* A butler’s duties were many and varied. He would be directly responsible for maintaining the cellar, and he would oversee anything that happened in the dining room, but he would also supervise maintenance of the contents or the fabric, that is any kind of work in the house or on the house, unless there was a clerk of the works employed to manage exterior building. A workman employed in the house would be under the charge of the butler in most households. As testimony to this, I always like to see old Carson making his entries in books and doing all his paperwork.
* This is a speech I was rather proud of, and so I was saddened when it fell to the editor’s axe. Still it’s a good line, I’ll use it somewhere else. In this story, just as Violet has judged Matthew correctly in thinking he will give her the right advice, Matthew judges Mary correctly in thinking that she will be quite sympathetic to the position he’s been placed in.
* What is more interesting than the emotion of love? How it really is almost never based on any kind of logical thinking. Maybe, much later in life, some sensible considerations might play a part in deciding whether to commit your heart to another, but when you’re young you simply select people you are physically attracted to, and then invest them with all sorts of qualities which they probably don’t possess. Or, if they do, it is completely coincidental. Here we have a classic example of that.
* Mrs Hughes is the daughter of a Scottish tenant farmer which would be a pretty standard background for a servant then. She’s shown talent in her job and she’s progressed. One of the hardest aspects of being a senior female servant was that, as a general rule, the top jobs, cook, housekeeper, lady’s maid, were only given to unmarried women. Interestingly, the cooks and the housekeepers were given ‘Mrs’ as a courtesy title but ladies’ maids were not. Quite why that distinction was made I could not tell you.
* I like these rules; I always enjoy the fact that the kitchen staff eat together and they don’t eat in the servants’ hall. They may talk to the others, they may come into the servants’ hall for a chat, but they never eat there, any more than the outside staff would have come in for their dinner. And O’Brien is right. The chauffeur would have eaten separately.
* When we saw the rushes of this, Matthew didn’t stand up when Violet came in. He remained sitting, despite the fact that, at that time, it would have been completely impossible for a man to have stayed in his chair when a woman entered a room. So we had to remount the scene and reshoot the moment. What interested me is that, for my generation, if Maggie Smith walked into the room I would have to stand up, never mind if it were the Countess of Grantham in 1913. There was a similar instance when Matthew approached Mary in the garden and didn’t remove his hat or even touch it. These episodes, and others like them, have made me realise that the automatic manners of my youth have gone now. If I’d been asked, before Downton, whether most men would still stand if a woman came into a room, I would have said yes, but I wouldn’t agree with that today.
* I think they were probably right to cut a chunk of this scene. The statement of Bates’s love is so well expressed visually, which is not something you can always anticipate when you’re writing something. Here, to see this man standing there with his tray, complete with a flower in its little vase, says more about his feelings for her than dialogue would.
* Robert realises that Mary and Matthew are alone in the library, and this is (I hope) the first moment where we understand that he hasn’t let go of Violet’s idea that they might marry. He instructs Carson: ‘No wait until they ring’ – just in case something might be happening.
* The fact that this way of life will not go on for ever is a theme that trickles through the show. That said, some of the characters don’t question it and that is Mrs Hughes’s position. Human beings usually assume that the way they live now will see them out and there are periods of history where it’s fairly true. What we’re not prepared for is absolute change and yet it happens. I remember when I was about nineteen I was at a drinks party and a girlfriend and I were talking to an old lady. She noticed the brooch my companion was wearing and commented that she used to have one just like it, it was her favourite, she said, she loved it. When I asked what had happened to it, she told me it was lost. I was horrified. She stared at me as though I were mad. ‘But I lost everything,’ she said. It turned out she had been a great lady at the Russian Court before the revolution, and she’d wound up in London after a spell of making hats in Paris. It stuck in my mind because I realised that the concept of total reversal was something I hadn’t really addressed before then. I remember wondering how would I manage if I was suddenly stranded in Madrid with nothing. Perhaps I’d drive a taxi. That’s what lots of them did.
* This scene is about the developing relationship between Carson and Matthew. The family may not all be happy about the situation, but in the last analysis Matthew has Crawley blood which makes his claims acceptable. But they are not acceptable to Carson who does not share the blood-based culture. In some countries, blood matters at every level of society. I am sure any Italian would recognise a blood link, however distant, but in England that tremendous importance of blood seems to be restricted to the upper and the upper middle class, and the working class, where there is a real sense of clan. You don’t often see it among the middle classes where people move around a good deal and tend to lose touch with most relations more distant than a first cousin. This is not true of toffs. They often know their eighth cousins, co-descendents from some Elizabethan courtier. To the Crawleys, Matthew is family. But to Carson, he’s an outsider who deserves to be seen off.
* I always want to remind the audience that Carson is like a ringmaster and his job is to keep the entire staff, in some cases potentially quite unruly people, to keep them all on the straight and narrow. The butler of a great house was a headmaster, a taskmaster, a king.
* This scene was originally written for Episode Five, but it was later deemed more appropriate to the narrative of Four. It is an example of the ‘building blocks’ element of constructing a screenplay, which is told by a sequence of separate scenes, each one a moment in the story. By re-ordering them, even after they have been shot, the plot line or a character’s development can be altered, and often is.
* Although this scene was cut, I love the dialogue, when Anna says: ‘I hate being ill; my mother used to look down on ill people. She used to say “they’re always ill” as if it were their fault.’ And then Thomas replies: ‘My mother worshipped disease – if we ever wanted to get anything out of her we had to start by pretending to be ill.’ In actual fact, Anna’s mother is based on my own mother who always thought ill people were frightful time-wasters. She used to say: ‘Well do ring me up when you’re well again’, and then put down the telephone, and I’m afraid I’m rather like her. On the other hand, Thomas’s mother is based on Emma’s mother. For my mother-in-law, at the top of the moral high ground is a little hillock and on that hillock are the ill people. Poor Emma has to deal with these colliding philosophies.
* Of course Isobel has overcomplicated it and, for me, that is often the problem with so-called experts. The moment anyone refers to an ‘expert opinion’, I always reach for my gun. You just know that too many ‘experts’ will miss the essentials of the case.
* Anna sneezes here, because originally the scene was much earlier in the episode, so she had still not gone to bed with her cold. Again an example of how the rhythm of a piece sometimes demands that building blocks be moved around.
† I wanted to remind the public that even though women’s clothes were beginning to loosen up a bit – a harbinger of the First World War fashions of the shorter skirt and so on – nevertheless they were still wearing corsets and having the laces tightened by their maids, every day of their lives, young and old alike.
* Restoring the cottages is the beginning of another Downton theme. We shall see that Matthew is essentially a businessman, he thinks the estate has to be managed properly and he would argue that it is not to anyone’s adva
ntage to run it badly. He is not at all opposed to Robert’s philosophy when it comes to the estate’s tenants, i.e. that he, Lord Grantham, is responsible for their welfare, but Matthew would say that it would help them more to make the place efficient. Robert can’t see that. He thinks Matthew is too money-conscious, and that striving for financial efficiency is parsimonious and bourgeois. These two philosophies will eventually collide, but they don’t collide yet.
* Mary is starting to like Matthew but at the same time she resents this unarguable fact. Her father has always wanted a son. He’s put a good face on it, but that is what he longed for and now the heir has arrived. He might have been awful, but he’s very nice, a personable, pleasant, young man and, without really noticing, Robert is turning Matthew into his son, downgrading Mary in the process. It is bad enough for Mary that the law gives her no value but for her father to collaborate in it, is very hard to bear. And Robert would never consider that he was hurting Mary in his adoption of Matthew, because he is incapable of challenging the moral precepts of the world into which he was born.
* Most people, at some time in their lives, have to take stock of how much they have changed. They have to accept that they do not want the things they used to want, or enjoy the things they used to enjoy, and there is nothing wrong with this. For me, one of the saddest aspects of the sixties generation is that they often won’t acknowledge that their taste, whether in politics, clothes or music, has not only evolved, but should have evolved. I like Joe and I hope the audience does because, in a story about whether or not Mrs Hughes is going to marry, we needed her choice to be difficult. Here, she has been offered a healthy life with a nice man and if she is going to refuse him, then she’ll need a good reason. I thought the actor, Bill Fellows, understood that and played it very well.
* We did film this scene but something went slightly wrong with the way it was shot, and it ended up looking incredibly sinister, like something out of The Woman in Black. So it was cut.
* The purpose of this moment with Daisy was to make it clear that Pamuk isn’t going to go away, to remind the audience of the scandal so that they will know the scandalous death of the Turkish visitor will be hovering in the background for some time yet.
* Sybil now becomes proactive, she’s going to take Gwen to the interview.
* I like the relationship between Matthew and his mother, which in many details is the work of Dan Stevens and Penelope Wilton. By this stage of the series, I was writing material that would work with the characters they had developed. He likes and admires her but he can’t see why she always has to make trouble. I think this is lifelike. By now Matthew identifies with both families, with his mother but also with Robert. He’s the pig in the middle really.
* As I have said before, Robert loves his three daughters but he doesn’t really know them. He thinks they’re all nice girls who will marry nice gentlemen and have nice children. He doesn’t realise they’re born at a period of change which is bound to affect them all. This doesn’t mean they don’t get on. In fact in some ways Mary is like his son because she is dynamic and worldly and they have a lot in common but, in the last analysis, I think Mary’s cleverer than Robert. I wonder if she’d have taken Patrick when it came to it.
† In the first series, Cora is still playing along with the values she’s married into even if, every now and then, you can see she disagrees with them. She sticks up for Matthew’s having a job for example, but she has yet to re-connect with her beliefs from before she was a member of the British aristocracy. It is not that her spirit has been broken, but she doesn’t feel entitled to rebel. So, she assumes that Mary will marry someone like Robert and everything will go on as before. Robert doesn’t disagree with this in principle, but he has a clearer view of the qualities that would interest Mary. And Strallan hasn’t got them.
* You often see servants depicted as grovelling, but this was not true at all. The upper servants, who were masters of their own domain, expected to be treated with a degree of respect, while cooks were notoriously touchy and for a cook to talk back would be quite normal. Sometimes cooks were absolutely impossible but if the food was marvellous people didn’t want to let them go. Usually the master of the house would have little to do with them, but his wife would frequently require all her diplomatic skills. Each house had its own way of managing this relationship, which was illustrated for me when we were making the film Gosford Park. We had three former servants advising us, and one day we were doing the scene where Eileen Atkins, playing the cook, is asked to accompany Stephen Fry. As she leaves the kitchen, she instructs a kitchen maid to ‘see that those menus go up on her ladyship’s tray’. Immediately one of the advisory board said: ‘Oh, no. That’s quite wrong. The menus were always done in her ladyship’s boudoir.’ Whereupon, a second advisor contradicted her. ‘I don’t think so, no, her ladyship would always come down to the cook’s sitting room to do the menus.’ At which point the third one remarked that ‘ours went up on the tray’. It made me realise that people are wrong in thinking everything was governed by universal rules when it often depended on the ways of an individual house. At any rate, for Mrs Patmore to refuse to follow a new receipt would not be a first for Cora.
* This is an important marker moment in the development of Sybil. She is no longer content to sympathise with Gwen’s ambitions. She is determined to give her practical help.
* In supporting the claims of old Mr Molesley, Isobel is making trouble. Partly because Violet irritates her and Isobel would love to take her down a peg, but mainly because, like pretty well every newcomer to a village in the country, she can’t leave anything alone. I remember in the village where I grew up, there was a harvest supper every summer which was organised by my mother and two or three other women. Then a new artistic couple arrived, arguing that this was terrible and patronising and of course the supper had to be run by the villagers, themselves. My mother was perfectly content to be free of the work but she warned them that the supper would vanish within three years. They laughed at her, seeing this as proof of her self-importance and vanity. But in fact it had vanished in two.
* The one thing no servant could afford was to attract even the faintest suspicion of theft. A career in service really depended on having good references, and while an employer might swallow a bit of bad temper or a lack of punctuality, they would never overlook theft. Once you were perceived as a thief you would not work again. So here, it may only be about a little snuff box, but Thomas and O’Brien are attempting to ruin Bates.
* Scenes 31 and 32 were originally separated by what became Scene 33, but during the shoot the decision was made to combine them.
† This story is exploring that strange transition when your children grow into adults and begin to have an independent life of their own. Even in their teens, you know what your sons and daughters are doing and, for the most part, where they are. You take them and you collect them and then, suddenly, you’re not quite taking them but you’re meeting them off a train, and soon after that you don’t know where they are and you ring and find they’re in Suffolk but you don’t know why. This, for most of us, comes as a shock. Here, Cora has reached that moment with Sybil. She doesn’t know where her daughter is.
‡ I think this kind of complicity happened a great deal in these households, as it does in any workplace. Even though Anna is both a moral person and a completely truthful one, it wouldn’t occur to her to give Gwen away. This class loyalty, which can be very strong, must often have been tiresome for the employers because they knew that even the members of staff they loved and trusted would cover for less worthy co-workers. It is a human instinct.
* It is impossible for Daisy not to tell the truth here because, for her, to be questioned by a daughter of this great house, would be like our being interrogated by the secret police. She feels completely disempowered. And Edith is forceful and determined in her desire to humiliate Mary. She is a nicer person after the war has changed her, but at this stage, she is still fuel
led by a kind of jealous rage.
* That line came from a great aunt of mine who said that things with her had got to the point when she felt that if a man could walk and talk and hadn’t actually spilt something down his front, she was expected to marry him. In fact, I had two aunts who were sent out to India on the ‘fishing fleet’. One of my great great uncles was the Governor of Bombay and two of my grandfather’s sisters were despatched to stay with him, but neither came home with a husband. They were what was known as ‘returned empties’. They both got married eventually, but quite late by the reckoning of those days.
* Mary’s quite harsh to her mother, but then I think young women are often harsh to their mothers and Mary is not a hypocrite. She may not want the world to know the details of her adventures but she doesn’t lie to herself. She never pretends about the events in her past or about Pamuk and, to me, that seems an important part of her character.
* I blush to recount that this incident, when they rescue the chicken from the cat and take it up to the dining room, comes from my own life. I was giving a lunch party in Sussex and I walked into the kitchen to find that the cat had hooked the joint out of the oven in some way and both he and the dog had both had quite a go at it. I had nothing else to give my guests, so I just cut off the chewed bits, carved the rest in the kitchen, then took it in and served it up. I thought at the time, what the eye doesn’t see the heart won’t grieve over, so that’s what we make them do here.
Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 Page 38