A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (19 page)

Laura Carmichael, as Lady Edith, has her hair curled in this way for the daytime scenes: ‘She wears a wig for the dining scenes,’ says Nic, ‘the problem being that hats go on and off during the day, ruining the curls.’ Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary) and Lily James (Lady Rose) wear wigs all the time and Elizabeth McGovern (Cora) has just a switch for the back. Above stairs, the only actress we see on screen with all her own hair is Daisy Lewis (Sarah Bunting).

Make-up, too, began to be increasingly used, losing its lowly associations with tarts and actresses. The glamour of the new movie stars probably had a great deal to do with this, and many women liked to imitate their smoky eyes and wine-coloured lips. As Downton Abbey does not move as fast as Hollywood, to say the least, Nic cannot paint the cast with too much make-up, but the natural look is being gently updated with some darker lipsticks and a little more eye-shadow than before. ‘We’re helped by the fact that the 1920s’ looks seem to be fashionable again today,’ says Nic. ‘Lady Mary wears Julie Hewett lipsticks in Sin Noir and Film Noir colours, with gorgeous period-style packaging. Lady Edith uses taupe and brown palettes by Laura Mercier and Bobbi Brown.’

Actresses below stairs have to look completely natural. Nic’s team tint their eyebrows and eyelashes, so that no products have to be used there, and then its just a skin primer followed by a light base (foundation mixed with a little oil and then applied using either a natural sponge or a special airbrush spray gun to give everyone a natural, healthy sheen), with some base and corrector. They are even given lip treatments so they don’t get chapped lips.

The men need to look groomed, so they’ll have the same light base applied, and any marks and blemishes will be covered, ‘Though we’re careful not to even out the tone and we’ll give them washes of colour,’ says Nic.

Each actor and actress has their own make-up bag and their own exclusive products – ‘It’s about creating individuals rather than generic colours on everybody.’ This reflects exactly the approach of the show to its characters and demonstrates how carefully every detail is thought through.

Sophie McShera’s natural look and (inset) Lily’s wig.

The London Season

In 1924 there was only one place to be in June if you were fashionable and rich: London. For several decades, this had been the headiest month of ‘the season’ which began in the first week of May with a Private View at Burlington House, home to the Royal Academy, and lasted until the end of July, with the races at Goodwood as the final event.

In these exhilarating weeks almost every conceivable kind of occasion took place in London, or just outside it, whether sporting, theatrical, floral or plain old party. Kicking off with the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, there followed polo at Hurlingham, Roehampton and Ranelagh; racing at Ascot; the All England Tennis Championships at Wimbledon; the Eton–Harrow and Oxford–Cambridge cricket matches; the Fourth of June (a picnic at Eton commemorating a visit made to the school on that date by King George III) and numerous concerts, fêtes, recitals, luncheons, parties and balls. The city was a whirligig of amusements and beautifully dressed men and women. If you were young, good-looking and rich in 1924, the fun was there to be had. (Truth be told, if you are young, good-looking and rich in almost any year, the fun is there to be had. And a great many of those season events still happen today.)

Initially, the season had begun as an amorphous thing, a rather exclusive round of functions for the very grandest families in England, all staying in their London palaces while the men attended Parliament. This ‘Little Season’ ran during the Parliamentary session from February to July, gradually shortening its calendar to the round of annual events popular in Queen Victoria’s reign, which carried on to the twentieth century. Over time it became more of a spectacle, with the nouveau riche, artists, Hollywood stars, musicians and so on all joining in, as well as crowds of spectators lining the route to witness the famous and infamous in their fabulous dresses. The season became almost as much of an event for those not actually taking part as for those in it.

The Crawley family are seen for the first time at their London base – Grantham House – in the fourth series. In keeping with many such families of the time, they keep their London house closed, bar one or two servants permanently living in, unless the family are staying there. For most of the year, for their occasional trips to see their dressmaker or milliner, the daughters and Cora prefer to stay with Rosamund, Robert’s sister, to save their staff the bother of opening up the house just for one or two nights. Robert, if up for business (one is always ‘up’ to London and ‘down’ to the country, whether your country residence is north, south, east or west of the city), stays either with Rosamund or possibly in his club, most likely White’s, one of the older, grander establishments of Pall Mall and St James’s.

Of course, those families who went backwards and forwards quite a bit, such as the Astors (whose country house was Cliveden), would keep their London household running on a fully operational basis: in 1928 they had a full-time staff of housekeeper, head housemaid, two under-housemaids, an odd man, a carpenter and an electrician. There was also a controller, who looked after all the households, three accountants and a number of secretaries – as many as seven when Lady Astor was MP (she was the first female MP to sit in the House of Commons).

When the Crawleys go to London for Rose’s court presentation and coming-out ball, they take most of their servants with them, although this is partly because Mrs Bute, their London housekeeper, is ill with scarlet fever. A skeletal staff remains behind at Downton to look after Tom Branson. As Julian explains: ‘The Crawleys are medium-grand and they don’t have the money to waste all year round. So they would only open up the house for the season, but that wasn’t unusual.’

While Rose is the chief reason for the family going to London, that’s not to say the rest of them don’t enjoy the season too. Cora, Mary and Edith especially will use the time to visit dressmakers and fashionable couture houses, as well as catch up with friends and cultural events. While they hold occasional house parties at home, Downton Abbey, being in Yorkshire, is not somewhere many of their friends can visit easily for one supper. In London, they can enjoy both accepting and issuing rather more spontaneous invitations. The best of these are the ‘At Home’ parties, which begin after dinner has ended, with various people dropping in and a light supper served at 11 p.m. These are a headache for Mrs Patmore – she never knows exactly how many people will turn up, so we see her prepare dishes that could be served to several, such as kedgeree.

Lady Rosamund Painswick

Rose, in common with her peers, much prefers to end her evenings at a nightclub. These were still a novelty concept in 1924 and were definitely considered rather dubious, with illicit goings-on. Quite a few parents forbade their daughters from going to nightclubs, as one deb complained: ‘They did not see any difference between a place like Uncle’s where you drank beer in a teacup [in imitation of American prohibition] in case the police called or the Fifty-Three with its squad of girls, and Ciro’s and the Embassy which had nothing sinister about them.’ Nevertheless, the rebel ignored her parents and went to the Embassy as often as she could: ‘It was the favourite meeting place of all my friends and so it was like going to a lovely party where one knew everyone.’

Like his grandfather, the Prince of Wales was a man who enjoyed dressing up, parties and the company of women. The Kit-Cat Club became known as ‘virtually a second home for the Prince of Wales’, according to Charlotte Breese, author of
Hutch,
her biography of the popular jazz musician. Which was not to say that he was known for being outrageous – the Prince’s affair with Wallis Simpson in 1936 was not revealed to the British public until he abdicated over it.

The average Joe was still relatively naive and the newspapers were still cautious, despite the reputation of the period – in print, syphilis was ‘a certain disease’, rape was ‘a certain suggestion’ and pregnancy ‘a certain condition’. Perhaps parents of the period can be forgiven for worrying about what went on behind the closed doors of a basement nightclub.

Racy young girls were known as flappers – they didn’t wear corsets, exposed their legs below the knee and embraced the new dance bands with open arms and jazz-hands. The change was extraordinarily rapid, given that women had not exposed their legs above the ankles since they wore sacks in medieval times. In 1923, the skirts were still quite long and, in fact, they didn’t get as short as one expects of a typical twenties dress until 1925, when suddenly the hemline rose all the way to the knees: as James Laver, the 1920s contemporary fashion commentator, put it, ‘It seemed to many that the end of the world had come’. The dresses were getting shorter, inch by inch, each year and there was one striking consequence: women suddenly paid attention to shoes, and stockings, which up to that point had always been plain, black and woollen. Now they had stockings of cotton, silk or artificial silk, in all kinds of colours, some with wonderfully elaborate patterns. Flesh-coloured stockings heightened the impression of nudity, which gave further shocks to the moralists.