Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 (54 page)

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Servants' eating hours varied from house to house. As with so many aspects of this way of life, there were not the hard and fast rules that people now like to talk about. In some houses the servants ate before the family, at about seven o'clock when the family was coming down after dressing. They'd be given a drink before dinner (at least they'd have a drink after the First World War, though not before) and then the servants' feed would happen. It wasn't very long, about half an hour, after which dinner would be served in the dining room. That's what we did in
Gosford Park
. In other houses they would eat at the other end of the proceedings and in fact, when we were filming
Gosford Park
, there was a wonderful chap on the set as an advisor called Arthur Inch. He had been a butler for many years and, before that, a footman. He's dead now, I'm sad to say, but he was a lovely chap and he knew everything there was to know about this way of life. He had spent years under both regimes, eating his dinner before the family and eating it afterwards. He much preferred the latter, even if he was ravenous by the time it came, because then the day's work was essentially done. If there was a great ball or something, things might be different as everyone stayed on duty, but on a normal night, when your employees were reasonable people, they let the staff go after dinner was done, finished their own drinks and went to bed. The maids and valets still had to go up and undress them, but for everyone else the day was done and you could relax, and that's how we do it at Downton. It was quite late. They would sit down to dinner at ten thirty or eleven, and it must have required quite an adjustment from the young members of the staff, most of whom had come from farms and shops where they had their supper at half past six, but they would bridge the gap with tea. This would take place at about five and it would finish with the dressing gong. The valets and maids would then hurry upstairs, but it was also a marker for the kitchen staff and the footmen that upstairs dinner was on the way.

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Thomas is of course an interesting character in that his predicament is one that few of his contemporaries would even acknowledge existed. He is a homosexual, which makes him defensive and hostile but also makes him, to a degree, to me anyway, sympathetic. He is a villain in the first series, less so in the second, probably less so in the third actually, but his real role is to be gay, and being gay in 1912 was very, very difficult. I think there are plenty of younger people out there who don't understand that it was actually illegal at that time, a crime, and a man could risk prison by expressing his attraction to someone else. Of course, people can say there is still sexual behaviour that is illegal, but it is pernicious. Here, by contrast, we have a grown man who wants to be allowed to enjoy a relationship with another consenting adult, and for this, in 1912, he could go to prison. I think the enormity of that injustice is interesting and makes Thomas somehow sympathetic because of it.

Incidentally, Crowborough wouldn't have been the first gay peer to marry money in order to rescue his family financially. Aristocracy in decline is a subtext of the whole show and an heiress was quite a popular way out of disaster. The truth is, that life may seem magnificent and even enviable, but, in many cases, by the start of the First World War, it was resting on sand.

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I had a struggle here, because putting names outside houses is quite modern. They had nailed a huge plaque on the gates saying ‘Crawley House', very cheerily, but I didn't see it until the rushes. So it had to be removed by the special effects department. If you look carefully you can see slightly wobbly stones in the gate pier.

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The whole business of Matthew's being the heir. It was very important that this would be credible. There was a certain kind of story-telling imperative that would have quite liked the heir to be a window cleaner from Solihull, picking up the salt cellar and saying what's this?, but we just felt it would be unbelievable at that particular time, if not so much now. However, this didn't mean the heir had to be a super-toff. In those days it would have been perfectly credible for the younger son of an earl to take up a position in the army, perhaps, and then for his son to do something else, until they would gradually grow, as a family, into the professional world. They wouldn't have had much private income, as the system in England leaves the younger sons to shift for themselves. And so by the time you've got to third cousins like Robert Grantham and Matthew's father, the junior branch is sufficiently distant not even to be quasi-aristocratic. They are respectable
haut bourgeois
.

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Isobel has grown up in the world of medicine and become a nurse in the Boer War, one of the first moments when you had that kind of civilian response to a war which would become much more ordinary in the First World War. Up to the Crimea, on the whole war was something that the army was doing over there, and the idea that we were all in it together hadn't really taken root. They were patriotic, of course, but the civilians didn't really see they had a role to play. That was essentially a twentieth-century thing. But anyway, Isobel became a nurse, which meant she'd had nursing training. You will notice that she didn't become a doctor. I thought that would be over-egging it a bit because, although there were women doctors by the end of the nineteenth century, they were pretty few and far between and they had a tough struggle to make themselves heard.

Matthew, therefore, comes from an intellectual and knowledge-based society. He hasn't grown up killing things and checking the bridle and girth. I suppose the fundamental philosophy of
Downton
is essentially that pretty well all of the men and women in the house, whatever their role there, are decent people. We have one or two who fall below that marker but mainly they are trying to do their best. Of course we need conflict, but to me it's not enough just to have nasty people versus nice people, which is why the
Downton
disagreements usually depend on both points of view being reasonable. The audience will hopefully they have their sympathies and take the side of one character or the other, but I also hope they will sometimes change their minds.

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The maids would almost certainly be local girls since service was generally seen as a rite of passage. They would be chosen by the housekeepers and mistresses of the local houses, who would visit the schools to see the leaving girls, with the great houses getting first shout, and when they had been chosen, these ones would be seen as having won the prizes. The farmers, the shop keepers, the businessmen from the nearby towns would court the maids of the great houses, because they'd had a training, almost like a finishing school, in sewing and cooking and clothes, and they were mostly very competent by the time they had worked for a few years in service. In other words, they were considered excellent wife material. If you see photographs of great households with masses of maids, almost all of them are young because, as a rule, they only worked into their middle twenties, before leaving to marry. It was kind of a ten-year career really, from about fifteen to twenty-five. In this show, they are northern, because
Downton Abbey
is set in Yorkshire.

The footmen were more likely to have travelled to find work. William is local and so is Molesley, who started out as a footman and has been promoted, but Thomas, for instance, and later Jimmy, have both grown up elsewhere. Certainly, the senior servants, the valets, the ladies' maids, the housekeeper, the chauffeur, were often from different parts of the Kingdom. We don't have the generator men, figures of some mystery at the time as they understood electricity which was a frightening concept, because we just thought it was one too many but they and the butler, particularly, would often travel far afield. These were big careers and seen as such, and the employers would generally advertise in
The Lady
which was read by the entire servant class when in search of a job. As for casting, we asked Jill Trevellick not to worry when it came to whether or not an actor could do a Yorkshire accent. They could come from anywhere and I remember I said I wanted someone Irish because I knew I wanted to deal at a certain point with Irish politics. Our Irishman would turn out to be Tom Branson, the chauffeur. Phyllis Logan came in for the housekeeper and Mrs Hughes immediately became Scottish which she wasn't before. We had already agreed that it was one of those roles that could be filled by someone from any part of the country.

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This was widely seen as a desirable outcome in these situations, if it could possibly be arranged; the bloodlines would be mixed together and justice was seen to be done. Of course, by the 1890s, unlike other European countries, we didn't really go in for arranged marriages. The system here was for your daughters to participate in what came to be known as the London Season and young men from a similar background would meet them. In effect what you said to your children was: You must choose from within this gene pool, but within the pool you can please yourself. That was the rule of thumb. Obviously there were a few great prizes every year, the elder sons of great families, and there were the heiresses, although, until the American girls arrived, there were not many of those because of the English system, which meant that the girls got nothing if there was a boy. That's why the American heiresses were such a bonus, because American rich people made all their children rich and so to have an American heiress it wasn't necessary that her siblings were dead and she had no brother. Consuelo Vanderbilt, who became Duchess of Marlborough, had two brothers but that didn't stop her bringing a huge fortune into the Churchill family. This would never happen in an English dynasty. By definition, if an heiress was English, her family would have more or less died out, which meant they were often bad breeders, whereas an American heiress carried no such stigma – they came from perfectly healthy stock. In all this, breeding was a pretty key element, and unless your estate was in need of rescue, it was better to marry into a family like that of the Duke of Abercorn, a famously fertile tribe, where every one of them produced enormous families. If you married a Hamilton from the Abercorn branch, you had a pretty strong chance of healthy descendants.

That said, in the highest echelons there was still a certain amount of nudging involved. Very few duchesses at that time had not been born at the very least the daughter of an earl. And so, inevitably, when someone did appear who was beautiful and the daughter of an earl and very nice, on the whole she had the pick of the room. Nevertheless, as I have said, as a system it was less constraining than those in a lot of the continental countries.

We are told that Mary had been pushed towards first Patrick, who went down on the
Titanic
, and then towards Matthew. Of course my own theory, which is expressed by Anna the maid, is that Mary probably would not have gone through with it with Patrick. It is one thing to entertain the idea of marrying for social reasons, but when the reality of letting someone into your life and your bed starts to take shape, it is quite a different matter.

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One reason for this scene was to show that Matthew, although he's a clever fellow, has curious spots of blindness when it comes to other people's feelings.

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This scene is annoying because somehow the riding habit got put on wrongly. When a woman was riding side-saddle she wore breeches and boots under the skirt of her habit to protect her legs but these were concealed by the habit. In period drama on television you will often see petticoats fluttering away and stockinged legs as the skirt flies up, which is all complete nonsense. Bare or stockinged legs would be rubbed raw of skin within five minutes. Women wore perfectly normal breeches and boots and so the skirt of the riding habit was essentially a coat which was designed to break open at the waist if she fell, so she would not be dragged. But of course the wrapover part of it was meant to go underneath, against the horse, and for some reason here it was put on backwards. When Matthew comes out and Mary is in the saddle, you can actually see her breeched leg. We were told off for this by several viewers and quite right, too.

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I felt that it wasn't enough for them just to be introduced. There had to be some electricity in the meeting. If Mary could take against Matthew at the very beginning then obviously it made the ensuing journey more interesting. In Hollywood, this used to be called ‘meeting cute' which meant some comic mishap would start the whole thing off wrongly. Any Tracy/Hepburn or Day/Hudson movie will show you what I mean.

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Mary is really affronted by the fact that everything is going to pass to a stranger instead of coming to her, and her position is not at all unreasonable to a modern audience. In fact, to our generation, it is the law that seems unreasonable in denying any inheritance rights to someone simply because she's female. We find that extraordinary. I think many in the audience would be genuinely amazed to discover that it is still the case.

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The butler was really the head of the household, but only the male staff were specifically under his command, the footmen, the hall boys and so on, even if he had a kind of watching brief for the whole operation. A housekeeper was in charge of the female staff, that is all the housemaids, but it was anyone's guess if she was in the charge of the lady's maid because the lady's maid had the ear of the mistress so in that area they had to walk fairly gingerly. The other big trouble spot could be the cook, because the cook, male or female, was in charge of the kitchen staff, so technically the housekeeper couldn't really give orders to a kitchen maid although there was no question that she was considerably her superior in rank. But then there was an odd detail in that the housekeeper was in charge of the stores and the cook in a great house never had a key to the store cupboard. Instead, she would have to ask the housekeeper for the ingredients to do her own job. This situation famously resulted in many passionate battles, as one can easily imagine.