The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era (14 page)

Anna
I do not believe when Vera decided to kill herself she never mentioned it to another living soul.

Bates
I don’t like him, but,
so far, I’ve kept it to myself …

Grim as the food was, the grinding tedium of the daily routine was far worse. Roused at
6.30
each morning, inmates would work in their cells for a few hours, sewing nosebags or mailbags, with short releases to attend a service in the chapel and to take an hour’s walk in the prison yard. This exercise was vividly described by one prison reformer as ‘a monotonous and uninterrupted perambulation in single file round and round two concentric tracks under the orders and vigilant gaze of warders’. Nor were they allowed to talk to each other, although all convicts learned to talk without moving their lips so as to subvert this rule. The afternoons would be spent continuing their labours in workshops, again in silence and under the watchful eye of the prison officers. Lunch and tea (bread and cocoa) would be taken alone in their cells, the latter at
4.15
pm, signalling the long watch of the night. Prisoners were left alone in their cells for some 15 hours until the monotonous routine began again the following morning.

Anna
How are you getting on with your
new companion?

Weekends, far from being a period of respite, were worse. Prisoners spent from noon on Saturday until Monday morning in their cells, with only three brief breaks – two chapel services on Sunday and a half-hour’s exercise session.

The boredom was soul destroying – small wonder Bates seizes upon even seemingly trivial chit-chat with Anna. She thinks that with all the worry over proving his innocence he can’t possibly be interested in the plans for Lady Mary’s wedding or the minor dramas of the kitchens. She couldn’t be more wrong.

For relief from the tedium, Bates would relish anything novel – the weekly bath was a highlight for prisoners, together with the weekly change of clothes. Recent reforms did mean that some prisons had lectures and cultural events, even the occasional film screening. But an educated and reflective inmate such as Bates would be most likely to borrow books from the library. Given his need to escape from the seriousness of his concerns, he might have enjoyed the work of P. G. Wodehouse. Jeeves, a valet like him, had made his first appearance in a short story published in 1915, with his character developing in further collections. Or Bates might pick up Wodehouse’s
Something Fresh
, which featured Blandings Castle, a setting not dissimilar to Downton Abbey in many ways. Reading about the frustrations of chinless aristocrats, forced to ask their always far superior servants how to replace a stolen policeman’s hat or some other minor caper, would no doubt have given Bates a much-needed chuckle.

More worrying than the problem of how to survive the boredom was the constant threat of violence, felt in every prison, from both the warders and fellow inmates. Discipline could appear arbitrary. Small offences might be punished with solitary confinement, or a restriction of privileges. The Penal Reform League, having compiled reports from former convicts, came to the conclusion that the warders were often ‘tyrannical bullies’ who gained promotion by cowing the prisoners. One convict, imprisoned in 1919, characterised the prison officers or ‘screws’ as of four different types: ‘There were the slackers, the sneaks, the bullies and the officious. They were much divided into cliques. Some of them indulged in filthy jests and were of a low mental type. Some of them were corrupt.’

All of this will present Bates with a battle to hold onto his sense of self – he has almost no control over his own life anymore and the overpowering feeling of helplessness meant that many others like him lost the fight. Bates, with his military background and schooling in the life of service, is better equipped than most to deal with the ennui of prison. There are flashes of temper, too, that we have seen in the past – that chink in his armour that led him to reach for the bottle before. It will stand him in good stead now if he needs to defend himself, but as anyone knows, if you use a weapon – whether anger, fists or a knife – you must be prepared to have the same used against you. Bates’s greatest danger may in fact be himself, as he struggles to survive for as long as it takes to prove his innocence.

The comforts of prison life were few. Bates, in his cell,
had a narrow shelf on which he could place standard-issue
books and a small selection of personal possessions.
The photograph of Anna was the most important for
Bates, reminding him of life beyond the prison walls.

Returning home to Downton Abbey was a far speedier exercise for Lady Sybil
and Tom Branson in 1920, if they used the fast and regular steamboat service
between Dublin and Liverpool. The City of Dublin Steam Packet Company
was the oldest established carrier, having been founded in 1822. Its four
large, twin-screw steam ships, built in 1897, could reach speeds of 24 knots.
Unfortunately, two of these magnificent ships – the Connaught and the
Leinster – were sunk by German torpedoes during the war.

Isobel
He’s making a problem where
none exists. No one could care less were
Branson at the wedding or not.

Matthew
You must think country life
more exciting than it is, if you imagine
people don’t care when an earl’s daughter
runs off with a chauffeur.

O
n the face of it, the young newlyweds Sybil and Tom hope to live an unobtrusive, quiet existence in Dublin as ‘Mr and Mrs Branson’, happily waiting for the arrival of their baby. Tom is pursuing a new career as a journalist, writing for the radical nationalist newspapers, and Sybil is looking to work as a nurse once the baby is born, busying herself with managing their little flat and cooking her husband’s suppers in the meantime. But as the gossip back at Downton Abbey shows, nothing of their way of life is normal. An earl’s daughter and a chauffeur-turned-Irish-revolutionary cannot expect an uneventful life together. And perhaps it is disingenuous of the two of them to think that they can.

Sybil, after all, has worked as a nurse in wartime and this has changed her outlook forever; she wants to live life differently and on her own terms. She has always embraced opportunities to excite change (remember her outlandish, trousered outfit designed to shock, not to mention her attendance at political rallies?) and running off with a firebrand chauffeur is another. As Julian Fellowes says, ‘I’m sure plenty of people were attracted to each other across the barriers. But I think Sybil is essentially a rebel. And one of her ways of expressing her rebellion is Branson. It isn’t only that she finds him attractive or is in love with him. It suits her to have a statement of rebellion in her life choice.’

Sybil might challenge this view – she likes to believe that love is what motivates her – but she wouldn’t deny that after the war she no longer believes that society can pick up and carry on as it was before. Nor, having exposed herself to great suffering and trauma and having seen for herself how all men are equal in the face of tragedy, would she want it to. Sybil believes there is no reason why her marriage to Tom should not work – she doesn’t see the differences in their background as relevant, let alone affecting their chances of a contented life together.

For Tom it’s more complicated. Ardently left wing, anti-establishment, increasingly anti-English and getting deeper into the Irish nationalist movement, his falling in love with an earl’s daughter would be harder to explain back home, but for the fact that he can point to the zealous attitude they both share to change the world. ‘They are by far the most forward-thinking couple,’ says Allen Leech, the actor playing Tom. ‘They have a shared spark and that’s what attracts them. Sybil has always enjoyed putting the cat amongst the pigeons, ever since she came downstairs in that outfit. And Branson loves that.’

But where Sybil’s politics were either harmless (the right to wear trousers) or a force for good (particularly her defiance of her mother to work as a nurse), Tom’s can be more dangerous. Dublin in 1920 was almost a war zone. For anyone living in the city at that time life was dangerous, but for a revolutionary republican it was even more fraught with peril. And it was scarcely any less risky for Sybil, who – as an upper-class Englishwoman – could have become a target for attack.