In the meantime, if you don't think that it derails from your thread too much, would you mind telling us Leftpondians what made Downtown Abbey codswallop besides a possibly-non-existent wedding rehearsal?
Hi
Jeanfrom,
Sorry for the delay responding to you! I had to refresh my memory banks, it being years since I stopped watching, and once I started - well, brace yourself for a screed...
There was just a constant stream of macro- and micro-assaults on historical accuracy. It started right from the beginning with the whole Cora/Robert relationship. He is supposed to be crushed with guilt about having married her for money: but (a) the British aristocracy had been marrying for money for centuries, and indeed would have thought it very selfish and irresponsible not to; and (b) she had married him for social status, which he and society at large would have seen as a very fair deal all round. Also, that whole plot point about all her money having gone straight into the Downton estate leaving her with nothing, is pretty much impossible.
No properly-drawn up marriage settlement failed to settle a proportionate slice of money on the bride personally, so that if her husband squandered the dowry, or he threw her out of the house so he could live with his mistress, or - as in this case - failed to sire an heir so that after his death the estate went to a nephew or cousin, she would be comfortably provided for. (At least one commentator on
Downton has described the series as one long whine by Fellowes against the male inheritance of peerages, as without that that his wife would be a Countess; and they had a point.)
The Downton household contains less than a quarter of the number of servants it would in reality have had. In 1912 Highclere Castle, the house where
Downton was filmed, had 25 maids, 14 footmen and three male chefs! It's understandable that the production cast reduced numbers, not only on the grounds of expense but so there weren't too many below-stairs characters to recognise and relate to; but it did mean that the whole servant community was far more cosy and tight-knit - and far less regimented and hierarchical - than it realistically would have been. For example, the upper servants wouldn't even have sat down to eat with the rest; they would have had their own meals in the steward's or housekeeper's room and been waited on by junior servants.
Relationships between the family and the servants were also far closer and more casual than they would ever historically have been. Yes, a very few servant roles (valet, lady's maid, nanny) required intimacy with one of the family, and the senior servants (butler, housekeeper) might - not necessarily would - have been in the confidence of the master and / or mistress of the house; but the family would barely have known the names of most of the other servants, and might rarely have even seen many of them. The scene where the Earl, interviewing his new chauffeur Branson in the library, casually gives him permission to borrow books, is beyond ridiculous. A room like the library would have been totally off-limits to any servant who didn't have a job to do there; no house-owner would have cheerily let them browse and borrow books. (Heck, can you imagine any present-day millionaire allowing that?)
But in fact the whole Branson story arc is consistently absurd. He plans a criminal assault on a Downton dinner-guest, which is known to Carson, but doesn't even get the sack; he claims to be a socialist and Irish patriot but sits out the entire World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence comfortably as an imperialist lackey (literally) in Downton without lifting a finger for it; then when he finally has to leave Downton on account of having tried to elope with one of the Earl's daughters (nothing less would have got him the sack) he swans into a good job with a Dublin newspaper, well-paid enough to allow him to support a wife, for which he can't possibly be in any way qualified - if he has any experience at all in writing or journalism it's at least seven years ago, and since then he has been rusticating in the Yorkshire countryside, not seeing anything at all of political life and events even in London, let alone Ireland.
The characters' attitudes are resolutely modern. Girls who get pregnant out of wedlock are sympathised with, not labelled as
**** and turned out of the house. And while everyone except the youngest and most naïve of the servants knows that Thomas the footman is gay, nobody has a problem with this: they dislike him because he's a slimeball, not because they honestly believe that homosexuality is an abomination, "
peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum" ("that horrible crime not to be named among Christians") as the majority of people at the time -
including genuinely nice, kind people - honestly did. Indeed, the Earl not merely doesn't sack Thomas for making sexual advances to a new footman; he puts pressure on the lad to drop his (100% true) accusation of indecent assault, and promotes Thomas to under-butler! No, no, no, that would not have happened in period. Not unless the Earl himself was gay and deliberately hiring gay servants (safer; they couldn't shop him to the police or the press without outing themselves).
Clangers were constantly dropped in non-period language and manners. E.g. the butler and footmen wear white-tie evening dress during the day -and even out of doors! - rather than their daytime livery: a big no-no.
Glaring anachronisms, e.g: Mrs Patmore the cook. (NB that having a woman heading up the kitchen in an earl's household is itself implausible; a house of that status would have at least one male chef - as mentioned above, Highclere had three - paid a whole lot more.) She is going blind with cataracts (medically perfectly plausible); hides this because she dreads simply being sacked if her employers find out and ending her days in the workhouse (also perfectly plausible historically - many well-off people did sack their servants when they became ill or disabled, which should alert viewers to the untypical benevolence of the Crawleys). When her problem is discovered Robert pays for an operation for her (OK; it's untypical, but some employers
were that generous). She then comes back to Downton wearing a pair of dinky dark glasses, sighted and able to work again, hooray! But the specs simply disappear shortly after her return, implying that she only needed them while she was recovering from the operation, and for the rest of the series she apparently has perfectly good sight. And that's ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE! The first cataract implant operation was in 1950 (and for decades after that it was a big-deal, complex, very expensive procedure, nothing like the outpatient deal it is now). Before that, all surgeons could do was remove the clouded lens. Literally just that. Without the lens, the eye couldn't focus and was permanently very long-sighted, so the patient was equipped with a pair of spectacles with lenses thick as jam-jar bottom, and peered through these. It wasn't brilliant, just a lot better than being blind.
And the issue of Robert - aged 48 at the outbreak of WWI - being 'too old to fight' and thus hanging resentfully around Downton all through the war was ludicrous. The Army was desperate for trained officers, especially ones with experience of active service; men who had fought in the Boer War, as Robert had done, were gratefully taken back on to the active list. He would have been about the average age for a regimental commander; many officers 10 or more years older than Robert commanded troops on the Western Front. And of course it wasn't only front-line officers that were needed; even men who really were no longer young or fit enough for that were in demand as staff and training officers (In fact, in real life there was a big training camp for recruits at Catterick near Ripon, which it's canon was the nearest serious-sized town to Downton. Robert was perfectly qualified to command that, and could still have been home to dinner every night.)
Fellowes also claimed that Robert was not called up because he was a landowner. That's not merely not true but amounts to a libel on the British aristocracy, who have always accepted that their one absolute duty and raison d'etre, the basis of all their privileges, is to fight for the monarch against his/her enemies. In 1910 every peer had personally sworn an oath to King George V at his coronation to do that very thing. And they did. They went to fight en masse; by the end of 1915 nine peers and ninety-five peers' sons had been killed in battle. In all, 24 peers were killed in action in the war.
Then there's the stupid bit where Robert is finally made Colonel of the North Riding Volunteers*, expects to go to France in command of them, and is utterly dashed to be told that it's only an honorary post. But the full Colonelcy of a Territorial regiment was, and is,
always an honorary post! He's a local landowner, who acts as patron of the regiment, lets it use his estates for field exercises, gives dinners for the officers and awards the prizes for the marksmanship competitions. Robert could not possibly not have known that. (Indeed, it's a good question why he hasn’t been its colonel ever since he retired from active service; he's exactly the kind of person who would be offered the post. He would certainly have known whoever was Colonel, and known exactly what that entailed.) Also, as an ex-soldier himself he could not possibly have been unaware that for a honorary colonel to wear uniform other than on specifically regimental occasions is very,
very bad form, and that he had no business whatsoever to be hanging around Downton in khaki.
*Never mind that the Volunteers were a 19th-century movement that had been completely subsumed into the Territorial Army long before the outbreak of WWI - they would have become a Territorial Battalion of a regular country regiment.
Fellowes decided to have the Downton Abbey household carry on their pre-war life for the first two years of the war, largely unaffected by it; it only starts to impinge on them in 1916. Which is absurd. Everybody had lost relatives in the war (certainly all the aristocracy), or at least had friends who had. There was a major 'servant problem', since able-bodied men were called up and women found they could get far better pay and conditions in munitions factories than in service. And, most of all, in rural Yorkshire where they live, a huge shocking atrocity took place - in December 1914 the German Navy shelled the Yorkshire ports of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, destroying hundreds of houses and killing many civilians. Nothing like that had even happened before. The whole nation was rocked back on its heels, and people at Downton, just 50 miles inland would have felt themselves almost directly under attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Scarborough,_Hartlepool_and_WhitbyOne more thing (since I've probably bored you all to tears already): the Crawleys were strikingly selfish and unpatriotic during the war. Many great houses were turned into hospitals right at beginning of the war (including Highclere Castle, the real 'Downton', where the Countess of Carnarvon began fitting it out for the purpose before war broke out; it was taking patients already in September 1914), and scads of duchesses and their daughters trained as nurses and did real nursing work - assisting at operations, emptying bedpans, the lot; many of them behind the lines in France. The Crawleys' half-hearted effort, right at the end of the war, offering convalescent facilities to officers only, with two of their daughters providing a little ladylike bustling around, is pathetic in comparison.