A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (12 page)

Mrs Crawley’s house, Bampton village.

Highclere Castle is not a purpose-built set and so the crew must behave slightly differently here than in Ealing Studios. Before one reaches the sweeping drive at the front of the house, several crew trucks and actors’ trailers (more like caravans than Winnebagos) are parked on the lawn. Close to the front door is a table with tea and coffee – nothing, apart from bottled water, may be eaten or drunk inside. Spare lights, cables and camera tracks – these are used for above-stairs scenes to create a smoother sensation; for below stairs, they use hand-held cameras, giving a greater sense of movement and activity – alert one to the fact that you’re on set, but you cannot help but be struck by the interior of the house itself. From the grand hall, with the various coats of arms of past wives of the Carnarvon earls around the gallery, to the hundreds of leather-bound books in the library and the pretty pink sofas in the drawing room, it looks exactly as you would expect, although the ‘Please do not sit on here’ printed cards placed on chairs remind you that these are real heirlooms, not imitations made by the art department. The house is in fact increasingly used by the Carnarvon family for their own enjoyment (they also have a cottage on the estate in which they live when the main house is hired out) and always when hosting a house party or shooting party for friends.

I watch the monitor as the director for episodes four and five, Minkie Spiro, shoots a scene with Michelle Dockery and Hugh Bonneville. There is absolute hush when the cameras are rolling – the slightest footfall on a creaky floorboard or muttered whisper will echo. Removing sound from the film is one of the production’s more painstaking tasks: ‘It’s amazing how much of the twenty-first century we hear and edit out – at the time, you don’t even know you can hear the distant sounds of the A34,’ explains Liz Trubridge.

The scene wraps and the actors for the next scene begin rehearsing. Elizabeth McGovern (Cora), rather disconcertingly dressed in a pink fluffy dressing-gown, hairnet and Ugg boots, holds her script and blocks her movements, an industry phrase for working out exactly where she will stand and move to within the scene. A splendidly dressed, tall and booming Richard E. Grant introduces himself to me – ‘Hi, I’m Richard’ – and he looks so absolutely as if he has stepped out of 1924 that I am quite flummoxed and manage only, I am sure, a rather stupid reply.

But Highclere is only part of the story. Bampton in Oxfordshire is the location for any village scenes, right down to the churchyard where Lady Sybil and Matthew Crawley are buried. Donal says that they try to film there in blocks, so that it is less disruptive to the inhabitants, but the seasons are a factor in the schedule: ‘There’s a danger that we leave Highclere in winter and arrive at Bampton in spring, as the changes can be so quick, with hawthorn bushes in flower and trees blossoming almost from one day to the next.’

Bampton is also the village where the exterior of Isobel Crawley’s house is filmed (the interior is a house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and reflects the tastes of her progressive, intelligentsia outlook). The real-life owner takes great pride in her garden, now frequently admired by fans of the show from America to China, peering over the wall.

Violet’s house is Byfleet Manor in Surrey. The design is more deliberately Edwardian inside, symbolic of her resistance to change. Lady Rosamund’s house is in London’s Belgrave Square – on the outside; the inside is the very pretty interior of West Wycombe, home to Sir Edward Dashwood and his family today.

For the inside of the Crawley family’s London palace, seen for the first time in series four, Donal chose Basildon Park, a National Trust property close to Pangbourne: ‘We had to find a house that was lavish, but not as lavish as Highclere. Basildon Park is a reasonable size, but not too enormous. We dressed it with some personal items, but it was its own Georgian interior that was right for the part.’

The grounds of Basildon Park were also used for the filming of the Hyde Park picnic scene in the final episode of series four. They had a rather unusual interruption to filming when a hot-air balloon that was running low on fuel made an unexpected landing right between the picnic and the crew trucks!

The London servants’ quarters are another specially built set at Ealing, done, explains Donal, slightly more modern than Downton, with cream ceramic brick tiles in the kitchen and all rather smaller, to show that the space would be a bit tighter in a London house'.

Lady Rosamund’s house, West Wycombe Park.

Travel

Foreign countries were steeped in a culture almost entirely different from one’s own, whether it was the clothes they wore, food they ate, god(s) they worshipped or language they spoke. Almost nothing, if you travelled overseas, was familiar.

What’s more, only a very few people travelled. It took so long to get anywhere that you had to be prosperous enough not to need to be at home to do your job or work your farm for a period of time. (The only non-rich people who travelled went on a one-way ticket, whether as an exiled criminal or hopeful emigrant.) Until the early twentieth century, long-distance travel for the purpose of pleasure, whether across Britain or overseas, was almost entirely the preserve of the upper classes and the moneyed.

The Crawleys may be a family living in the northern provinces but, as aristocrats, several of their previous generations would have enjoyed the benefits of travel. By which I mean, the getting there as much as the arrival. Julian remembers his great-aunt Isie saying to him once: ‘I always feel sad that your generation has missed the pleasure of travel.’ To which he replied, ‘Are you mad? We travel more than you ever did.’ ‘I don’t mean the pleasure of getting there. I mean the pleasure of travel.’ ‘I am inclined to think she was right,’ says Julian now.

Violet recalls travelling to St Petersburg in Russia in her youth, sometime around the 1870s, which would have seemed fabulously outlandish – ‘glittering parades and rides in a horse-drawn sleigh, flying across the snow at midnight’.

In upper-class tradition, Robert almost certainly would have completed a Grand Tour as a young man, travelling all over Europe to educate himself in the great art and architecture of France, Italy, Spain and beyond. Cora, of course, came across from America in the 1880s as a young Buccaneer (the name given to heiresses who travelled to Europe in the hope of landing a titled husband). Even their daughters, whose own travel plans may have been rather curtailed by the First World War, manage to leave the shores of Britain: Mary motoring through the South of France for her honeymoon with Matthew; Edith, rather less happily, travelling to Switzerland. Even Sybil lived in Ireland for a while – not so exotic, perhaps, but a change of scenery at least.

The servants, however, are unlikely to have travelled much more than between their home village and Downton. Except during the war which, conversely for the men, provided the greatest opportunity for the working classes to travel. We know Bates was in the Second Boer War, which was fought in South Africa. But Anna admits she had never even been as far as Scotland before travelling there as Mary’s lady’s maid. This was one reason senior positions as valets and lady’s maids were so coveted: Rosina Harrison, lady’s maid to Lady Astor at Cliveden, chose her career because of her long-held urge to travel. There wasn’t any other way for a working-class girl to do so, even though, for Rosina, it meant expensive training and the sacrifice of never having a husband and family.

Happily, by 1924, things were looking up for those who wished to see other places without spending several days on the journey. In the previous century trains had revolutionised the country in almost every aspect of life. Heavy goods could now be freighted with ease and people could begin to live further away from their work – the word ‘commuter’ started to come into use in the 1860s. As the national network grew, it became possible to have seaside holidays without an agonisingly slow journey there by horse and cart. Servants could get home to visit their families more than once a year without having to rely on a sporadic series of lifts and ‘dog-carts’. It was even possible to get away for a ‘weekend’ if one worked. Gareth Neame, Julian Fellowes and the director Brian Percival deliberately chose to open
Downton Abbey’
s first ever episode with shots of John Bates sitting in a train, on his way to the house, a telegram speeding its way overhead in parallel – it demonstrated that this was not a Jane Austen world of candlelight and tapestries; a period drama, yes, but a period that shares elements with today’s modern world, from trains and electricity, to mortgages and motor cars.

Advertisement for the Orient Express.

Mr Bates