Downton Abbey Read online

  Footmen often had to fulfil other roles. It was part of their job. I have heard people saying, quite mistakenly, ‘There were forty footmen here in the 1880s,’ but there weren’t. What they have discovered is a cupboard with forty liveries, and they assume that all those liveries were occupied by permanently employed individuals. In fact, the reason a house had many liveries was to make a big show if there was a special event. They would then borrow other people’s footmen, just as they re-cast their own valets, to make a great display of having a seemingly endless line of footmen up a staircase, but it was all really a piece of aristocratic theatre. That sort of lending a hand, everyone getting behind the wheel, was part of life in these houses, and part of the job description. So, here, there’s nothing unusual about William pinch-hitting for Bates while he’s away, but William doesn’t know his stuff.

  * We start two stories here, both of which must have happened many times in real life. One concerns Robert; the other William. Firstly, Robert is unhappy about the fact that he is not able to serve. At the very beginning of the war there was a feeling that only young men should volunteer, and preferably young, unmarried men. There were exceptions made for career soldiers, and Robert thinks an exception ought to have been made for him, because he used to be a career soldier, but the truth is, he’s too old. Even in 1916 they wouldn’t have been interested in someone of fifty, married, running an estate. It’s silly of him to think they would. But a lot of men were disappointed. This tale of Robert’s frustration will be one of our running themes.

  Today, we are a very peace-orientated generation and one of the hardest things for us to understand is the response at the announcement of the war in 1914, when every palace in Europe was surrounded by cheering crowds, as various kings and queens came out onto their balconies and signed their own death warrants. By contrast, we have inherited the horror of two world conflicts, and we know the disaster and the social and democratic collapse that can follow, so we think anything is preferable to war. I can only say it was different then.

  But the other narrative that we begin here is William’s reluctance to sign up. Of course, William should have been a classic enlistee; he’s single and young, after all, but his problem is that he’s promised his father not to. His father is widowed, all his other children are dead – which we learn later – and so he cannot face the thought of losing William if it can be avoided. Conscription had only just come in and, obviously, if William is called up then there’s nothing they can do about it. But he will not allow his son to volunteer. For his part, William feels he’s given his word. We get much deeper into this later, but I like to start a plot with hints and small references and then let it build.

  5 INT. STAIRCASE AND HALL. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Followed by Isis, Robert descends into the buzzing hall.*

  ROBERT: Morning. I don’t suppose there’s any news of Bates?

  CARSON: We expect him back any day, m’lord. He wrote to Anna that they had the funeral last Monday.

  ROBERT: William’s a good chap, but he isn’t Bates when it comes to uniforms… I may not be a real soldier, but I think I ought to look like one.

  This is said as a joke, but the butler understands.

  CARSON: Quite, m’lord. This afternoon, m’lord, will you be here in time for Branson to meet Lady Mary’s train?

  ROBERT: Oh, yes. I should be home by four.

  The workers behind them drop something and he winces.

  ROBERT (CONT’D): They started very early.

  CARSON: You said they could, m’lord.

  ROBERT: I suppose her ladyship’s awake.

  CARSON: She’s already down, m’lord.

  ROBERT: Heavens. Will wonders never cease?†

  * I have always had rather a battle to get the dog in, although there are strong arguments involving logic and expense that make it impracticable at times. The previous dog, Pharaoh, was actually quite difficult, and by this series we had moved on to another one. I remember saying to someone in the office that I would have to think of a name for the new dog, and they said, ‘Why not just go on calling it Pharaoh?’ I said, ‘Well, for a start, Pharaoh was a dog, and this one’s a bitch.’ At that point we all realised we needed another name and so she became Isis. We stayed with the Egyptology theme, because we’re filming at Highclere, home of the man who discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. It’s a sort of joke with the Carnarvons that the dogs in the show will always have Egyptian names.

  † I didn’t mind this cut. It is explained in the next scene when he says, ‘We don’t often see you in here for breakfast,’ and the business about Mary’s train gets explained later with Isobel. In that sense, there are some proposed cuts where you feel strongly, and others where you don’t, and this was one I didn’t worry about. I was slightly sorry to lose Cora’s comment on Violet arriving to help with the concert, because I always think we enjoy the ongoing jokes of the different relationships, and the fact is, Violet is a tiresome mother-in-law, and Cora is a patient woman. I like Cora to have a chance sometimes to express what she has to put up with. But she gets her chances.

  6 INT. DINING ROOM. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Carson has followed Robert in as the latter helps himself from the sideboard. Cora is at the table with Sybil.

  ROBERT: We don’t often see you in here for breakfast.

  CORA: Isobel said she was coming up to help and your mother threatened to look in. No doubt they would love it if they found me still in bed.

  ROBERT: I don’t know what Mama can do.

  CORA: What does she always do? Frighten us into submission.

  By this time, Robert is opening letters. He almost gasps.

  ROBERT: I don’t believe it.

  CORA: Please say it’s something nice.

  ROBERT: Nice? It’s absolutely marvellous! General Robertson’s invited me to be Colonel of the North Riding Volunteers. ‘The Lord Lieutenant would be a welcome addition to their number.’ And this is the best bit: ‘It may please you to know that the idea was given to me by General Haig.’*

  CORA: What difference does that make?

  ROBERT: Well, if Haig’s involved, it means I’m back in the Army properly… Well, thank you, God.

  CORA: How can that be? You were told you weren’t wanted for active service. You can’t jump in and out of the Army like a jack-in-a-box.

  ROBERT: I don’t see why not. Churchill went back to the front after the Gallipoli business.† Commanding the Fusiliers. If he can do it, why shouldn’t I? Sybil? Are you all right?

  Sybil has also been reading a letter. Now she stands.

  CORA: Sybil, darling?

  SYBIL: Excuse me, I think I’ll just —

  But she doesn’t finish as she hurries out. Cora sighs.

  CORA: She’s had more bad news. Shall I go after her?

  ROBERT: Leave her. There’s bad news every week now, and she has to learn how to deal with it. We can’t protect any of them from the war, and we shouldn’t try.

  Cora knows this is true. She finishes her cup of coffee.*

  * Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force.

  † This is a classic Downton reference that we don’t explain, but is real. In fact, it refers to Winston Churchill’s decision, as First Lord of the Admiralty, to land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, otherwise known as the Dardanelles, in April 1915. They were to capture Constantinople and effectively knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. In fact, he had hopelessly underestimated the strength of the Turks, and the Allies sustained a crushing defeat with the loss of many lives. Churchill was initially demoted before resigning in November 1915 and leaving for the Western Front, where he was given command of a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. That is what Robert talks about here.

  * Sybil, being the youngest member of the family, is the one who has most recently come out and had a London season, which we know was two years before, in 1914. We began the last episode of the first series with the family coming back from it. As
a debutante, she would certainly have known many of the young men who were fighting and being killed in enormous numbers. That was the tough bit about being at the home front. People you’d known all your life, relations, friends, friends of friends – it didn’t matter – were dying all the time for four long years.

  7 I/E. MOTOR CAR/DOWNTON VILLAGE. DAY.

  A tattered old poster of Kitchener shouts ‘Your Country Needs You!’ Someone has daubed ‘RIP’ beneath the face, but respectfully. It is on the side of the Post Office.† Then a motor car drives past, jumping and grinding its way along the road. Edith is behind the wheel with Branson next to her.

  BRANSON: We ought to go back. I’m taking his lordship into Catterick at ten.

  EDITH: A bit longer, please. I do think I’m getting better, don’t you?

  BRANSON: Up to a point, m’lady.‡

  She grinds the gears again.

  BRANSON (CONT’D): If you could just get the clutch right down to the floor.

  EDITH: But I am.

  There is another grinding rasp.

  BRANSON: Not quite, m’lady.

  EDITH: It doesn’t seem to want to go.

  BRANSON: I think it wants to, if you ask it properly… That’s better. You’ll be putting me out of a job.

  EDITH: Won’t the call-up put you all out of your jobs?

  BRANSON: I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

  † One of my sadnesses, actually, because of the decision to start at the Somme – which I’m sure was right – was that my wife’s great-uncle, Lord Kitchener, had drowned earlier in 1916, so I couldn’t really refer to him in the action. Initially, when I knew I was covering the first war, I thought I might involve Kitchener in something, for Emma, naturally, but also because he was a genuinely giant figure of the day. In the end, all I felt I could do was to have a tattered poster of Kitchener for Edith to drive past. They did use Kitchener’s posters marked ‘RIP’ for a while after his death, and it may have been one of them – either that or an old one – which would have worked, except that the shot apparently didn’t. It should have started on the poster and then, as the car crossed it, we would go with the car. But the car sort of jumped, leapt and bucked as it crossed Kitchener’s face, until it was quite clear that the first part of the shot was unusable. So we could only start the action after the poster had vanished from the frame. I was really sorry about that, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault. And we’re not like David Lean; we can’t spend three days getting a shot at dawn, and that’s just the truth of it.

  ‡ One of the journeys we go on in this series is with Edith, who had been, in the first series, essentially a frustrated character, but also rather a meek one. She may be jealous and hostile where Mary is concerned, writing horrid letters and things, but on the whole she does what she’s told. Like a lot of those women, I’m afraid, and certainly like several of my great-aunts, in the pre-war period they just sort of sat there doing occasional good works, teaching religious instruction in the village school and waiting for some nice young man with a reasonable acreage to turn up and marry them.

  The war changed that. In fact, the role of women would change fundamentally once the fighting was done, making it quite clear to the Government, and to the political class generally, that where women’s votes were concerned it was only a matter of time. In 1919 they chose to say that they were giving women the vote as a reward for their war work, but it was really that they knew the hour had come for women to be enfranchised, and they preferred to make concessions and lessen the risk of their losing control of the situation. I know they started by restricting the vote to women over thirty who had their own property and so on, and of course people make a big thing now about the injustice of that. It was unjust, but it was still a huge step forward, and it was, as the opponents of the bill would call it, the thin end of the wedge.

  In a way, we use Edith to track how more ordinary women felt about these changes. She is not a firebrand like Sybil, or Lady Constance Lytton in reality. She is simply a woman trying to get on with her life. And it is just such women who were most changed by the events of 1914–18. From Tudor times there were always female freedom fighters who tore up the rule book and lived their own lives, but what changed in the First World War is that non-revolutionaries started having different expectations of the future. Edith is not a rebel, but the war will change her, and she’ll end up with different ambitions. And the first sign of this is that she is determined to learn to drive, which is where we begin her story.

  8 INT. KITCHENS/PASSAGE. DOWNTON. DAY.

  William is with Mrs Patmore and Daisy.

  WILLIAM: What are you giving them to eat?

  MRS PATMORE: Not much. They know the money’s for the hospital, so they can’t expect Belshazzar’s Feast.*

  DAISY: I’ll make some cheese straws. What’s the matter with you?*

  WILLIAM: Nothing much… My dad still won’t let me enlist. His lordship’s made it clear he thinks I’m a coward.

  DAISY: No such thing.

  WILLIAM: No, he does, and I don’t blame him.

  MRS PATMORE: Your father has no one but you. Of course he doesn’t want you to enlist. Who can argue with him?

  WILLIAM: So I stand by while the lads on the farms and in the gardens go to war. Even Thomas is at the front in the Medical Corps —

  MRS PATMORE: That’ll have come as a nasty shock.

  WILLIAM: Oh, you can make fun of him, Mrs Patmore. But he’s fighting for his King and Country and I’m not.†

  MRS PATMORE: Well, I dare say you won’t have long to wait.

  WILLIAM: Well, I hope you’re right.

  MRS PATMORE: Do you? Because I don’t. I hope very much that I’m wrong.

  * Mrs Patmore has been established in the first series as the sort of downstairs Violet. A lot of that was due to Lesley Nicol’s performance, because she’s a very funny actress. At the beginning, if you go back and watch the early episodes, she’s really just the cook, but she gradually develops this personality and, as a writer, when you know you’ve got an actor who can deliver, you give them stuff to do. Lesley has never disappointed, and so by this stage she has established who Mrs Patmore is. We begin with that same tone here, with her reference to Belshazzar’s Feast.

  The village dame school education that the servants would have received was narrow, but it was also quite efficient, so Mrs Patmore would have known her biblical references. The emphasis then was entirely on giving the pupils what they would need to earn their living, so they were taught to read and the lost skill of good handwriting. They would also be competent in mathematics, and the girls were instructed in the domestic chores of cooking and sewing. There was not much history and almost no science, but the Bible would definitely have figured. One of the bitter ironies in all this is that a comparison of percentages in literacy between then and now makes for depressing reading. It is a sad truth that our standards of literacy have collapsed, thanks largely to the fashions in teaching that surfaced in the 1960s and 70s. To me, this was a betrayal of generations of children, and I find the teaching establishment’s refusal to accept responsibility for it uncomfortable. At any rate, it is quite legitimate that Mrs Patmore would have known about Belshazzar’s Feast.

  * Here the servants are being obliged to support the war effort, but they do support it. We haven’t got any conchies in this show. I suppose I felt it would have been a bit of a cliché, to have a conscientious objector among the servants.

  † When conscription arrived in early 1916, they started by only calling up unmarried young men. By June of that year, married men were included, but no fathers, and so it crept on, broadening its net. The British complete indifference to whole families being wiped out was, I am convinced, quite wrong. In America, if all but one of your sons had been killed, then the survivor was taken out of the front line, which was the plot of Saving Private Ryan. We never had that, which seems terrible to me, but anyway, we don’t get into that here. Mr Mason knows what he’s askin
g; in plain terms, he is asking for his son not to participate in the war.

  9 INT. HALL. DOWNTON. DAY.

  Clarkson, in a major’s uniform, and the servants arrange the gilt chairs. Cora, Robert and Isis are with Isobel.

  ISOBEL: It’s kind of you to let us hold it here. They’ll enjoy it so much more.

  VIOLET: And you can charge so much more for the tickets.

  She has crept in on them in her usual stately way.

  ROBERT: Good morning, Mama. This is very early for you to be up and about.

  VIOLET: War makes early risers of us all. I thought I would help with the flowers. I’ve asked Sharp to bring whatever he can spare.

  CORA: Well, Bassett has plenty… but thank you.

  With a fixed smile she goes, leaving Robert and Violet alone.

  VIOLET: You don’t mind my taking over the flowers, do you? Cora’s flowers always look more suited to a first communion in southern Italy.

  ROBERT: So, what do you think?

  VIOLET: I think it looks like a music hall in Southend. Well, what else have you planned for tonight’s revels?

  ROBERT: Anything we can think of that will raise money.

  VIOLET: Hot buttered toast with a countess, at tuppence a slice?*

  He gives her a sharp look and she holds up her hands.

  VIOLET (CONT’D): I know. War is a foreign country, and we must all adjust accordingly.

  The Major/Doctor has approached with a request.

  CLARKSON: Will the new Lord Lieutenant open the proceedings tonight? Congratulations, by the way.

  ROBERT: If you want me to. What should I say? The hospital’s been promoted and the cash’ll come in handy?

  CLARKSON: Promotion’s one word for it… The casualties from the Somme are squeezing the system dreadfully. They want us to double our intake.