The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era (13 page)

Bates
It’s the stuff of my dreams.
The panic that a dinner won’t be ready,
or that a frock isn’t ironed, or a gun
wasn’t cleaned.

A
s the new year dawns, bringing hope to those ready to leave the horrors of wartime behind and make a fresh start, the residents of Downton Abbey are poised to embrace the new decade with optimism. Almost all are ready, that is, but for one of their number. Bates, valet to the Earl of Grantham, husband of Anna and friend of almost all the other servants and the Crawley family, is locked in a prison cell, convicted of his first wife’s murder. Bates is hoping to appeal against his conviction, but until that can happen he must reconcile himself to prison life. He is in for a long stretch, 20 years at least; though this is better than it might have been – at his trial he was sentenced to be hanged.

Living under the threat of death for some weeks until his reprieve was obtained would have been enormously traumatic for Bates. At least, we must imagine that it was. Bates is a man who has been so opaque and guarded in his emotions that even those closest to him have had to patiently and slowly tease out details about his past. So his present mental state is something that we – and those around him – can only guess at. What might be taken for silent strength could perhaps mask a fragile temperament. Bates has admitted that when he was invalided out of the army after the Boer War he felt lost and became a drunkard. He believed then that he had made his wife’s life such a misery that he needed to atone by going to prison for a crime that she had committed. He has not always, in other words, been a man able to take whatever life threw at him with an upright, stiff-upper-lip attitude. Beneath that calm exterior we know there is a man who is kind and sensitive to the feelings of those close to him, and that is why he is one of the most loved characters in the series.

Bates is respected by most
of his fellow servants and the
Crawley family, which was
proven through the support
they gave him in court.

Meeting Anna changed everything for Bates. When he began working at Downton Abbey, his one hope had been to hold onto his job – something that, at times, looked highly unlikely. The other servants were at best doubtful that he would be able to do the work demanded of him because of his limp and walking stick, and at worst they plotted to get him the sack. Bates fought to keep his position. It provided a refuge and it kept him apart from his now estranged wife, Vera. Having a criminal record, he knew that other work opportunities would be extremely limited. At Downton he had a roof over his head, three meals a day and the patronage of his friend and master, Lord Grantham. Despite his rather enigmatic manner, Bates’s fundamental goodness and fairness to all shone through and it wasn’t long before he had won the respect of nearly all the staff below stairs.

Unexpectedly, he fell in love with Anna and she returned his feelings, giving him the chance to dream again of a happy future, and together they planned a family life, running a small country hotel. At this moment, in prison, just one thing will be keeping him going and that is the faith that Anna, now his wife, has in him. She loves him, absolutely and entirely, and knowing that gives him the strength he needs to get through the long years in prison he believes lie ahead. As Brendan Coyle, the actor who plays Bates, says: ‘At first he doesn’t think he’s worthy of Anna – of this goodness that’s come into his life. She frees him from himself, and allows him to express himself more. He comes to feel that he is worthy of her.’

Thwarted once again in their desire to be together, those years in prison will be long indeed. Having been through a relatively brief spell in prison before, when he took the rap for Vera’s theft of the regimental silver, he knows what he’s in for. But it’s one thing to nobly serve a sentence on someone else’s behalf, knowing that your crime would be considered quite petty and that there’s a date not too far away when you will get out again, and quite another to be staring at many long years of confinement and hard labour as a convicted murderer.

Bates
Don’t you understand?
While I’m in here, you have to
live my life as well as your own.

Nor should we underestimate what he has been through up to this point. His experiences in the Boer War would have been intense and difficult (‘It was a horrific conflict,’ says Coyle, ‘a guerrilla war’); extraordinary enough for him to forge a friendship with Lord Grantham, to whom he was a soldier-servant. Bates suffered immense disappointment that his career was over, after he was forced out of the army because of an injury that left him, as a relatively young man, dependent upon a walking stick. He might otherwise, believes Julian Fellowes, have enjoyed a long and successful military career. On top of which, on his return, his former wife – whom he once loved – turned into a bitter and shrill harridan, intent on making his every moment wretched. For a decent man of moral virtue, he must have felt that he had taken quite enough punishment even before his incarceration began.

On entering prison, newly convicted prisoners faced a dehumanisation process. Bates would not be referred to by name but by his assigned number, and while interned he must wear an ill-fitting suit with few home comforts permitted. The environment itself is harsh, too. Like many others across the country, Bates’s prison is a purpose-built Victorian edifice. Within it, tiers of echoing galleries radiate from a central observation core, with long rows of tiny cells, each one sealed shut with a heavy iron door, adding to the overwhelming atmosphere of grim oppression.

Bates’s sentence would have begun with a 12-week period of ‘lone confinement’, when the prisoner was supposed to ponder his crimes. One convict at the time described the hell: ‘Prisoners generally suffered a reaction after conviction, and frequently had nervous breakdowns. There was a great danger of suicide and incipient madness during the early period of separate confinement. There was nothing to relieve the strain except two educational books, a Bible and a prayer book.’

The conditions in which prisoners lived were usually spartan; cells tended to be narrow, 10 by 7 feet, and perhaps 9 feet high, containing little but a bed board (made of two planks), a table, a stool and a shelf for the small number of books and a few personal possessions they would be allowed to keep. The air was stale, the lighting poor, and in the winter months it would be bitterly cold.

As a ‘lifer’, Bates is entitled to certain rewards and privileges, as it was thought then that the punitive elements of prison ceased to be effective over prolonged periods and it was better to ameliorate prisoners’ conditions – although this process was both relative and gradual. Bates could, for one, receive more letters and have longer visits – 30 minutes, as opposed to the regulation 20 – which would mean a great deal to him and to Anna. He would also be allowed to earn 1d a day to spend on ‘comforts’ – biscuits, pickles, jam and sugar (but not tobacco). These items may sound modest but they were extremely welcome, as prison food was meagre and disgusting. Manny Shinwell, imprisoned for political insurrection in 1919, never forgot the horror of his first prison breakfast: ‘I was handed a large stone jar of the kind that holds jam or marmalade. It was nearly full of a greyish-looking thickened liquid which I presumed was called porridge – a description that would have made any Scots-born official in the place rise in wrath. Along with it came a small canister of milk. As soon as the door closed I tried the milk. It was sour.’ He found himself quite unable to eat or drink a single drop. The midday meal was a jar of similarly indigestible ‘soup’. Shinwell survived his five-month sentence solely on tea and bread.