arrives for them to ‘Come Out’. For Cora’s daughters, their entry into Society as debutantes took a more simple route than that of their mother; as aristocracy they had an automatic ‘in’ that had been denied Cora. The Season was their opportunity to meet the right circle of men from which to choose a husband. ‘For marriage market it was,’ writes Anna Sproule of this annual ritual in The Social Calendar. ‘Nobody in the pre-1914 era made any bones about the fact that marriage was a woman’s sole career, and she owed it both to herself and the family that had so far supported her to get on with it.’
The girls’ entrée into Society would begin, as it had for their mother, with their presentation at Court. Despite the different years in which they were presented, each of the daughters would have worn more or less the same outfit for the occasion: a long, low gown and three ostrich feathers pinned to their head (a dictat of King Edward VII), a veil and a decent length of train.
SYBIL
‘There’s nothing wrong with doctors. We all need doctors.’
MARY
‘We all need crossing sweepers and draymen, too. It doesn’t mean we have to dine with them.’
Presentation would be followed by the Season, which traditionally began with the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. With no shooting or hunting at that time of year, and the men in London to attend Parliament, they were available to escort their wives and daughters around the social whirligig. Four thousand of the richest and smartest people in England descended on the capital from the end of April to the latter part of July for the Covent Garden opera season, the Eton and Harrow cricket match, Royal Ascot (in 1910 everyone wore black mourning for the King who had died the month before), lawn tennis at various venues, including Wimbledon, the Henley Regatta, and a series of garden receptions, private concerts, balls, dinners, receptions and just plain parties.
LADY ROSAMUND
‘I’m sorry you haven’t received more invitations. But then, after four Seasons, one is less a debutante than a survivor.’
The Season was really all about parties, especially those given in the great London palaces, which many of the most significant families still owned and lived in. They would host enormous gatherings every night and every day the newspapers would report who had been present, as well as who had hosted what the previous night – who went and who was giving the next one. Essentially it was an endless succession of opportunities for young people to meet and for their parents to catch up. Even in the daylight hours there was no time lost in finding a way to see and be seen, as young men and women on horseback cantered up and down Hyde Park’s Rotten Row for exercise.
Come 12 August, the grouse season opened in Scotland and everyone shut up their London houses again. You had to hope that by that time you had already caught your future husband as securely as a salmon on a fly hook.
To make her mark, a girl had to be pretty, finely dressed and of excellent parentage. Mothers chaperoned their daughters everywhere, sizing each other up across the dance floor. They would be assessing the competition, as well as the potential suitability of their daughters’ beaux. No one could be seen to dance with the same man for the whole evening, so the opportunities to gauge whether you liked him or not were scant. Instead, opinions were formed on the gossip and stories that related to his fortune, background and character. Naturally enough, the men did the same about the women.
The ceremony of ‘Coming Out’
In 1911, Lady Diana Manners, the third daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland, was presented at Court: ‘I had made my own train – three yards of cream net sprinkled generously with pink rose-petals, each attached by a diamond dewdrop. The dress was adequate and the three feathers springing out of my head looked less ridiculous when everyone was wearing them… I was nervous of making my double curtsy. The courtiers are very alarming and martinettish – they shoo you and pull you back and speak to you as they would to a wet dog, but once the trial is successfully over you have the fun of seeing others go through the same ordeal.’
Not that a deb’s troubles were over once she had ‘caught’ a fiancé. Any potential husband would be checked out by both the family and the servants. When Mary brings home Sir Richard Carlisle, he is seen as the classic arriviste and there is consternation in the ranks. But he enters their lives in the middle of the war: all around them there is change, and Society is changing too, as impossible as that had seemed to the older generations. Bringing with him money and confidence, Sir Richard is unfazed by the stuffy ways of the Crawleys. He is happy to do his best to fit in with the grand country family (he orders a country suit to go walking in) but is unembarrassed when he doesn’t quite manage it (he has mistakenly ordered a heavy tweed more suited to shooting). As unpalatable as he may be at times, Sir Richard represents the future – a way into power that doesn’t depend on blue-blooded connections but an agile mind and ambitious drive instead.
With new pathways to the top of Society being laid in this decade, Matthew may feel the pressure to be a pioneer on top of his duty to Lord Grantham to preserve the traditions of Downton Abbey. His future earldom will give him a seat in the House of Lords but it might be, after all, his upper middle-class background and professional career that enable him to make his peerage a success rather than, as Violet and Lord Grantham fear, hold him back.
THE REAL-LIFE SIR RICHARD CARLISLE: LORDS BEAVERBROOK AND NORTHCLIFFE
Sir Richard Carlisle is loosely based on the newspaper magnates who made their fortunes out of the First World War. The Canadian tycoon Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, was a prominent figure largely because of his political friends as well as his rousing leaders in the Daily Express. But it was Lord Northcliffe who led the way in tabloid journalism with the establishment of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail – his descendant, Lord Rothermere, is still the majority shareholder of his newspaper group.
Aitken is compelling for his political bombast. A protégé of the Conservative party leader, Bonar Law (who formed the wartime coalition government with Lloyd George), and a friend of Winston Churchill, his personal alliances guided his newspaper editorials, which were hugely influential in directing politics after the war. But it was the brash effrontery of Lord Northcliffe, born Alfred Harmsworth in Dublin to ‘a tough mother and a feckless hard-drinking father’ in 1865, that could be said to be responsible for influencing some of the major decisions of the war cabinet, including – with Beaverbrook’s Express – the destruction of the Liberal government.
When the Daily Mail was first printed in 1896, the immediate effect was electrifying. Gone were the word-for-word dull reports of political speeches; in were first-person accounts of events. Easy on the eye with lots of white space on the page and an early use of big pictures, one could say that the founding principles still operate on the paper today. ‘The three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things,’ Northcliffe told a reporter. Cheap to buy and titillating to read, the paper made him a millionaire. Northcliffe died in 1922 quite mad, probably due to a blood infection, and a newspaper man to the end; he telephoned his night editor and told him: ‘They say that I am mad: send your best man to cover the story.’
EXT. NORTHERN ENGLAND. DAWN.
At dawn, a steam train travels through this lovely part of England. As the camera moves in, we can see a man, whom we will know as John Bates, sitting by himself in a third-class carriage. Above him run the telephone wires, humming with their unrevealed, urgent messages. The train flies on.
TIMELINE
1912
On 17 January Captain Scott and his team successfully reached the South Pole, only to perish in March as they made their way home. On 15 April, tragedy struck again when the ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. It sank within hours, killing over 1500 people, mostly men from first and second and passengers from third class. The summer brought more scandal as the British government was accused of profiting from information about the Marconi Company.
1913