A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (6 page)

Gareth made a deliberate decision to take the idea to ITV: ‘We were trying to do something fresh, non-literary and revive the genre of period drama. So I had an idea that the show needed to be where you wouldn’t quite expect to find it. ITV is a mainstream entertainment channel and on Sunday nights – if we got it right – then three generations of a family watching
The X Factor
would stay with the channel at 9 p.m. and find
Downton.
Often one makes a plan and it doesn’t entirely turn out as predicted. But in the case of which broadcaster to take the idea of
Downton
to, it worked precisely according to plan. I think perhaps, if this isn’t too bold a claim, we’ve reinvented the genre for the twenty-first century.’

The Children

Master George Crawley

Not since Mary, Edith and Sybil were little girls have tiny hands smudged the walls of the nursery and their happy, innocent noises are a delight to a house that is still reeling from the deaths of George’s father and Sybbie’s mother. The two young cousins are less than a year apart in age, but this shared bereavement – both lost a parent within hours of their birth – is sure to make them as close as twins.

George is currently the heir apparent to the earldom; his mother, Mary, is the owner of what was Matthew’s share thanks to the hastily written will. This was not usual but possible because Robert had to sell half the estate to Matthew (away from the entail, which legally ring-fenced an estate and its assets) to keep from going under. This happened increasingly, which is why entail was ultimately abolished. When Robert dies and leaves his share to George, George and his mother will be co-owners, which will certainly be unusual. Of course, there’s always the spectre of Robert remarrying, should Cora die early, and suddenly producing a son. Which means the future of Mary’s son is not yet absolutely certain.

Nevertheless, given the strong likelihood of inheriting Downton, George will be brought up always mindful of his future responsibilities and the work needed to keep the house going. It could be a heavy burden on such small shoulders. Sybbie’s background creates a complication for her future of another kind: her mother was Lady Sybil, the beautiful youngest daughter of Lord Grantham, but her father is Tom Branson, an Irishman and former chauffeur, now land agent to the family.

Later, the questions surrounding their upbringing and what decisions ought to be made with regard to their education may become more complex, but for the moment they share a nursery and a nanny and, for all intents and purposes, are as brother and sister. We can well imagine that they will turn most naturally to each other for comfort and companionship throughout their lives, both understanding the extraordinary circumstances into which they were born in a way that few others will.

Although George will be brought up as an earl-in-waiting, his parents’ marriage was a mixed one, just as Sybbie’s parents’ was. George’s father was not born the heir to an earldom, he came into it quite unexpectedly as a young man in his twenties and brought with him his modish ideas about democracy, equality and fairness; it will be interesting to see whether his widow, Lady Mary, will decide to teach their son something of these values. Her own background is decidedly traditional and conformist, but she is of course living in a changing world and finds herself drawn to modern ideas now and then, almost against her will. Nor is she as tamed by conformity as she’d like to imagine – her own strength of character frequently wins the battle against the expectations of the past.

Sybbie is the child of rebellious parents and it is certain that Tom will wish to let her know of her Irish ancestry as well as his strong socialist ideals. However, he finds himself parallel to Mary, if travelling in the opposite direction – he is drawn to the old world and those that occupy it or, at least, he does not damn them as outright as he used to.

Tom and Miss Sybbie Branson

For now, the nursery is a haven from the worries of the adult sphere and things are done here as they have been for several generations. To our modern eyes, the life of a child in the nursery under Nanny’s jurisdiction seems almost unbearably harsh, but at the time this was seen to be in the child’s best interests. For one thing, by living in the nursery at the top of the house, the infants were excused from the formalities of the drawing room and could behave as children. By way of example, in the nursery they would wear flannel and cotton clothes, but to go downstairs they would be dressed in highly starched, fussy outfits.

Of course, the children didn’t tend to feel that they had been saved from the drawing room – on the contrary, they missed their parents and many grew up to realise they hardly knew them. In
Grace and Favour
Loelia Ponsonby describes a typical aristocratic childhood that may have chimed with Mary’s, explaining that she and her peers spent their early years ‘almost entirely in the society of servants … dumped in the nursery, which was as far away as possible, either on the top storey up a lot of stairs or in a remote wing with a green baize door across the corridor to protect the polite world from horrid noises’.

In these sorts of circumstances, the extended family of servants meant a great deal to a young child. The servants themselves would often have grown up as part of a large brood of siblings in a small house; they were used to the boisterousness of children and were, consequently, often more forgiving and affectionate. Nurses (the Nanny’s assistants) and nannies were sometimes more loved than mothers, butlers as respected as fathers – as we see with Carson and Mary – and kitchen maids reliable sources of stolen biscuits. The parents rarely went into the nursery themselves and the children would be seen only for half an hour or an hour when brought downstairs, dressed in their best clothes and expected to behave impeccably. There was even a popular joke of the day about a mother who only recognised her infant in the park because she remembered the nurse.

Despite this, parents of the twentieth century believed that they were much nicer to their children than former generations had been. Julian’s great-grandfather, John Wrightson, for example (who was president and principal of the Downton Agricultural College, and so provided the name for the show), disliked babies so much he established a house in the village, the Warren, and my wretched great-great-grandmother had to visit her babies there until they were allowed in the main house at the age of five or six. This was in the 1870s, hardly a thousand years ago.

Many parents justified their routine for the children with the latest fashion for scientific thinking: behaviourism. This was the rationale behind a popular belief in the 1920s that children could be trained to behave in desirable ways through suitable rewards and punishments.

The frequent consequence of only seeing their parents in these restricted surroundings was that the children rarely felt they could be themselves or talk truthfully to their mother or father. We all know the child – we may well have been the child – who chooses to shield their parents from any sad or bad reports, particularly if they don’t see their parents much, so as to keep everything good humoured and happy.

Parents then, too, expected a certain amount of reverence from their children and perhaps weren’t interested in them until they really had something to say. Julian reflects this in a line he gives to Robert, when Cora asks him to stay and see the children. ‘Just as soon as they’re able to answer back,’ he replies.

In fact, Sybbie – the older of the two cousins – does reply to Robert, her grandfather, calling him ‘Donk’, which he doesn’t much like. Alastair Bruce, Downton Abbey’s historical adviser, recalls: ‘The actress who plays Sybbie is like Shirley Temple – she gave three perfect takes one after another and delivered the [‘Donk’] comic line with precision timing.’

But even with all the grandeur that parents and grandparents could muster, it was usually an accepted fact that Nanny was the one in charge – of the adults as well as the children. A mother would always ask Nanny first if it was convenient for her to take her own children out and even then Nanny would usually go with them, so that they were still in her charge.