The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era (10 page)

So once again Thomas finds himself cast off. Rob James-Collier, the actor who plays Thomas, believes it is this theme of rejection that makes the servant so angry with the world: ‘Whenever he has let someone in, he gets hurt. And it fuels his rage. So he thinks, “I’ll do it all on my own.”’

Robert
Are you not popular downstairs

Thomas
Oh, I wouldn’t say that,
m’lord. But you know how people can
be. They like a little joke.

Later, Thomas is petulant when he sees Carson advising Alfred on the precise uses of the many different small spoons that could be laid on the dining table. ‘You never helped me,’ he says. To which Carson replies, ‘You never asked.’ But, says James-Collier, even as a junior footman Thomas would have been shy of asking because ‘He feels the world is against him. What’s the point in asking? It’s part of his insecurity. He doesn’t want to be rejected.’

Much of Thomas’s feeling of being an outsider stems from his homosexuality, or as the doctors of the time would have had it, his ‘sexual inversion’. While this is not one of his defining characteristics, it is a significant aspect of his make-up and one that, in the early twentieth century, Thomas would have had to keep hidden from view. While most men of his generation were accustomed to being reticent when it came to affairs of the heart, the strain for Thomas is that he is never able to be completely himself. We must suppose that part of the appeal in staying at Downton is that it is the one place where he and his preferences are tolerated – there are hints that the rest of the household know – even if it can never be spoken of openly.

In the early twentieth century, homosexual acts were not just viewed with intolerance, they were also punishable by law. Imprisonment was known, and the widely publicised and scandalous case of Oscar Wilde (sentenced to two years’ hard labour at Reading Gaol in 1895) was a memory that refused to fade – indeed, it remained the example to which everyone pointed for at least 40 years. Throughout the war there had been concerns about homosexuality amongst the troops at the Front, with so many men forced into proximity under such extreme conditions. During the course of the war, 270 soldiers and 20 officers were court-martialled for ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person’, according to the Guidance notes in the
Manual of Military Law
. There was very little understanding shown to the men’s situation; King George V, on hearing the extent of homosexual activity in the army, is supposed to have said: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’

At home, anxieties about homosexuality had been further raised by the alarmist – and completely unsubstantiated – articles written by the journalist and MP, Noel Pemberton Billing. He claimed that German secret agents were blackmailing ‘
47,000
highly placed British perverts’, including cabinet ministers and peers of the realm, having lured them into ‘evils which all decent men thought had perished with Sodom and Lesbia’. Homosexuality, it seemed, was not merely a crime and a sin but also a threat to national security.

While those around him indulge in light-hearted flirting or make plans to leave service in order to start a family life of their own, Thomas cannot. His loneliness reveals glimmers of a softer side – such as when he sobs, wretched after the suicide of the blind officer he had grown fond of. But he is a hard-hearted man and much of his behaviour is defensive; he puts the barriers up long before anyone has a chance to get near him.

Could it be this feeling of being prejudiced against that gives rise to the more unattractive aspects of his personality? Because with Thomas it’s not so much his sexuality that those around him find hard to handle, it’s his malicious streak. His merciless teasing of others, his meanness to those below him in rank and dismissiveness of anybody who does not think as he does are challenging qualities to live with. He’s a snob, too, flatly refusing to dress Branson when he returns to the house as Lady Sybil’s husband. The extent of Thomas’s bravery must be suspected as well. He signed up for the medical corps perhaps not realising he would be exposed to such gruesome horrors of war on the front line. After he has been reminded of home – when he sees Matthew at the Front – and then frightened out of his wits when his fellow stretcher bearer is shot right beside him, Thomas decides he must get sent home. At any cost.

Having successfully accomplished his ‘Blighty’ (a self-inflicted wound that is not serious enough to kill but is sufficiently debilitating to get a soldier sent home from the Front), Thomas returns to England with his maimed hand. He is able to present himself as something of a wounded hero, however far from the truth this may be. He relishes his new status and also the opportunity to throw his weight around at Downton Abbey. As Acting Sergeant for the convalescent home, Thomas enjoyed a brief episode at the house not as a servant but as a man in charge, but as soon as the war ended, so too did his privileges.

Thomas
If you are learning how to do
your job, you should never open a shirt
in a room like this where it might be
marked, let alone put studs in it. Do
that in a dressing room and nowhere
else.

Alfred
Thank you.

Handsome, conceited and ambitious, Thomas is not, says Julian Fellowes, ‘as clever as he thinks he is’. This misplaced self-confidence is what trips him up and thwarts his often morally dubious plans from time to time: from the occasion when the Duke of Crowborough finds and burns all the incriminating letters with which Thomas had planned to blackmail him, to when a black marketeer took everything that Thomas had (‘and more besides’) in exchange for inedible and therefore unsaleable goods. Carson may have been reluctant to take Thomas back into the household, but he cannot resist a man who is good at his job – and Thomas is very good at his. His pride and vanity, which are scarcely attractive qualities in themselves, did make him very exacting and able in his work as a footman. And now he is ready for a new challenge.

Thomas’s new position as valet to Lord Grantham is the step up that all footmen aspired to and were trained for from the moment they entered service. It is a role that as yet eludes Molesley, who like Thomas missed the opportunity for promotion when Bates was appointed as Lord Grantham’s valet in Series 1. They would be given hands-on experience when they acted as valets to any visiting guests, and in an era of large house parties this could be a taxing process. In hunting counties, of which Yorkshire was one, there were additional strains to contend with, which required not just skill but also a calm temperament. After a day following the hounds, the entire hunting party was liable to return to the house at the same moment, with all the weary hunters wanting restorative hot baths immediately. One footman at Badminton House, Gloucestershire, recalled: ‘They were very free with their language, and when they’d had a bad day they vented their spleen on me. It was like water off a duck’s back; one thing I learned early in service was never to allow myself to get hassled.’

Still, there were attractive perks to being a valet. It was possible, over time, to accumulate a small wardrobe of expensive ‘cast-off’ clothes from your master. The arrangement tended to be somewhat indirect. A man would hand over some items, whether shirts or socks, saying they could be thrown away as he had no use for them anymore. This was a kind of code. A butler at Cliveden clarified matters to a bemused footman, who was surprised to be given those instructions with a handful of apparently brand-new silk ties. He explained, ‘This is the way gentlemen of breeding offer you their old clothes as a present.’ The footman was not supposed to throw them away, but to keep them for himself.

Being in a position of trust could also offer opportunities for those who were prepared to bend the rules. The rather oblique approach to ‘giving’ adopted by many gentlemen encouraged some valets to adopt an equally oblique approach to taking. One valet recalled that he ‘began “accidentally” to leave the odd thing out when I was packing a case at the end of a stay until I had a tidy collection of shirts, vests, underpants and socks’. Sometimes items might be ‘loaned’ rather than taken. If a gentlemen changed his clothes twice a day and bathed regularly, as was the norm, the valet might wear the cast-off clothes for a couple of days before putting them into the laundry. Care had to be taken not to be too conspicuous, particularly as a family crest or initials may be sewn onto certain items. One footman was sacked when he was caught wearing a house guest’s socks.

Thomas’s working day as a valet is rather less onerous than when he was a footman, at least from the point of view of running up and down the back stairs all the time. His principal role is to make sure that Lord Grantham is properly turned out at all times, whether at Downton, in London or elsewhere. Thomas is expected to travel with him, wherever he goes, but in any place the framework for the day remains the same. The day begins with Thomas taking up a ‘calling tray’ with tea on it, before brushing and laying out his lordship’s clothes for the day. He then takes charge of the dressing room and bedroom, making sure that the fires are lit and the rooms dusted and cleaned by the housemaids, and removing any clothes that need to be cleaned or mended. Unlike the women, Lord Grantham would remain in the same clothes until it was time to change for dinner, when Thomas helps him to dress. During the day, Thomas must be on hand at all times to assist if his master decides to go for a walk and so needs his hat, coat, gloves, boots and walking cane. If Lord Grantham intends to go away, Thomas is responsible for packing the correct attire. Any mending or spot-cleaning would also be done by the valet.

However, over time a valet would – or could – become much more than a mere clothes’ brusher and tray-carrier. As Ernest King recalled in his memoir,
The Green Baize Door
, a good valet might be ‘depended on to do everything and forget nothing’. He would not need to be told what to pack for a journey, he would ‘know’: ‘He should be prepared to dress his man for a funeral or a fancy- dress ball. He must never be caught napping, he must be able to produce everything, even shoes so well polished they may be used as a mirror in an emergency!’

To bring Thomas to life, James-Collier first had to tone down all of his movements. ‘Normally I gesture a lot when I talk. But back then, everything was much more restrained. I’ve had to change my walk. In Series 1, there is a scene when I walk into a library. Now I look at it and think, that’s all wrong. Too much movement. A perfect footman was like a racehorse. He had been trained for years to perform all these tasks. It is almost balletic: you have to be quick but discreet in everything that you do.’

Thomas’s time as Acting Sergeant in the house, which set him apart from the servants, as well as working alongside Lady Sybil when she was a nurse for the convalescing officers, might have muddied the divide between above stairs and below for him, but Thomas doesn’t seek to refashion the world order; he is only interested in improving his place within it. While he may respect Lady Sybil more, having worked alongside her with the convalescing officers, it doesn’t sit easily with him that she ran off with the chauffeur. No, it is not that Thomas seeks to refashion the world order, but to be master of his own domain – even if that domain is only Lord Grantham’s dressing room and the servants’ hall.