Downton Abbey

by Emma Marriott

  MR WILSON

  David Haig

  Mr Wilson leads the invasion by the royal household and immediately makes his mark as an intensely disagreeable character. The King’s Page of the Backstairs is as pompous in title as he is in personality, a trait that David Haig, who plays Mr Wilson, displays brilliantly.

  From the outset Mr Wilson has total disregard for the staff at Downton and takes himself very seriously, all of which causes outrage and ridicule among the Downton staff. ‘Wilson’s pride at being the Page of the Backstairs is inordinate,’ remarks David, explaining Wilson’s indignance at being called a ‘butler’ when he arrives and his disregard of Carson. ‘As provincial butler of a house far from London, Carson would to him seem very inferior and that of course causes conflict between the two.’

  Mr Wilson is unapologetic in his superior attitude, as Mr Carson discovers when he enters the butler’s pantry and is surprised to find Wilson sitting at his desk, decanting wine. Without hesitation, Wilson says, ‘Mr Carson, you are a retired servant in a minor, provincial house, serving an undistinguished and unimportant family.’ The slight is like a physical blow to Carson and he leaves bruised from the encounter.

  The Page of the Backstairs title is in a fact a real one and the current Queen Elizabeth II has four of them. They are senior servants in the royal household, attend to the Queen at all times and are the only individuals who can give others access to the private rooms of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Created by Queen Anne in the 1700s, these pages were positioned literally on the ‘backstairs’ which led to the monarch’s private apartments. A recent well-known Page of the Backstairs was William Tallon, nicknamed ‘Backstairs Billy’, who devotedly served Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, for fifty-one years.

  David’s experience on set couldn’t have been more different to that of his character – his immediate impression of filming Downton Abbey was how welcoming everyone was.

  As his character appears both upstairs and downstairs, David also got to experience the different worlds of Downton, filming at Highclere, Shepperton and the other locations that feature in the movie. Most of David’s dialogue, however, was downstairs, as David explains: ‘As you climb the stairs, you know you’re in for long periods of silence. I think I said about six words in the first five days of filming. At Highclere, I did a lot of what Jim [Carter] has been doing for the last few years, such as serving tea very silently to the royal family and aristocrats. In fact, my biggest challenge in filming was pouring the tea with my right hand. I’m naturally left-handed, which in those days was frowned upon, so I had to swap over hands, which is quite difficult!’

  Mr Wilson: ‘Excuse me! I am not a butler. I am the King’s Page of the Backstairs.’

  In the end, the Downton staff exact their revenge on Wilson. Mrs Patmore ‘accidentally’ throws the contents of her mixing bowl over him and he is forced to go to his bedroom to change, but is unable to leave as he can’t open his bedroom door. Of course, Andy has secretly locked it, but assures Mr Wilson afterwards that it must have stuck. David adds, ‘When I read the part, I immediately thought of Shakespeare’s character Malvolio, who is pompous and vain and then rightly gets his comeuppance.’ David’s comparison is apt: Malvolio is a proud servant in Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night who takes himself so seriously that he becomes an easy target for the other characters in the story – who eventually humiliate him. ‘It’s always satisfying for the audience to see someone like that tumble. The more vain and self-assured he is initially, the more fun the audience has in seeing him fall.’

  MRS WEBB

  Richenda Carey

  The alarming figure of Mrs Webb, the royal housekeeper, arrives at Downton Abbey and immediately tells Mrs Hughes, ‘You are not housekeeper so long as His Majesty is under this roof!’

  Mrs Webb certainly comes across as rude and overbearing, although, like Mrs Hughes, she has a job to do, as Richenda Carey, who plays her, explains: ‘In the pecking order of the time, Mrs Webb was of course higher in status than Mrs Hughes and she can’t understand why the Downton staff are trying to subvert everything and get in their way. What I think people also tend to forget,’ continues Richenda, ‘is that people really needed to keep their jobs. There was a lot of insecurity below stairs and Mrs Webb wants to get on with her job, and she feels she’s being prevented from doing that. She’s trying to impose some order on this chaotic household and I think gets very frustrated that she can’t.’

  Nevertheless, our sympathies are firmly with Mrs Hughes and we really do feel the rage of one normally so composed. Richenda of course knew when she took the role that Mrs Hughes was a much-loved character in Downton Abbey, and that she would come across a ‘complete devil’ by trying to cross her. The scenes between the two housekeepers are predictably fierce, although Richenda herself and her experience on the Downton set was the opposite: ‘Phyllis [Mrs Hughes] was completely adorable and lovely to me. In fact, the whole cast were incredibly welcoming and not at all ‘grand’. In between takes, I could always find a semicircle of canvas chairs and have a good old gossip – it was such a treat.’

  MISS LAWTON

  Susan Lynch

  As the Queen’s dresser, Miss Lawton clearly feels she is a cut above the rest and more than worthy of her position in the royal household. Chatting with Anna and Mr Bates, she smugly informs them that she’s a professional dressmaker, with a reputation that befits her lofty position at the palace.

  Susan Lynch, who plays Miss Lawton, relished playing the role and from her first audition worked closely with the creative team to get a handle on the character. ‘Miss Lawton really does believe she’s the “chosen one” and she’s clearly a very good seamstress.’

  She boasts that she ‘trained under Madame Lucile’. Madame Lucile was a preeminent fashion designer in the early twentieth century. Officially Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff Gordon, she worked under the professional name of Lucile (and incidentally survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912). From her palatial headquarters in London, she developed the first global couture brand and Vogue hailed her as a fashion icon, the English grande dame of Parisian glitz. Society ladies, from the actress and socialite (and former mistress of George V’s father) Lillie Langtry to the queens of Spain and the more conservatively dressed Queen Mary, all clamoured for her feminine and frothy gowns. If Miss Lawton had trained with Madame Lucile, she would indeed have been a much sought-after seamstress.

  Nonetheless, her grand airs don’t stop Anna becoming suspicious when various items belonging to the Crawley family go missing from the house. It turns out that Miss Lawton has indeed been pilfering these trinkets and Anna confronts Miss Lawton with her discovery.

  Anna: ‘“Queen’s dresser a thief!” That’ll make headlines from here to Peru.’

  ‘We gave Susan Lynch an Eton crop, which is a very sharp, almost boyish hair-do and was quite different to anyone else. It worked well for her character.’

  Nosh Oldham, hair and make-up designer

  ‘When she’s caught,’ says Susan, ‘there’s that initial moment when she genuinely believes she has the right to take the items because they mean nothing to an aristocracy who are lavished with wealth and glory, whereas she has so little relatively. At the same time, she’s aware that she’d suffer absolute humiliation if people found out, but she holds real conviction in doing it – and I liked that juxtaposition of character.’

  Ultimately, Miss Lawton is allowed to get away with her misdemeanour, although she is made aware just how precarious her position is. With everything returned and Edith’s ballgown altered, Anna well and truly won that particular battle.

  MR ELLIS

  Max Brown

  Of the trio of royal servants who arrive at Downton ahead of the main royal party, the King’s valet Richard Ellis is the most approachable. ‘Unlike the others,’ explains Max Brown, who plays Mr Ellis, ‘he doesn’t take it all so seriously. He finds the Page of the Backstairs amusing, as well as the anger of th
e Downton staff, and sits between the two worlds.’

  In cahoots with Mr Barrow, with whom he immediately strikes up a friendship, Mr Ellis helps to dupe the other royal servants by pretending to be ‘Sir Harry Barnston’ on the telephone, insisting that the royal footmen come to London. As Max says, it was an interesting scene to do because ‘I was pretending to be someone else playing someone else! I tried a few ridiculous voices and hopefully one of them worked.’

  ‘Initially, the relationship with Thomas and Ellis is fairly ambiguous,’ explains Max. ‘Michael [Engler], the director, was keen to keep it that way and to play up the romance.’

  When Thomas is arrested by the police in York, it is Mr Ellis who comes to his rescue, securing Thomas’s release by showing his ‘Royal Household’ card. He advises Thomas to be more circumspect in future and we begin to suspect there’s more to him than meets the eye. Thomas and Ellis continue to talk and the intimacy between them grows until they kiss. Mr Ellis leaves Thomas with a key ring as a memento, saying, ‘It’s not much, but I’ve had it for years. It’ll remind you of me … So you can think of me ‘til we meet again.’

  MONSIEUR COURBET

  Philippe Spall

  Monsieur Courbet wastes no time in making his presence felt when he first arrives at Downton Abbey with housekeeper Mrs Webb and four footmen from the royal household. They are greeted by some of the Downton staff and Mr Carson points them in the direction of the servants’ entrance. Monsieur Courbet, however, has other plans. ‘I am Monsieur Courbet, chef to Their Majesties!’ he exclaims, as he pushes past them and heads through the front door!

  Like many others of the visiting royal household, Monsieur Courbet considers himself a cut above the Downton staff and is entirely dismissive of them. In the kitchen, we see him constantly haranguing and barking orders, although Mrs Patmore is less inclined to jump at his every word, remarking when he rudely asks where he should put his cooking pot, ‘Don’t tempt me.’ Philippe Spall, who plays Monsieur Courbet, agrees. ‘Most of my scenes involve raised tempers – he wants to make everything just so, and he’s not the sort of person who will tolerate fools gladly.’

  Clearly under immense pressure, having to move from house to house and deliver sumptuous meals for the royal party, Monsieur Courbet is nonetheless haughty and insufferable, with an air of ridiculousness about him. ‘We talked about making him quite a heightened character,’ explains Philippe. ‘He’s a Frenchman who has been living in England for a long time and in the process has taken on English aristocratic airs and graces. So he speaks with this French accent but with a particular English affectation. His pomposity and confidence in himself and his status certainly assists in making that transition!’

  Philippe, who is himself half-French, has had some experience acting around food, having once appeared in a theatre production where he had to cook a whole meal live on stage. For Downton, he was only required to whip the odd thing in a bowl as his character spends most of his time rushing about the kitchen telling people what to do. To add to the background noise of the servants’ area, Philippe, like many of the actors, was called in after filming to record some additional dialogue, such as the line when Monsieur Courbet commands his staff to ‘prepare to do battle with the barbarians’.

  Like Mr Wilson, the imperious Page of the Backstairs, Monsieur Courbet receives his just comeuppance when, having prepared great piles of lavish food for upstairs, he is forced to retire to his bedroom overcome with tiredness, requesting to be woken in half an hour. Unbeknown to him, Anna has slipped a sleeping draught into his cup of tea and he will be out for the rest of the night. This allows the Downton staff to take over all preparations and serving duties for the evening dinner and Courbet misses the entire thing. At breakfast the next morning, he and Mr Wilson threaten to investigate what went on the previous night; Mr Carson advises them not to unless they ‘enjoy ridicule’, as Mrs Hughes has received compliments from upstairs about Mrs Patmore’s food, which clearly had gone down well with the royal party.

  Courbet certainly has a distinctive look, and hair and make-up were delighted to see that Philippe had grown his hair fairly long prior to filming. ‘I had this rather ridiculous coiffed, curled and primped look to go with my character,’ explains Philippe, ‘and to keep my curls in place I was put in a red hairnet every morning. It meant when all the ladies were being put into curlers, so was I!’

  Despite the unpopularity of the chef, Philippe found the experience of being part of the Downton Abbey film simply joyous and his arrival at Highclere, drawing up in the 1920s ‘charabanc’ with the rest of the royal household staff, was a particularly memorable moment: ‘It was a beautiful day, but also a little misty and just for a while it really did feel like the clocks had been turned back.’

  Courbet: ‘I want the milk now! I want the egg yolks now! I want the olive oil now! And I want the vanilla pod now!’

  Mrs Patmore: ‘He wants a clip round the ear. Now.’

  YORKSHIRE’S GREAT ESTATES

  While the film returns to Highclere, it also features a host of new locations, many of them in the beautiful county of Yorkshire, home to the fictional Downton Abbey. These include the very grand Harewood House on the outskirts of Leeds, and the ballroom of Wentworth Woodhouse, which is captured in all its glory in one of the final scenes of the film.

  A key location for the Downton Abbey movie, and one of the grandest, was Harewood House in Yorkshire, the family seat of Princess Mary’s husband, Lord Lascelles.

  The use of Harewood House as a location for filming was in fact entirely appropriate to the storyline. Harewood is the family seat of the real Lascelles family. It was here that Princess Mary, Lord Lascelles and their two sons lived and she is buried at All Saints’ Church, in the grounds of the estate, alongside her husband. Today it is the home of the 8th Earl of Harewood, Princess Mary’s grandson.

  Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood built the house between 1759 and 1771; its interiors were designed by the fashionable Robert Adam and its 1,000 acres of landscape designed by Capability Brown. Sir Charles Barry, who remodelled Highclere, was also brought in in the 1840s to add an extra storey on the east wing.

  Princess Mary and Lord Lascelles first lived at Goldsborough Hall (as is mentioned in the film), which is ten miles north-east of Harewood House and part of its estate. The King and Queen stayed at Goldsborough many times during the 1920s, visiting Princess Mary and their grandchildren.

  The family then moved to Harewood House in 1929, after the death of Lord Lascelles’ father, and they set about modernising the house, installing twenty new bathrooms (it previously had only two) and adding a nursery on the top floor of the east wing for the boys.

  Happiest in the Yorkshire countryside, Princess Mary and her family enjoyed outdoor pursuits and the boys spent a happy childhood in their thousand-acre playground. The house itself provided a splendid venue for entertaining the great and the good, with frequent shooting parties and house parties for races at nearby Wetherby and York. In the early 1930s, the large lake at Harewood froze over for three weeks. As a result, Lord Lascelles, by now 6th Earl of Harewood, arranged an ice hockey match for the family and staff, with one team led by the head gardener and with the Princess in goal.

  Members of the royal family were also regular guests at Harewood and, as she had done when the family lived at Goldsborough Hall, Queen Mary spent ten days each August with her daughter on her way north to Balmoral in Scotland. In 1933, the King and Queen stayed at Harewood House during a trip to visit Leeds, where they opened the Civic Hall. As they travelled through the city, a large crowd of people from all over Yorkshire turned up for the royal procession from the suburb of Oakwood to the Civic Hall and then the Town Hall where, in a similar event to the parade in the movie, the King inspected the guard of honour.

  Today, the royal family are still regular visitors at Harewood and the property is often open to the public. The house impressed both cast and crew, some of whom had visited before, incl
uding location manager Sparky Ellis: ‘It is a beautiful house and we did actually consider Harewood prior to the first season when we were scouting for locations for Downton Abbey itself. Of course, we went for Highclere in the end, but it was great to be back there.’

  The protocol surrounding hats was fairly rigid at the time and removing them could be something of an undertaking, particularly if a lady’s maid was not on hand to help. When Edith suggests that it won’t be necessary for Violet to change for the buffet dinner but will just need to take off her hat, Violet is suitably aghast at the proposition: ‘You talk as if that were easy.’

  The convention of the time was that if a woman made a visit to another house, she would not take her hat off, but if she received guests in her own house she would. So, when Cora, Edith and Mary visit Princess Mary at Harewood, they keep their hats on while Princess Mary does not. It was much simpler for men whose hats would come on or off as they left or entered houses.

  In 1927 cloche hats continued to be all the rage, although women still wore wide-brimmed hats too. In the movie Anna Robbins dressed Mary and Edith in cloche hats, which worked well with their shingle bob haircuts, while Isobel and Cora wear wider brims to give great drama and presence.

  PRINCESS MARY

  Kate Phillips

  We first meet Princess Mary, the daughter of King George and Queen Mary, at Harewood House. Here she receives Cora, Mary and Edith for tea and amid the opulent surroundings of the house we also get a first glimpse of the Princess’s husband, Lord Lascelles, and their two young sons.