A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (33 page)

Sloes are the sour little fruit of the blackthorn tree and appear in the hedgerows in early autumn. Wild food like this would have been freely available to tenants of the estate. What better way to use sloes than to make this warming winter liqueur?

MAKES 1 LITRE

Wash and de-stalk the sloes. Spread them on a baking sheet in a single layer and freeze overnight.

Next day, pack the sloes into a large, sterilised glass bottle that has an airtight seal. Add the sugar, using a funnel. Pour in the gin until the bottle is full. Screw the lid on tightly and give the bottle a good shake.

Shake the bottle once a day over the next week to help the sugar disperse and dissolve, and then shake it once a week until Christmas, by which time it should be ready to drink. The gin will continue to mature in the bottle for 1–2 years, so if you can keep it for longer, so much the better!

The sloe gin is best drunk neat, but it can be topped up with tonic water or mixed into a cocktail.

The gin-soaked sloes that remain in the bottle can be made into a delicious chocolate bar. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. Stone the fruit and spread out on the paper, along with some lightly toasted hazelnuts. Gently melt some dark or milk chocolate and pour over in an even layer. Leave to set.

Unfortunately, as these cottages brought no money in for the family, they were often not terribly well kept up and were frequently damp and dark – there was no national grid until 1938, so they had no electricity either. We see Anna and Bates (will she ever call her husband ‘John’?) sitting in their cottage with oil lamps. The cottages did at least give the workers some privacy and they enabled the landlord to save old retired servants from the workhouse if they had no family or savings to prop up their remaining years. Although a great number of aristocratic families would have found it increasingly difficult to support their retired servants after the First World War, many blamed the Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George’s welfare benefits for their failure to do so – they claimed that compulsory contributions to employees’ health insurance and pensions meant they couldn’t afford to look after their servants in the way they might have ordinarily done.

The question of health and old age were serious for the worker with little provision beyond their basic wage. Those in the house might have access to the local doctor, but if there was no surgery to visit discreetly, he would have to attend to a patient in their room. Naturally, this meant that the entire household would know within a matter of minutes that a servant had been seen by a doctor, so many servants chose to treat themselves rather than become the subject of gossip.

The health of the family and servants at Downton Abbey is managed by Dr Clarkson and, to a lesser extent, Isobel Crawley, as she had grown up in a medical family and been married to a doctor – she was certainly very involved with the local hospital when she arrived at Downton and later went to work for the Red Cross in France during the First World War. This was a time of great medical change and advance – we hear about the arrival of insulin in series five, for example – though many new treatments were felt to be too unproven and were not easily adopted by rural doctors. David Robb, who plays Dr Clarkson, admits his character is ‘not cutting edge’. David believes Dr Clarkson is really in retirement: ‘I think he was jilted badly, so never married, but went into the army as a medical doctor in the Boer War and has now retired as a GP in Yorkshire. He’s not stupid, but he is a bit of a plodder. He is very honourable and does what he thinks is right – unfortunately, it isn’t always.’

When Mrs Hughes is threatened with cancer (in series three), we see that it is a real worry as to what will happen to her if the diagnosis is positive. Fortunately, Cora is a sympathetic employer and is able to reassure her that she will be looked after as a long-standing member of the household. But Mrs Hughes knows she is lucky.

Dr Clarkson

The art department created the workhouse location, capturing the gloom, poverty and hard labour of its inmates. Those without money or family support, such as single mothers, would live in fear of being sent to such a place.

The workhouses were frequently filled with former domestic servants, forced to see out their old age or terminal illnesses in squalid sanatoriums, minimally treated by doctors who had to rely on the haphazard and ill-educated assistance of other inmates. Before welfare benefits, workhouses were the only provision for people unable to earn enough money to keep a roof over their heads and meals on the table. As they were largely unregulated, it was sheer luck of the draw that saw an impoverished person land up at a workhouse that provided well for its residents.

In general, however, the poor were treated almost as a criminal class. The children were beaten for the slightest misdemeanours; families were separated, with the women in one area, the men in another and the children in yet another (they would be reunited for an hour on Sundays). The food was basic and mean, the work harsh – breaking stones for gravel or building materials was a common task. By the 1920s, workhouses were improving or gradually disappearing, due to better regulation and the growth of the welfare state, but for the older generation there was still a very real fear that they would die there. This was why Mrs Hughes feels such sympathy for Carson’s former friend, Mr Grigg, when she hears he had ended up in a workhouse – for all his past sins, she believes it would be too hellish a condemnation for anyone.

As workers on the estate were frequently recruited from the local village, the house was at the centre of the area’s entertainments and even political life, with the residing lord or lady often appointed chair of a board for, say, the school, hospital or even of a committee for erecting a monument, particularly after the First World War, when commemorations were established for the men who had died.

Village children in series five.

Anna Bates

With the house known to all, there was always the threat of the unwelcome intruder – and Mrs Hughes turns to this for an explanation as to how Anna is attacked the night Dame Nellie Melba comes to sing at Downton Abbey. It is an entirely believable alibi – the back door would almost never be locked.

The storyline was shocking, and so it should have been – as good as the old days might have been, there were terrible times too, and the series does not shy from them. Gareth Neame explains: ‘We ask ourselves – what is the big story for this character? With this particular one, we felt with Anna and Bates that they had been through Bates-related stories that Anna had resolved. This time it was reversed, with Anna at the centre. Bates is generally melancholic and Anna supremely positive and we flipped that around. We’re always putting roadblocks and obstacles in our characters’ way.’

What was crucial for the production was how they handled this particular scene: ‘Rape is depicted frequently on television,’ says Gareth. ‘We were not going to trivialise it. We also recognise that we cannot underestimate the degree to which these characters are loved. But it’s part and parcel of what we do – because there’s so much comedy and romance in the show, people forget that there’s a tougher edge to it too. I like the way we deliver these stories. In that episode, the audience is led to believe the focus is on the house party with Dame Nellie Melba, when in fact what is really going on is below stairs. As the story unfolded, it was so brilliantly performed – it was ultimately about Anna and Bates’s marriage – not to shock and surprise.’

Perhaps the biggest challenge was for the actress Joanne Froggatt (Anna Bates), who has seen her character develop hugely over the series. ‘She’s grown as a woman. She met Mr Bates, fell in love and then had to overcome trials and tribulations, as well as being involved in the day-to-day things of the house. I see her now as a little more knowing than in the first series. She’s still got a lot of worries on her mind,’ she says.

Of her character’s own backstory, she has some ideas. ‘You want to have some kind of background in your head, even if that’s not the same as Julian’s,’ she laughs. ‘In my head, Anna has grown up within the village boundaries, possibly in a farming family. I think she’s very emotionally mature and possibly experienced death at a young age – perhaps she was the oldest of all the siblings and a mother figure to them. She’s also got a strong work ethic and comes from a hardworking family. She’s an old head on young shoulders.’