The Real Life Downton Abbey. Jacky Hyams

to give the working person a voice. Change is the last thing her generation wishes to contemplate. Yet her granddaughter, Lady Sybil, aware of this impending social storm, attempts at least, to get involved and attends a protest meeting – and she helps one of the servants find a less restrictive job in an office.

      Make no mistake, the Edwardian years before World War I broke out were times of real social upheaval: the Suffrage Movement, increasingly violent and dramatic, drew much attention to the fact that women could not vote – although it wasn’t until 1928 that the vote was given to all women.

      Despite the efforts of the reforming Liberal Government and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, in the years between 1911 and 1914 there was considerable industrial unrest across the country. Yet the years between 1900 and 1914 were ushering in many reforms and the beginnings of a welfare state: the needs of the ordinary person were no longer going to be ignored.

      Politics aside, there is another reason why we’re so drawn to the lives of the previous century: we’re immersed in the idea that we live in a ‘classless society’ yet somehow, we’re a bit uneasy about it. So we’re intrigued by a world where everyone ‘knows their place’ because everything, for them, is so clearly prescribed or set down. And, of course, we continue to live with them. The evidence of Edwardian life is everywhere. Not only the big department stores, hotels, theatres and seaside resorts where they enjoyed themselves, but our homes too. The Edwardians and Victorians built so much housing that still stands in our country. Servants worked for millions of middle-class families in cities too, not just the super-rich country house dwellers. So anyone living in a house or conversion from the Victorian or Edwardian era inhabits the same space, may see the same view from their window. Climb the many flights of stairs to the tiny bedroom at the very top of the house and there is the servant’s world: the tiny fireplace, the narrow single bed and bare wooden floorboards. We can easily imagine their lives for ourselves. Maybe that’s why they are so real to us.

      More insights to these lives can also be found, of course, in taking time out to visit the grand country houses dotted all over the country, many open to the general public, thanks to their owners and the work of English Heritage and the National Trust. These houses are awesome examples of architectural grandeur, wealth, and the long histories of many aristocratic families. Some houses show, in some detail, the fascinating insights into life below stairs, so that we can see with our own eyes how it was, wander around their vast gardens and estates and gaze at the impressive splendour of their vast interiors.

      Downton Abbey starts in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic, two years before World War I erupts. This book covers a wider period, from the late 1800s right up to 1914 when the war started.

      Technically, the Edwardian period starts at the beginning of 1901 when Queen Victoria died and her eldest son, ‘Bertie’, Prince of Wales, took the throne until he too died in 1910. But although Edward VII’s reign is brief, less than ten years before his son George became King George V in 1910, the term Edwardian is used to describe the entire period after Queen Victoria died up to 1914, mainly because it is so closely linked to the opulence, elegance and sophistication of the ruling aristocratic class who surrounded Edward VII – the elite whose waning influence marked the beginning of the end of the rigid class system that dominated millions of lives for hundreds of years.

      We left the world of toffs and servants when the next page of history was turned, the onset of World War I in August 1914. After this, many grand country houses were requisitioned as hospitals to treat the sick and wounded. This war with Germany – ‘a war to end all wars’ – destroyed many lives. Close to a million British men were killed and millions more wounded in combat – yet it eventually sped up the process of the changes in society that were already beginning to be felt before the war. Wealthy, privileged individuals took up arms alongside ordinary working men: unbreakable bonds, irrelevant of class or background, were formed in adversity – and after the war, they remained, helping bring the class barriers down.

      Women too, took on new roles in place of the men away fighting; in peace time, they didn’t want to relinquish their recently- found freedoms and, most importantly, as they came through the disruption and chaos of war, working people started to see that they no longer had to toil away all their lives to support the lifestyle of the rich or privileged.

      Servants didn’t suddenly fade away overnight, of course. But the figures speak for themselves: a life in service no longer appealed to successive generations with other work options. And the decline of aristocratic wealth meant those in servitude themselves were no longer needed in large numbers. By 1931 there were 1.3 million servants in domestic employment in Britain, 700,000 less than at the beginning of the century. In 1951, following World War II, there were just 250,000 such workers in Britain. And a decade on, in 1961, just 100,000 people worked as servants. The wider availability of labour-saving household devices, better job opportunities and wider education options for all, in time, limited the availability or need for servants.

      Today, the well-off continue to hire domestic help around the house and in the garden, to drive them around, look after their children or work in any way that may be needed. Agencies who specialise in supplying experienced butlers on a full- or part-time basis continue to thrive. Housekeepers are still hired to run households for the rich. And some people still opt to have live-in help in their home. But, generally, the relationship between employer and employee tends to be quite different.

      Sometimes, the disgruntled servant will simply sack the master. Only the other day, a friend told me she’d lost her long-term cleaner. ‘She gave me the sack – by text message,’ she wailed.

      That, for me, sums it all up. Today’s domestic servants may need the cash – but essentially they’re free in a way that could never have been imagined a century ago. She or he can sack the boss if they want to. And in this world, thankfully, there are no ‘Servants’ Rules’ to worry about.

       Chapter 1

       The House

      It stands at the end of a long, winding gravel driveway, set in five thousand acres of perfectly landscaped parklands. It’s the grandest of grand houses, built from honey-coloured Bath stone, a monument to the wealth, privilege and history of the titled family that has owned this house and the land around it for centuries.

      Step inside the massive and imposing studded wooden doors into a vast, breathtaking entrance hall with wide, tiled floors, enormous columns and neck-craning vaulted ceilings.

      Climb the equally imposing staircase with their polished oak balustrades and gaze, in awe, at the splendour and opulence of the interiors and the furnishings: the saloon with its towering ceilings, the enormous library displaying thousands of valuable antique books, the stunning drawing room with silk-covered walls and curtains, the vast, gilded huge double doors leading to the beautifully furnished smoking room hung with valuable works of art, the enchanting music room with its baroque painted ceiling and walls decorated with sixteenth-century Italian embroideries, room after room displaying the evidence of a magnificently elegant and sumptuous way of life.

      Venture above these vast State Rooms and you find more than fifty bedrooms, where the rich and privileged owners once played host to the many impeccably attired, equally wealthy house guests that were such an important part of their social life in the early twentieth century.

      This is Highclere Castle in Berkshire. This Victorian gothic pile, home to the Carnarvon family since 1679 and rebuilt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is the stunningly beautiful location for the TV series Downton Abbey, set in the Edwardian era in the early years of the 1900s. Back in 1912, when the story of Downton Abbey starts, Highclere had close to thirty servants working there.

      Across the UK, we can still visit and explore many other examples of Britain’s architectural heritage: grand, vast country houses and estates like this, some with hundreds of rooms, every estate with a proud aristocratic history going back many centuries, each one with a fascinating story to tell.

      But