David Marsh
Editors
John Wilson A.C.E
Nick McPhee
Alex Mackie A.C.E
Costume Designer
Susannah Buxton
Make-Up & Hair Designer
Anne ‘Nosh’ Oldham
Casting Director
Jill Trevellick CDG
Music
John Lunn
Writer (Episode 4)
Shelagh Stephenson
Writer (Episode 6)
Tina Pepler
First Assistant Directors
Phil Booth
George Walker
Howard Arundel
Second Assistant Director
Charlie Reed
Third Assistant Directors
Dannielle Bennett
Gayle Dickie
Script Supervisors
Sarah Garner
Heather Storr
Location Manager
Richard May
Assistant Location Manager
Mark ‘Sparky’ Ellis
Unit Manager
John Prendergast
Production Manager
Sarah Dibsdall
Production Accountant
Sarah Lucraft
Production Co-Ordinator
Bettina Lyster
Assistant Production
Co-Ordinator
Jonathan Houston
Assistant Accountant
Davina Pem
Camera Operators
Xandy Sahla
Paddy Blake
Focus Puller
Anna Benbow
Clapper Loader
Gabriel Hyman
Grips
Simon Fogg
Rupert Morency
Gaffer
Otto Stenov
Best Boy
Aaron Walters
Supervising Art Director
Charmian Adams
Art Director
Mark Kebby
Production Buyer
Fiona Haddon
Set Decorator
Gina Cromwell
Standby Art Director
Pippa Broadhurst
Assistant Art Director
Lucy Spofforth
Sound Mixers
Mark Holding
John Rodda
Peter Eusebe
Prop Master
Mike Power
Dressing Props
Tom Pleydell Pearce
Charlie Johnson
Standby Props
Damian Butlin
Andy Forrest
Special Effects
Jason Troughton
Stunt Co-ordinator
Andy Bradford
Assistant Costume Designer
Caroline McCall
Costume Supervisor
Dulcie Scott
Costume Assistants
Jason Gill
Vicky Salway
Hanne Cauwenbergh
Make-Up & Hair Supervisor
Christine Greenwood
Make-Up & Hair Artists
Elaine Browne
Sally Collins
Gerda Lauciute
Historical Advisor
Alastair Bruce
Script Editors
Sam Symons
Claire Daxter
Production Executive
Kimberley Hikaka
Business Affairs
David O’Donoghue
Unit Publicity
Milk Publicity
Post Production Supervisor
Moira Brophy
Post Production Assistant
Ilana Epstein
Assistant Editors
Al Morrow
Sascha Dhillon
Colourist
Aidan Farrell
Online Editors
Clyde Kellet
Barney Jordan
Re-Recording Mixer
Nigel Heath
Sound FX Editor
Adam Armitage
Dialogue Editors
Alex Sawyer
Jessica Ward
Titles
Huge Design
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like, first and foremost, to acknowledge the contribution of Gareth Neame. He had the idea in the first place, of making a series about a country house, dealing with the lives of a family and their servants, and since then, he and our producer, Liz Trubridge, have consistently improved the scripts at every stage. We are essentially the triumvirate at the heart of the show. I would also like to thank Ion Trewin who has been bottomlessly patient in editing this book, Doctor Alasdair Emslie, FFOM, for his matchless resourcefulness in supplying medical conditions that will answer the narrative requirements of a plot, my agents, Cathy King and Jeremy Barber, and of course my wife, Emma, and my son, Peregrine, who read the script before anyone else and so weeded out the worst bits. I am very grateful to them all.
PHOTO SECTION
The Earl and Countess of Grantham, whose lives are not as uncomplicated as one might think.
The servants form a line as the car containing the Duke of Crowborough arrives.
ROBERT: Carson, I hope you weren’t embarrassed this afternoon. I can assure you the Duke very much appreciated his welcome.
DUKE OF CROWBOROUGH: But I remember this man. Didn’t you serve me when I dined with Lady Grantham in London?
Mary looks up and her jaw drops. Riding towards her is one of the handsomest, sexiest men she has ever seen in her life.
Kemal Pamuk, the son of one of the Sultan’s ministers, is in England for the Albanian talks.
DAISY: Do you think he’ll speak out? Do you think we’ll have a duchess to wait on? Imagine that!
MRS PATMORE: You won’t be ‘waiting’ on her, whatever happens.
GWEN: He doesn’t look Turkish at all.
ANNA: Well, he doesn’t look like any Englishman I’ve ever met, worse luck. I think he’s beautiful.
ISOBEL: What should we call each other?
VIOLET: We could always start with Mrs Crawley and Lady Grantham.
DR CLARKSON: Mrs Drake, the choice is simple. If your husband endures this procedure he may live. If he does not, he will die.
CORA: Are we to be friends, then?
VIOLET: We are allies, my dear. Which can be a good deal more effective.
SYBIL: Why are you so against him?
MARY: Aside from the fact he’s planning to steal our inheritance?
EDITH: Your inheritance. It makes no difference to Sybil and me. We won’t inherit, whatever happens.
MATTHEW: You must have thought me an awful prig when I first arrived.
ROBERT: Not a prig. Just a man thrust into something he’d never wanted or envisaged, clinging for dear life to his old certainties.
VIOLET: The Grantham Cup is awarded to – she takes a deep breath to steady herself – to Mr William Molesley for his Countess Cabarrus rose.
MARY: You know what all work and no play did for Jack.
MATTHEW: But you think I’m a dull boy, anyway. Don’t you?
SYBIL: Good evening, everyone!
STRALLAN: You’re so right, Lady Mary. How clever you are. This is exactly what we have to be aware of.
MRS HUGHES: In many ways I wanted to accept. But I’m not that farm girl anymore. I was fattered, of course, but I’ve changed.
Thomas, William, Gwen and Daisy at the fair. Daisy hangs on Thomas’s arm, which is breaking William’s heart.
The crowd starts to jostle. There are shouts and jeers. Branson approaches Sybil, who is bubbling with enthusiasm.
BRANSON: Oh, no. Oh, please God, no!
He takes her up in his arms, as tenderly as a father with his child.
CREDITS
Cover photograph by Nick Briggs
COPYRIGHT
TEXT © BY JULIAN FELLOWES 2012.
THE AUTHOR ASSERTS HIS MORAL RIGHT TO BE IDENTIFIED AS THE AUTHOR OF THIS WORK.
EPISODE 4: WRITTEN BY JULIAN FELLOWES AND SHELA
GH STEPHENSON.
EPISODE 6: WRITTEN BY JULIAN FELLOWES AND TINA PEPLER.
A CARNIVAL FILMS/MASTERPIECE CO-PRODUCTION.
DOWNTON ABBEY SERIES 1, 2, AND 3 AND ALL SCRIPTS. Copyright © 2009 to 2012 by Carnival Film & Television Limited. Downton Abbey® and the Downton Abbey device are trademarks of Carnival Film & Television Limited. Carnival logo © 2005 by Carnival Film & Television Limited. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-223831-3
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062238320
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* I was keen on Highclere to play Downton Abbey from the start, because it is an extraordinary expression of aristocratic confidence, a loud statement of the value of aristocracy. The house was built, or rather, adapted, in the 1830s, at the very beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, by Sir Charles Barry who was working on the Houses of Parliament at the time. Knowing as we did that the series, if it was going to run at all, would trace the decline of this particular class there seemed to be a nice irony in choosing a house that was so confident of their worth and value, and you get that from the first moment you arrive, when you enter the great atrium hall to find the coats of arms of every bride reaching all the way up to the ceiling. Somehow that seemed right, as a comment on Robert’s melancholy appreciation that these will prove to be the last days of summer for his kind. These houses were deliberately designed to look monumental, and when you enter any of them, even Blenheim, you will find they are not quite as big as they look from outside, although they are big enough, Lord knows. But Highclere has the added advantage of a very straightforward plan. On the left of the entrance is the small library, followed by the large library, the painted room, the drawing room, the smoking room which we don’t use, the staircase, the door to the kitchens, and the circuit is complete with the dining room. Once they’ve been shown that plan, it becomes a very easy one for the audience to follow. It’s the same with the bedrooms; there’s a square gallery running round the hall and the bedrooms are off it. So the audience never has to wonder how they got to the library or where precisely is the drawing room. It’s all absolutely clear, and that’s a big advantage in filming. Basically, these are the rooms we use to show how the Crawleys live, and these are the rooms we film in.
† Daisy, the scullery maid, is up before anyone. Her first job of the day is to wake the other servants.
* We built the kitchens and the attics at Ealing Studios because in all of these houses those are the bits that are completely changed, either to be used for other, more modern purposes, or so run down that you’d have to rebuild them anyway. The advantage is that having standing sets at Ealing gives us flexibility. Highclere has other activities going on and we have to fit round those so we have the option of going to Ealing. We’ve also built Robert’s dressing room there, and Mary’s bedroom – which is sometimes redecorated to be someone else’s. The doors of these rooms are copied from the bedroom doors at Highclere, as well as the windows and, through the glass, we see great panoramic cycloramas of the park. The point of all this brilliant craftsmanship is that we’re never completely stuck for something to do.
† One of Daisy’s jobs is to creep into the bedrooms – the only time she ever went into the upstairs rooms – and build the fires. This was done for me just once in my life, and I cannot tell you the sense of luxury it conveys. The maid wore gloves, thick felt gloves, so you wouldn’t hear as she put the fire together. Everything was done very quietly and then lit, so that when you woke up there was the fire already burning in the grate.
* The challenge at the beginning of any series is to give enough information to follow the whole show but to convey it without it feeling indigestible. Brian Percival was the director of the first episode, the ninety-minute one, and is now the father director of the series; he usually does the first block and the last block, and has become the authority for other directors to refer to, in terms of the Downton style. He came up with an extraordinary shot to introduce the house and the life being lived in it. Daisy is first seen in the Ealing set climbing the kitchen staircase, but the top of these stairs is a replica of the real one at Highclere, so she is then picked up coming out through the glass screen at Highclere and is taken round the hall and through the libraries, until we lose Daisy and pick up Thomas so he can conduct us out of the library, past the drawing room door, through the hall again, past the staircase and into the dining room. In a single shot the audience has the whole layout of the ground floor that we’re going to use, the way the servants work within it, where they come in and go out, as well as all the different tasks that are being undertaken; Brian shows us how there is a pecking order of command, from top to bottom. And all this information has been given in three minutes. A marvellous piece of work.
* At the beginning we wanted the audience to understand that this was a show essentially about two groups of people living in one house, but with different functions within it, and the first few scenes are about that. They define the chain of command so that when the junior footman says ‘I’m not late, am I?’ and the senior footman replies ‘You’re late when I say you’re late’, we immediately know which one is the more powerful in the set-up.
† This was the moment when electricity was gradually spreading through England. Reasonably sophisticated people could deal with it, but it was still sufficiently new that there were people (in this case Daisy) who were alarmed. The point was that few really spotted its significance. Even Robert shows later he couldn’t see the point of having it in the kitchens. Of course, by the time the second series starts, in 1916, things have moved on and the whole house has been electrified.
* I was rather sorry when this was cut because when Mrs Hughes says, ‘It’s all right, Thomas. I’m not countermanding Mr Carson’s orders’, what she means is that she understands Thomas is not under her direct control, so again the audience would have been given the sense that there is a very complicated precedence among these people. In fact, the female staff, apart from the kitchen workers, were under the housekeeper, the male staff answered to the butler, and the kitchen was controlled by the cook. It’s not therefore just a simple case of there being the family and the servants. Not by any means.
* Thomas: ‘And they’re off.’ What we are doing here is giving a sense of an unbreakable routine, a life lived by bells, bells that kick off the upstairs life, bells that summon them to various tasks, and the servants have to
try and get their breakfast down before the bells start to ring. They know that once the working day begins, it doesn’t end until everyone goes to bed.
* Ironing newspapers is a cliché in a way because everyone knows it was done; but on the other hand a lot of people still think they were ironed to make them flat, as opposed to being ironed so that the ink would dry. It is sometimes quite fun to correct these common misapprehensions.
* The challenge of an opening episode, as I keep saying, is to give the audience enough information so that they can follow the show. The reason I chose the sinking of the Titanic to begin with, was because the Titanic is an iconic disaster. There are very few people who’ve never heard of the Titanic and most of us have a fairly accurate idea of when it took place, which is just before the First World War. By sinking two off-screen characters on the Titanic it is a shorthand way of saying we are in England and it is just before the First World War. These characters are not living in Queen Victoria’s reign, but during the aftermath of the long Edwardian summer, in that seemingly placid period just before the war would shake everything up. The audience knows all this because the script contains one word, Titanic, or indeed from the moment when Robert opens the newspaper and they see those familiar four funnels. You don’t have to spend lots of time explaining. This one incident tells them what they need to know. As it happens, I was later asked to write the mini-series of Titanic, but, in case anyone is interested, that was a complete coincidence.