23 I always think people can be curiously obtuse about how to deal with those in the throes of a death. I remember once, when my mother had died after a long illness, we were all in the country. We’d had the funeral and we were in that numb state that follows, when a great friend of mine, who was staying nearby with her in-laws, rang to see if there was anything she could do to help. ‘Can you ask us for a drink or something?’ I said. ‘Just to get my father out of the house. We won’t stay long, but he really needs to break it up a bit.’ I later learned that her father-in-law could not understand the point of this. Why would a man want to go out when his wife has just died? It is in those moments that you realise the absolute lack of empathy or understanding with which the English can be cursed. I find Americans are a more empathetic race. Most Americans I know would not need to have it explained why Pa wanted to go out. They would see that all he wanted was a rest from being bereaved in a house of mourning. From that incident came the Isobel story of asking them out for lunch.
24 Here, Violet is once again a pragmatic and positive force. I fairly unashamedly make Violet a guide to right thinking, most of the time. Underneath her snobbery and self-importance, she has a fairly stout grasp of the realities of life.
25 I was rather sorry this went. Thomas is trapped in that moment when you think you’re making your interest in someone clear, but they don’t get it. Which we’ve all done. You think you’re flirting, but if you ask them later why they led you on, they look at you completely blankly, because they don’t know what you’re talking about. This is where Thomas and Jimmy are. It is so outside Jimmy’s consciousness that he should be courted by another man, and an older man at that, that it just doesn’t occur to him. Which is a protection of sorts. It all rolls along without his knowing.
26 Anglicans always say Roman Catholic, but Catholics only say Catholic. And when a Catholic character in a film says, ‘I’m a Roman Catholic,’ you know it’s been written by an Anglican. This stuff intrigues me. Someone asked if I wasn’t rather anti-Catholic in Downton. But they can’t have been watching very attentively. I have quite a lot of fun with the anti-Catholicism, which I remember from my own youth.
27 The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk is a dear friend of Violet, more Catholic than the Pope and perfectly real. The Duke’s first wife was childless, and obviously for the premier Catholic of England there was no question of divorce. There was not then, and is not now, any shortage of Howards, but nevertheless, when she died he felt he should marry again and have another shot at it, as direct succession is always seen as preferable. His second and much younger wife had a son, Bernard, and two daughters, Rachel and Winifred, and then he died. So she was quite a young widow, and she had to fly the flag for the Norfolks until her son achieved his majority. I admire that, so I’ve put her in as a friend of Violet’s.
28 This is all really a reference to my own growing-up years, because I was a cradle Catholic. My family was not always Catholic, actually, but my grandfather died in the Great War at the age of twenty-nine, and my grandmother married again some years later when my father was eleven. Her second husband was a man called Arthur Byrne, whose family was very Catholic, and whose brother, Herbert Byrne, would end up as Abbot of Ampleforth. My father was summarily converted, much to the horror of his aunts and uncle, but then they didn’t like their sister-in-law much anyway. They carried on as if he’d been sold into the white slave trade. As it turned out, my father enjoyed his Catholicism, and even quite enjoyed being part of a persecuted minority, as he then was. I don’t mean we were spat at in the street, but among the upper middle and upper classes it was uncomfortable that one was Catholic. My wife’s grandmother wouldn’t have Catholics in the house, but that was quite rare by then. It was more a sense of our not being properly English, as Travis says here. In fact, his arguments would have been standard for an Anglican vicar of that time, or indeed later. But the family is more reasonable, with the slight exception of Robert, and they won’t condemn the world’s largest, most numerous Christian religion in this way. Besides which, it is fun to trap Travis. Still, it would have been a big thing for Robert to accept that his grandchild will be Catholic. Even in 1991 it was a big thing for my mother-in-law, so I’m the more appreciative that she has gone along with it so gracefully.
29 This is a Downton moment, because we always like to see a replica of the upstairs arguments going on among the servants. Alfred is anti instinctively, but the majority, on the whole, are tolerant, and I would say that was a fairly accurate replication of middle- and working-class society. Carson, of course, reflects Robert’s resistance to Catholics. His remark about it being hard to believe they’re loyal to the Crown was the great complaint, that their loyalty to the Pope made them not quite safe. This argument was credible enough in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when there was a danger that Catholics were fifth columnists, loyal to the King of Spain, who wanted to make England a Catholic country. At least, that was the fear.
In fact, I believe most English Catholics just wanted to be left alone to get on with it, and sadly there is evidence that Queen Elizabeth I would have agreed with them. She did not stoke up the persecution of the Catholics until the Pope issued an encyclical saying that it was not a crime to assassinate her and that all good Catholics in England should rise up against their Queen. With this supremely unhelpful gesture, he turned every English Catholic into a potential traitor, which placed them in an impossible position. Again, the Queen may well have appreciated the spot they were in, but it meant the priests who were being smuggled in were enemy agents.
She also had to deal with the intriguing, in both senses, Mary Queen of Scots. When I was young I had a romantic vision of Mary Stuart, and in fact it was a poster of her kneeling at the block that first really interested me in history. Alas, now I believe she was not innocent of the death of her husband, nor of several plots against Elizabeth. It is a very complicated issue as to whether Elizabeth, by executing Mary Stuart, started a train of events that led to both the execution of Charles I and subsequently Louis XVI. Certainly that was the Queen’s fear, that she had damaged the status of the anointed sovereign. Anyway, all this is why anti-Catholicism did have historically justifiable roots, and I’m a Catholic so I can say it.
30 Here is a clear example of how, by this point, I was writing towards Matthew’s death, because by now I knew it was coming. I’d had all the conversations with Dan Stevens, because we certainly didn’t want to lose him at all. But he’d made the decision. From then on he was very cooperative, but we knew it was happening and so we had to get some emotional mileage out of it, which is what we’re doing here.
31 I’m interested by this. When I was a child we had a cockney char, as they were known then, called Margaret Perrin. She came in every day of the week and worked for my mother, and she would always refer to the midday feed as dinner, and the evening feed as tea, which was, in fact, eaten earlier than our dinner. Then they would have some sandwiches before they went to bed. Interestingly, this is an eighteenth-century structure. They had breakfast very late to our way of thinking, at about eleven or twelve. They would then have dinner, the main feed of the day, at five, and it would go on until about eight. It was quite a palaver, and then they would go to the play or the opera and from there onto gaming and supper houses, and at the end of the evening, after the play, they would have oysters somewhere or they would go to the end of someone’s soirée and eat something. So it made a different pattern of feeding, which survived in the working class but not in the upper class. I find that sort of thing fascinating.
32 Mrs Bartlett is a match for Murray. I think it must have been very hard for people in this very stratified society, who had been told from birth they did not occupy a very high position, to stand against officialdom, and one of the great changes in my life – which I heartily approve of – is the refusal of the majority of the population to be bullied by officialdom any more. But such a stand in the 1920s would have been rare
and difficult. So, to me, Mrs Bartlett is an admirable figure. She doesn’t accept that, just because she is low in the pecking order, she doesn’t have the right to kick back. By the same token, I think Murray feels disempowered by people who challenge his authority, as, in my personal experience, civil servants and people are always disempowered, and usually rather fretful and indignant, when their automatic power is challenged.
33 I had a bit of an issue over this scene with Ivy and the foxtrot, because the dance teacher, with the best intentions, had altered it to a Charleston, thinking that seemed more fun. People feel that the moment flat chests and hair bobbing came in the Charleston whizzed up on the next lift, but in fact it was some years before that happened. We are in 1922, but the Charleston didn’t really arrive until 1925, and The Year of the Charleston, so called when it was all the rage, was 1926, so we had to revert to my original idea. The foxtrot of the Twenties was a wild dance, the precursor of the Charleston, whereas in my parents’ day, in the Forties, it was more sedate and you sort of walked it. My plan had been to have the wild 1920s foxtrot, but in the event it was fairly demure, more like the later version.
34 Mr Mason is one of the moral instructors in our show, and he is also, to some extent, a deus ex machina in Daisy’s story, offering her a future beyond Downton. We never really worry about Daisy because we know she has the protection of Mr Mason, but she is not yet ready to abandon the old way of life, which is symbolic of the way that generation looked both ways. They clung to the past while planning for the future. They are starting to make feelers and we have different stories of Mrs Patmore buying a house in the fifth series, and of Carson buying another, which is my way of marking the coming of change.
As for widows taking on a farming tenancy after the war, this wasn’t unusual if the husband had been killed and the son was not interested or not old enough to take it on. She would know the way the estate worked, and wouldn’t have to be taught the ropes. You’d think that society would be prejudiced against the concept of a woman farmer, but actually they weren’t particularly. It’s one of our misapprehensions. And if you look at a picture of a farmers’ market where they were hiring for reaping or lambing, the women farmers are walking around as well as the men. One only has to think of Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd. I’m sure there was a certain paternalistic attitude to women on their own, but they weren’t that unusual, which is interesting to me. Here, again, Mason is sounding the trumpet for the end of the way of life they’re all committed to, which you will hear more and more as the show goes on.
35 With Clarkson and Lady Grantham or Clarkson and Isobel, I try to show the gradations of that provincial, almost Chekhovian society. The doctor, the school teacher, certainly the vicar, were in a superior position to a tradesman or a farmer, but below ‘The Family’ in the big house. In fact, the vicar would often be the younger son of a landed family, so his case was different, but with the others there was always a slight inequality, indicating that there would be social interaction, but you were not a great friend. So, for example, when the Dowager, Lady Grantham, gives a luncheon or dinner party, the doctor would not expect to be invited (and Clarkson feels honoured when he is invited in the fifth series), but he might be asked to tea, when he’d gossip about the village.
I always feel sorry for people in that society who were neither fish, flesh, foul nor good red herring, and sorriest of all for the governesses and tutors. Tutors less, because being a tutor could be seen as the beginning of a career in the civil service or something – a recommendation from, say, Lord Minto of his son’s tutor would take you to a secretaryship or the start of a political life. But for governesses it was a dead end, unless she could find a man who would marry her without a loss of caste. Jane Eyre is an obvious example of this in literature, superior socially to kindly Mrs Fairfax but not seen as good enough for the company of Mr Rochester. And in Jane Austen’s Emma, the whole business of Emma’s governess, Miss Taylor, marrying Mr Weston disturbs the peace of the household until it is established that Mr Weston is a gentleman, and so the former Miss Taylor may continue as an intimate of Miss Wodehouse. I think in the country people do still have acquaintances in the village that they’re friendly with but they wouldn’t ask them to a top-level entertainment. It strikes me as absurd, but it still goes on.
36 I’m always interested by the whole business of the benign lie – what used to be called a white lie – where you tell a lie and on the whole matters are improved and people’s feelings are spared. But is it right to conceal the uncomfortable truth? This, for me, is the issue, because Clarkson is really letting Robert off the moral hook that he ought to have faced, that he was wrong to trust the London expert, rather than the man who knew Sybil from childhood. And I think Violet’s motives in seeking the Doctor’s support are defensible but flawed. She sees her son and daughter-in-law putting their marriage at risk because of this difference, and she sees her own moral and familial imperative as trying to get them back together. I don’t criticise her for that, but it doesn’t mean I think she’s necessarily in the right in making Clarkson falsify the truth.
37 Having made the decision that Sybil would die, because Jessica Brown Findlay wanted to leave the show, we then had to decide what to do with Branson. One option was to send him back to Ireland, maybe leaving the baby, and occasionally he could return as a guest star. But we all felt Allen Leech was a great asset to the show. He is also an attractive man, and knowing we were about to lose one attractive young man, we didn’t really want to lose two. More than this, his character is a bridge between the people below stairs and the people above. He has been at different points in the drama on equal terms with both groups, making him unique in the house. Having brought that about believably (I hope), it felt foolish to throw it away.
So, having decided to keep him, the next question is, what is he going to do? Someone suggested he open a garage in the village, but that would have been too self-consciously difficult where Robert was concerned, a son-in-law running a garage where the locals get their wheels changed is something that he would not find easy to live with, and it would have been false dramatically to make him find it easy to accept. But the job of agent, which was frequently given to cousins or connections of the family, seemed to me believable. My mother’s grandfather was agent to Lord Ormathwaite in Shropshire, and lived the life of a minor gentleman running that estate, so it seemed quite possible that a man like Branson would be given the job. In this way, Robert could absorb Branson into his family group, but in an acceptable and truthful way. The only problem was, we’d never shown him doing anything but lying underneath a car with an oil can, so from this point on we start planting the idea that he has a rural background and some knowledge of the country.
38 I like Murray’s being practical. In my experience, lawyers are a ruthless bunch, and once they’re on one side they stick to it. The question the public always asks them is how they can defend a man when they know he’s guilty. They always get round this by saying, ‘If he hasn’t told me he’s guilty, how do I know he is guilty?’ Which of course is a straight piece of Houdini. The truth is, they have an amoral streak that allows them to absent themselves from the notion of whether their client is guilty or not. I don’t exactly criticise this, because the legal system would not work if every criminal had to be defended by people who believed in their innocence or prosecuted by people who believed in their guilt. So I do understand the system, but for me it has a dark side, and that’s what we refer to here.
39 We always try to make the moments in the day reasonably parallel when we go between the different groups. We may jump so that the next thing they’re doing is changing for dinner or having tea, but we try to have one or two scenes between the servants or with the family, or maybe go to Violet, because that’s the third camp, to show that they’re all having tea, or they’re all having breakfast, or they’re all in the middle of the morning, just to endorse the time sequence.
40 I would
be sorry if the audience saw Carson’s position as outrageously intolerant. I think, at that time, for someone to allow a reformed prostitute into their house would have been an enormous thing, and for her to wait at table on the Countess of Grantham and her daughters would have put the family’s reputation at risk. So I don’t think his position is unreasonable, even if it is very unmodern. We, on the whole, tend to sympathise with Isobel’s more advanced views, but if people read into this that I think Carson is completely wrong-headed then they would be mistaken. As for Mrs Hughes, she always has an ambivalent attitude to this sort of thing. She doesn’t dislike Ethel. She rather admires her for rebuilding her life. At the same time, she thinks it only works with Mrs Crawley because Ethel is the sole servant employed there. Finally, she believes Ethel will never have a real chance until she moves away from the area where her past is known. So her position is not entirely modern, either.
41 Robert’s resentment over Matthew involving Branson in running the estate is going to be a story that runs over the next series, but we start to ratchet up the tension from here. Robert has reluctantly accepted that he must share power with Matthew, but he wants nothing to change. In some way he expects everything to stay the same, even though Matthew is now a co-owner. In a sense, Matthew’s cash allows him to think that, but Matthew knows that if things don’t change, his cash will run out, just as Cora’s cash ran out. Ideally, you should see all their points of view.
42 Make-up became a sort of young rebellion at this time. For years the official position had been that any use of make-up was only suited for loose women – not quite prostitutes necessarily, but loose and fast women – when secretly many respectable women wore make-up and had done for years. There was, in fact, a big market in what we would now call nude make-up, which is make-up that doesn’t quite show but just improves you. That was essentially a mid- to late-Victorian concept, of slightly tinted balms and powders that would make an ‘un-made-up’ woman look prettier. Now visible make-up was on the way in and young girls like Ivy would see photographs in magazines, not only of actresses but of countesses and politicians’ wives, all in visible make-up, and want to try it. Mrs Patmore is firmly on one side of this divide. Ivy, as a young woman in the early Twenties, quite understandably is on the other.
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