Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1

by Julian Fellowes

* Bates dislikes Thomas tremendously, but he would be uncomfortable betraying a fellow member of staff and thereby risking Thomas’s job. He cannot do it, even to help himself. Once again, I hope the audience can see both points of view.

  * In the filming, it was decided that their kiss should be interrupted, and so the final speech was redundant. I think this was the right choice, in fact.

  * This statement, that Mary is determined to tell Matthew about Pamuk, for me defines her as a sympathetic character because I suspect that most women wouldn’t feel the same, especially then. The simple truth that she is only prepared to enter the state of marriage honestly and without deception means we cannot dislike her. I think, anyway.

  * Violet’s initial repugnance on hearing Cora’s confession has been overcome in what seems to me a truthful way. Once she’d had time to think about it, she realised that scandal and the lowering of the prestige of the family would be much worse than carrying a dead Turk.

  * The acceptance of the ruling class’s power depended on their maintaining a strong sense of their worthiness, to show it was right they should occupy their privileged position. This meant that the unworthy members of those families had to be put away, and the so-called Remittance Men, sons and nephews who were drunks or simply useless, would be sent to Africa or Australia with an income as long as they never came back. But we forget about the girls who went wrong because there certainly were some. If you look in the Peerage and find the daughters of the fourth Earl of Somewhere and it says (1) Lady Amelia married the second Viscount Wotsit, (2) Lady Cecily married the Bishop of Peterborough, and (3) Lady Clare married Count Luigi Barrasconi Lupigi from Naples, you can be sure that she was the one who was having too much fun. The foreign marriage got her out of sight and out of mind in a reasonably respectable way. There’s no account of how the great ladies of Naples responded to these slightly déclassée English girls arriving in their midst, but, either way, it was vastly preferable to an unsuitable marriage in England as that kept her in full view. The clean solution was to send her off to be moderately happy in foreign climes.

  * Carson’s coming back with the Granthams at the start of the episode is to show that certain servants travelled with the family to London, but others did not. Some great dukes kept fully staffed houses at both ends, but it was much more normal just to have a skeleton staff turning the house over unless the family was in residence. As a rule, there was a housekeeper at both ends and, in London, she would have a couple of maids who stayed even when the family was away and kept the place clean. But there wouldn’t be any butler or permanent footmen in London, because when the family was not there, there was nothing for them to do. So when the Crawleys went up for the Season they would take the footmen, as well as the lady’s maids and the valet. The under housemaids and so on would stay at Downton and the London staff would be increased with temporary workers while the family was there.

  * If you just ran up to London for a short visit it was much easier to go to your club – they all had accommodation for valets. It was a bit more complicated for women but if they just wanted to pay a visit or go to a dressmaker, it was usually easier to take their maid and stay with a relation or a friend. This avoided the massive upheaval of opening the house. Those London palaces are interesting to me because they were built for entertaining, not for house parties. They had huge drawing rooms and even ballrooms, but there were not many bedrooms. There’s a book by Lord Claud Hamilton, a younger son of the Duke of Abercorn, who describes how their London base was incredibly splendid, but they were absolutely shoe-horned into the bedrooms, with children sharing, and some even on the servants’ floor at the top of the house. Nobody wanted people to come and stay.

  * It is part of the style of Downton Abbey, that we make references to these world-shaking events without usually having anyone of historical significance come to the house. Here, we wanted to show how the assassination of a largely unknown prince and his morganatic wife was going to affect the lives of everyone at Downton and beyond, from the Granthams to the most modest agricultural worker. It was a happening that gradually grew in significance until it became clear that the Austrians were being encouraged by the German Kaiser’s government to use the murder as a challenge to Tsarist Russia, once and for all. Russia had been trying to extend her influence in that part of the world and now the Germans and Austrians bonded together and decided to draw a line in the sand. Of course no one knew then that the fire they had lit would end by consuming almost the entire Old World.

  * This is the first mention of the garden party. As you can see, we make it a charity party, raising funds for the local hospital but, while there were charity bazaars and so on at the time, I’m afraid that making this one into a charity fund-raiser was a sop to modern sensibilities. In real life, the party would not have been for charity. It would simply have been a garden party that people expected the Granthams to give once a year. The thinking was that giving it a charitable purpose would render it more fragrant to modern eyes and ears. But I wasn’t completely convinced.

  * This is when we first meet Robert’s sister, Rosamund. To be honest, I felt (and feel) her image here is too 1870s in her hair and her clothes. It seems as if we have suddenly gone backwards in time. The costume and hair departments had pictorial evidence, so I imagine there was a revival of that kind of look – the chignon with a tiny hat that one thinks of as very 1875 – but it is an example for me of why things don’t only have to be true in a costume drama. They also have to look true.

  Rosamund is very much her own creature; she is brisk, she is tart, she is unsentimental (Samantha Bond gets all this very well), so Mary comes to her for the unvarnished aristocratic viewpoint. We learn later that Rosamund’s husband, Marmaduke Painswick, was immensely rich but not tremendously well born, being the grandson of the man who made the money. Rosamund has made the decision to marry this immensely well-off fellow, with the understanding that she would knock off any rough edges but, in my experience, the unequal marriage is often accompanied by an absolute determination, on the part of the grander member of the couple, to re-educate their partners and not to surrender any of their own rank, in other words not to pay any price for their choice of spouse. This often colours their ambitions for their children. I knew one couple, where the man was extremely nice but he was quite an ordinary chap, and the mother was much grander. As a result she filled her children with this notion of how important they were, pumping up their sense of social prominence, and I have to say it paid off. They all became rather important.

  This over-consciousness of position is what shades Rosamund’s opinions and it explains why she misleads Mary here. She was no great fan of the Matthew marriage anyway. To her, Matthew is an obscure person. She’s polite to him but she doesn’t see that Mary necessarily has to marry him. Sadly, Mary’s doubts are only strengthened by that foundation.

  * I like the mourning armband. For a long time, everyone observed the total mourning of the Victorians, with men and women submerged in black crêpe for months and years on end, but after the death of King Edward VII, things started to calm down. Mourning went on into my lifetime, but it wasn’t very long by then, although one of my grandfather’s relations, a darling woman whom we called Cousin Frances, chose to stay in half mourning colours for the rest of her life. It wasn’t a harsh sacrifice. Lavender and violet and mauve are prettier than black, so it was an attractive token of her love for her late husband more than a gloomy reminder. The armband was part of this more moderate mourning but even that would soon prove too much for modern taste. I remember that when my mother died in 1980 we wore armbands for a month. But when my father died in 1999, we didn’t. We were in black ties and morning coats at his funeral and his memorial, but the armband had gone. That twenty-year gap finished it off.

  Carson tells William ‘not when we’re entertaining’, because it is impossible for him not to put the interests of the family first, but we expect that. In Carson’s defence the good servant is esse
ntially invisible, and there shouldn’t be anything about them that makes you follow them with your eyes and ask a question. That’s what he would have been afraid of.

  * This kind of thing was not uncommon in an era when girls married at eighteen or nineteen and had all their babies by the time they were twenty-six. So it follows that they were often fertile for twenty years after the birth of their last child. We had to make it clear that if the unborn child is a boy everything changes for everyone. I was a little bit worried at the time that the audience wouldn’t understand this, but I was wrong. After all our nervousness, they grasped the concept of the entail, i.e. that in these families women had no rights, and so they did understand that if Mary had a legitimate brother then the whole game would be different. Where it gets, for me, enjoyably complicated, is that of course Robert would have loved a son. He loves Matthew, quite genuinely, but he would have loved a son.

  * In real life, if this situation happened in a normal family, Matthew would simply have been demoted to the position of a younger son, despite being much older than the new heir. In other words, he would always have been welcome at the house, he would have had all the shooting he could handle, and lots of contacts and introductions and promotions. But he would have been expected to make his own way. Sometimes enormously rich people were able to set up their younger sons as country gentlemen, but most younger sons were on their own. They just had to get on with earning a living, and I think that’s what would have happened here.

  * Matthew doesn’t want to stay at Downton as a hanger on, having been the heir, and I agree with him. I’ve never really understood lingering at the scene of your former glory, like those people who sell their family house and move into a farmhouse that’s half a mile away. I couldn’t do that. Once it had come to an end, I’d be off and good luck to whoever comes after.

  * The key to Mary is that, despite her superficial snobbery, she has true emotions and one of them is ambition. She loves Matthew for being Matthew, but she also likes the fact that he will give her a position from which she can do things. As the Countess of Grantham, she can lend her social muscle to this interest and that charity, she can entertain the county, she can promote a political candidate, a painter, a new novelist, she can have a life. But for women of her class, because of the way the system was loaded, if their husband did not provide them with a podium, it was incredibly difficult for them to have any kind of career. Even though she’s an earl’s daughter, as the wife of a lawyer, she would be unlikely to be a major player. She would get invited to things and she’d go to them, but she wouldn’t be a power. And she wants to be a power. She feels she could acquit herself well.

  * A key factor of Violet’s character is that she is not stupid about people. She understands what makes them tick.

  * Unfortunately, in the filming Robert referred to his sister as ‘Rosamund’, which would never have happened when speaking to the cook, and I had about fifty letters because of it. Quite rightly. Unfortunately I didn’t pick it up in the rushes and I didn’t see the edit in time to take it out. The correct speech is reproduced here. They also invented the fact that her house was ‘new’ when we learn later that Rosamund and Montague bought it when they married. So this whole speech in the televised episode is cock-eyed.

  † The absolute rule was then that no servant should ever sit in the presence of a member of the family. I remember when I was about twelve my elder brother Rory, who was about fifteen or sixteen, was left alone in the house. My mother and I had been away and when we returned he was talking about having a talk with a housemaid we employed then. He described this conversation and my mother said to him: ‘Do you mean she sat in your presence?’ I can recall her utter incredulity as she said the words. Nowadays, you can hardly credit it, can you? The phrase planted itself in my boyish brain and that’s why Mrs Patmore says it here. At that time, it would have been absolutely impossible for the cook to sit in the presence of the Earl of Grantham, unless she was actually going to faint, which is what is happening here.

  * Matthew is very wounded by Mary’s retreat. I like this situation because it contains a variety of moral positions. Mary would despise herself for lying in order to keep him, with a secret plan to dump him later if things didn’t turn out well. She’d feel this would be very dishonourable. On the other hand, Matthew feels it is dishonourable in her to refuse him because he may lose everything. So they have both defined Mary’s honour differently, though their difference doesn’t make either of them dishonourable, in my opinion. That is my hallmark, really. In writing this storyline, I never disliked Mary for being troubled by what she had promised. She had accepted a man who was going to give her everything, but now it may all be lost. She knows she will be judged harshly for not wanting to go on with it, but not by me. Personally, I think it would have been more reasonable of Matthew to suggest adjourning the discussion of the marriage until the child is born. If he’d done that, she probably would have married him anyway. So I am sympathetic to Mary even though she’s made a mistake, which turns out a big mistake. I can see her point of view.

  * As always, I try to resist over-sentimentalising these things. It is completely believable that Robert would ring up his sister, tell her that the cook is coming up for an operation at Moorfields, and ask her to put up a maid. But in a sentimental version of the story Rosamund would look out for the maid and ask after the cook, and so on, which would be very unlikely. There is a moment before the servants’ ball in the Christmas Special of the second series, where Robert and Matthew are having a drink beforehand to get their nerves up, before they have to go and face the ordeal. I was being interviewed for Australian radio and my charming hostess said she was shocked that they would have to fortify themselves, or that they wouldn’t be looking forward to the ball, as they were such friendly people. I explained that the Crawleys must belong to their own time. For Robert Grantham, trying to make conversation with Mrs Patmore is not something he would be looking forward to for months. I don’t think he hates it. Certainly he knows he’s got to do it and he does it with good grace, but you can’t ignore a character’s real context.

  † I feel this exchange has truth because cooks were notoriously bad tempered and they could find a quarrel in a bramble bush, if necessary. This was because their work day was endless with almost no labour-saving stuff at all. But also they were always in the heat of those great boiling ranges. Although many kitchens had very high ceilings to take the heat up, nevertheless the cooks were basically sweating from morning until night.

  * If you lost your job in middle age, that was usually the end. You were not going to get another. And there wasn’t much of a safety net in those days, some sort of parish payment was usually about it, so I think one has to have some sympathy for Mrs Patmore, caught in this spot. After the First World War, many landlords decided they no longer needed or wanted to pension off endless servants, and so they began to pull down cottages. They didn’t want the maintenance, and they couldn’t see them as a source of income until the 1960s and 70s. The truth is, they just didn’t think financially at all.

  * I went onto the Internet to learn about the first cataract operations, and I discovered that they started years earlier than I’d thought, going back, in Europe, to the eighteenth century. I hoped they had come in before 1914, but it was much earlier. Moorfields, the eye hospital, has been going since 1805. That said, it was fairly crude and you had to wait until the cataract had formed. Even in my time, I remember my grandmother having a cataract operation in about 1970 and they wouldn’t perform it until the tissue had formed a sort of crust. Golly.

  * In many ways, this decade, from 1910 to 1920, effected what would come to be seen as the change from the Old World into the New. Of course there had been earlier inventions, different forms of heating, more efficient kitchen ranges and so on, but not much had altered fundamentally in the way life was lived in these houses for two centuries at least. You could say gas lighting was a big modernisation, but the diff
erence between a gas lamp and a candle is only really one of maintenance. They both involve flames that must be lit and, more importantly, safely extinguished. And anyway, you never had gas lighting for everything. You still took a candle to light you to bed and many places had no gas lighting upstairs. There were also paraffin or oil lamps but these were too dangerous to carry around, when lit. A common mistake in films and television is when we see an unlit paraffin lamp sitting on a table during the day, as we might have a lamp that is turned off in a modern sitting room. This never happened. Paraffin lamps were removed from the room, either at night or first thing in the morning, when the family was not there, and taken to a lamp room, where one of the footmen’s duties was to clean and refill them. They would not then be brought back into the drawing room until it was time to light them. In this first series we have electricity in the main rooms on the ground floor, but not in the bedrooms, which changes in the second series. The table at the foot of the stairs with the candles for the family and guests to carry upstairs went on in some places until the Second World War, but in a lot of houses it was gone after the First.

  † In this sort of narrative almost every scene has to play more than one role. They have to deliver beats in two, three or even four storylines. This is particularly true of a drawing-room scene where you have several members of the family. In those big groups, about four or five different strands will be served.

  * This exchange was designed to define Sybil as a strong personality. She is not just a vaguely rebellious teenager, but a serious critic of the system who is trying to get things done. This characterisation seems right for a time of change when quite a lot of young people were showing they did not want to go on with things as they were. Jessica Brown Findlay made a good job of it, and her performance pays off even more in the second series, so here we are laying the ground for the woman she becomes later.