Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 (53 page)

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The Granthams are fictional. I have read in the newspapers that Cora is based on Mary Leiter or May Goelet or Consuelo Vanderbilt or Cornelia Bradley-Martin or any of the other famous American ‘Buccaneers', but all this is nonsense. She is entirely made up. Although Mary Leiter (who married Lord Curzon) was the daughter of a self-made man, a dry goods manufacturer, and in that sense she is closer to Cora than, say, Consuelo Vanderbilt, who could be seen as an American aristocrat because her money was in its third generation. The fact is a lot of American girls arrived in the 1880s and 1890s, with the express purpose of marrying into the aristocracy. The fashion began to die out by the Great War and there aren't many American-heiress brides in the late teens or after, because basically, by the twenties, most of them wanted to marry rich Americans and stay on Long Island for that Gatsby life. Freezing to death in some castle in Staffordshire was no longer considered the fun it had seemed thirty years before. In fact, that was part of the inspiration for the show. When Gareth Neame (Executive Producer) asked me whether or not I wanted to write it and, in his words, whether I would go back into
Gosford Park
territory for television, I was reading a book about these American girls called
To Marry an English Lord
, by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace, rather a funny book, actually, which has since been reissued because of
Downton
. And it did occur to me that we all know about May Goelet and Cornelia Bradley-Martin and many others who arrived and married slightly impoverished peers, rescuing their houses in the process, but we don't really know much about what happened to them later, because they were mostly still there in the twenties and thirties and forties, struggling with the new century and sharing the war effort. I thought it would be interesting to see one of these characters twenty years down the line, so in a way Cora was the first character I imagined. But, as I say, she isn't based on anyone specific.

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This is really the crux – and the most controversial element – of the plot of this episode and, really, of the rest of the series. Robert's estate, that is Downton Abbey and more or less everything else he owns, is entailed to the earldom. That means they cannot be divided. Whoever inherits the title gets it all. This arrangement was not uncommon then, and was designed to avoid a fortune being endlessly divided into nothingness. In short, it is how the British families retained their status. Of course, for most of them, where the property was entailed there was a son to inherit. But the Granthams have no son. That is the difficulty. I had a particular case in mind, naming no names, of a chap we know who grew up abroad and who was the heir to a great position. The peer only had daughters and this heir was, I think, his second cousin's son. Anyway, he made the decision that he would bring this young man over to live in England, on the estate, to be trained up for the role. The young man arrived, a stranger to England and found himself in this anomalous spot, quite a distant relation who was going to get everything, while there were all the daughters who were close family and who weren't going to get anything. Knowing them and hearing about this first hand, I could see there was dramatic potential in the situation, and that was the original idea for the Matthew Crawley story.

*
My wife, Emma, was the one who originally said why not make Bates lame? That was a good idea for me because it meant that he could never be a straightforward valet. (a) He couldn't be an extra footman which valets were expected to be, and that would become part of the plot. (b) It means that somehow Robert and he share some experience that is behind the unusual decision to allow him to hold the position. That put a kind of emotional narrative and some mystery into this particular strand of the story which of course pays off when Robert is persuaded first that he has to sack Bates, and then when Robert changes his mind. All of it is somehow tied up with Bates having been Robert's servant when they were serving in the South African War, or as we call it now, the Boer War. I have never really clarified quite what happened that bonded them so tightly. There was a moment when I did come up with a back story to explain it, but it seemed a bit banal so I cut it, and we have deliberately kept it vague. Maybe one day I will spill the beans.

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The core concern in this way of life, which was shared by many employers and which we can easily understand, was that it meant having people living in your house that you didn't know. For this reason, under the Black Code in the eighteenth century, any crime against a master or mistress by a servant was savagely punished as it came under the heading of petty treason. In this it was the same as when a wife murdered her husband; that was also petty treason and it almost invariably carried the death penalty. When a servant murdered their employer, they could expect no mercy. At one stage, the statutory punishment was being burnt to death or something equally horrific. It was such a risk, you see, letting these strangers into your home, there was no lock between you, and what did you know of them, apart from some reference from another stranger? On a more basic level, the general fear was theft. Today, when someone is sacked from an office, they are often escorted to the door of the building; there was similar thinking then, that when you sacked a servant, they must be kept under surveillance until they'd left the house, because once they'd lost their job they would immediately fill their pockets with spoons and be off. In fact, the worst thing for a servant was to be suspected of theft. Once you'd been sacked for stealing your career in service was finished, and so it was enormously important that you should never be suspected of dishonesty.

*
In my head, Mary thought she was prepared to marry Patrick in order to keep Downton and everything else in the family. The question is, would she have married him if it came to it? I suspect she would have, because I think she is sufficiently worldly in her values. But I also believe she would have regretted it, because of her finer side which she keeps largely repressed.

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This was the other half of the contentious entail plot. Would people understand that Cora's fortune has been incorporated within the estate, making it part of the whole that must pass to the heir to the title? As Violet says later, the old Earl, Robert's father, would have assumed his healthy young American daughter-in-law would have a son, and he was protecting the family from Cora's running off and taking her money with her. This sort of thing was done at the time, but it certainly seems unfair to our eyes. To be honest, I am not sure whether the audience did ever grasp the detail of this element, but they seemed to understand that Cora was going to lose her own money to the new heir, as well as the estate. That's all that matters.

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We wanted a decent entrance for Maggie Smith's character and so we see her now for the first time, dressed entirely in black, like the Fairy Maleficent at the Princess Aurora's christening.

*
Mrs Patmore is really only interested in what she is doing. She doesn't take a wide view of whether it is a just world or not, she's simply concerned about having enough flour – and the right flour – to cook with, but she does have very high standards. She is an excellent cook, not a plain cook at all, and despite the odd disparaging reference from Violet, her ex-employer, she is valued by the Granthams. The status she has achieved for herself is therefore enough and she doesn't challenge the system. Like Mrs Hughes (and not like Carson), she does not worship the family, she just gets on with it.

Of course the cook had a real relationship with the mistress in that the menus were checked and discussed between them and so on, but this was not like being housekeeeper and
nothing
like the position of the lady's maid, so when Cora comes down to the kitchen it is a fairly big event and Mrs Patmore is a bit nervous. In popular culture, the cook was expected to be bad-tempered anyway. This was usually blamed on their living in great discomfort. The kitchens were hot and stuffy and, even though the ceilings were often high in order to take the smoke and fumes above the heads of the workers, nevertheless they spent their days next to the steaming ranges. The thing about cooking, which again I hope we have conveyed, was that it went on all the time because there were so few short cuts and labour-saving devices. When you are making everything from the horseradish sauce through to the biscuits the cooking was never ending. That is something that our takeaway, throwaway generation finds difficult to conceive of. The cook got out of bed, got dressed and started cooking and she kept cooking until basically the servants had had their last feed and that was it. Actually, in the series, we never make it clear who cooks the servants' food. In some houses the senior kitchen maid, Daisy in this instance, would do more of the cooking for the servants, but nevertheless the main cook was still ultimately responsible, as she was for the catering upstairs. This would consist of three or four large meals every day, if you include tea which was course a big thing, then.

In real life, Mrs Patmore would not have made the cakes in a house like Downton Abbey because that was more the business of the still-room maid – but we don't have a still room maid among the cast. We just thought it was one more character than we could service. In reality, at Highclere, a still-room maid would have made the jams and cakes and so on, as well as laying out the breakfast trays for the married women. In some houses there was also a pastry chef, who would take care of the baking side of things, but we don't have a pastry chef, either. In fact, in a really big house like Chatsworth or Wilton or Blenheim, there would have been a great variety of cooks. But in terms of a drama narrative there is a limit to how many people you can balance in the air at once, and we may have exceeded our limit as it is.

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Here is the distinction between Carson, who is completely unchallenging of the system, in fact who loves the system and finds comfort in it, and derives his own sense of self worth from it, as opposed to Mrs Hughes. I don't mean she is persecuted or wretched and she is certainly not a revolutionary, but she is not in love with the whole set-up either. I don't think she dislikes the Granthams, I think she quite likes Robert and Cora, but she doesn't feel the need to kiss their feet and if tomorrow she had to go off and be someone else's housekeeper that would be fine. Where this helps us, the difference between them I mean, is that with every situation below stairs you've got these completely contrasting approaches to the way of life.

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All of these scenes where we deliberately present the information upstairs and follow it with the discussions about it downstairs are really illustrating one of the central truths of this way of life which is that the servants always knew more about the family than the family knew about the servants. They might be quite familiar with their lady's maid and valet, and the butler, too, but seldom much beyond that. Even the cook, who was a senior figure, would have great areas of his or her private life about which their employees knew nothing, and once you get to the housemaids, footmen, hall boys, kitchen maids, most employers would hardly know their names. We try to show this with Edith speaking to Daisy and having to check, ‘Daisy, isn't it?' or when Mrs Hughes is talking to Cora about Gwen, ‘one of the housemaids, m'lady'. We are reminding the audience that, before they get too cosy about the whole thing, and despite the fact that most of the members of the family are quite nice, there was nevertheless great inequality in this world.

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This situation would have been quite tough for Mary and girls like her. Even today, it can be difficult for a woman to promote and prosecute a romance if she isn't getting much help from the man, but in those days it was effectively an art for a woman to take the initiative. It wasn't that you couldn't do anything, but you couldn't do much, without risking being labelled ‘loose' or ‘fast' and all those other words. I remember an old aunt of mine telling me about her preferred method of man-catching in her early years. When she went to a house party she used to take with her a selection of books on very different topics. If she liked a man in the party, she would wait until the last night and then she'd engage him in conversation on one of these subjects, announcing: ‘I've got a book upstairs on this very thing which I must lend you.' She would give him the book the following morning, when they were all leaving, and of course as a gentleman he was obliged to return it. He would then come to her family's house in London and they would be back in touch, but, as people say now, what a palaver (although it did eventually result in her ensnaring a husband she adored). I think Michelle plays the scene when she goes up into the attics with Crowborough particularly well. She is not comfortable, but at the same time she has to take what advantage she can of the opportunity to be alone with him.

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I have some old friends called Northbrook and I usually put their name somewhere in almost every script, for a bit of good luck. You will find them in
Separate Lies
and
Mary Poppins
, and many others.

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We were almost obliged to drop this scene through lack of time, and eventually we shot it in the guests' ironing room at Highclere, a very interesting interior apparently converted from a chapel, which is to be found high up, almost among the attics, presumably why its original purpose was abandoned. We don't normally film in that part of the house, but of course we knew about this beautiful room with all the pine cupboards that would have been allocated to the visiting maids and valets. We hadn't planned to film in it but there was suddenly space in the day for this scene to be shot and we needed an instant set. So the unit rushed up there with a camera.