Chapter Two
Endings And A Beginning
With the S.S. Canterbury at last now finally securely moored both fore and aft to several of the large cast iron bollards lining the quayside, here in Calais, the slightly delayed disembarkation of the steamer's passengers and the unloading of their luggage now began in earnest.
"Well who'd have thought it? That really is a turn up for the books!" laughed Tom.
Along with many of the other passengers on board the steamer, together the Bransons and the Crawleys now duly trooped across the promenade deck and began the slow process of descending one of the several steep flights of stairs which led down to the passenger saloons and the main deck from where access was gained to the narrow canvas sided gangways which in turn led onto the quayside itself.
"Agreed!" laughed Mary, half turning on the stairs. "Matthew, darling, where's Si..."
"Simon's here with me" replied Matthew.
With Oscar his teddy bear clutched firmly under his right arm, holding tightly onto his father's hand, standing waiting on the crowded staircase several steps above Mary, young Simon smiled shyly down upon his aristocratic, beautiful mother, always so immaculately coiffured and stylishly attired, of whom, if the truth be told, he was rather in awe. As did his elder brother Robert and his younger sister Rebecca, Simon both liked and respected his mother, but it was their aunt Sybil whom the Crawley children all loved.
Mary nodded disinterestedly at her younger son, casting an airy backward glance over her left shoulder to see nanny with Rebecca in tow, closely followed by Mary's own maid Hodges, slowly descending the flight of stairs immediately above the one on which the rest of the family were now waiting. Somewhat stout of build, and because of which, behind her back, Robert and Simon had taken to calling her "Podgy Hodgy", or simply just "Podge", Hodges was clearly finding the steep, narrow stairs on board the steamer something of a trial.
"Hey! Danny lad, not so fast now! Wait for me" called his father.
"But Da, Rob and I want to go see that big crane down on the quayside, the one you pointed out, and then have a good look at the engine".
Tom grinned broadly, thinking just what his haughty sister-in-law the countess of Grantham would have to say when she found her eldest son, the heir to the Downton estate, examining at close quarters the dirty, greasy, oily workings of a French steam locomotive. In all likelihood, Mary's considered opinion of the matter would be quite unrepeatable.
After all, Mary had been not inconsiderably annoyed when she found out that Tom had quietly purchased Danny and Robert a bag of gobstoppers each at Victoria station while they were all awaiting the train to Dover Marine.
When reprimanded by his mother for eating in public and asked by her exactly what it was he had in his mouth, young Robert, rendered temporarily incapable of coherent speech by the presence of a gobstopper, had then made the singular mistake of offering one to his mother. Mary's eyebrows had shot heavenwards towards the arching glass roof of the station while Matthew then proceeded to make things worse by admitting, with a sly wink to his elder son, that he himself was rather partial to gobstoppers too; whereupon Danny had immediately offered one to his uncle which, to Mary's absolute horror, Matthew, with thanks and a broad grin, promptly took and popped into his own mouth.
And, it was well known in the family that if there was anything remotely mechanical available for inspection, then Danny and his cousin Robert made a beeline for it. In tacit recognition of this incontrovertible fact, last Christmas, Matthew and Mary had bought each of the boys a Number 7 set of Meccano. After Christmas lunch was over, and all their presents unwrapped, the boys' late grandfather's large desk in the Library at Downton - Matthew preferred to use the one in the Small Library - was duly commandeered, cleared of its clutter of blotter, papers, pens, inkstand and photographs. Thereafter, and in no time at all, the desk was transformed into something resembling the shipyards of Harland and Wolff in Belfast; littered with all manner of dark green metal strips and girders, brass screws, nuts, bolts, wheels, and gears.
Watching their eldest sons and their fathers setting about constructing a pair of battleships, and seemingly completely lost in a world of their own, Mary and Sybil found themselves wondering whether Matthew and Tom would have much preferred a set of Meccano themselves rather than the Christmas presents which they had received.
Sitting next to her daughters on the sofa by the fireplace, their mother Cora, now Dowager Countess of Grantham and but widowed scarce six months, smiled, remarking to Mary and Sybil that Robert himself would have dearly loved to have seen what was now taking place on his hallowed desk, would no doubt have joined in whole heartedly with all the fun now unfolding, although what the late Dowager Countess would have made of it all was anyone's guess.
Robert's mother Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, had passed away in 1926, the year of the General Strike. She had enjoyed a long life, but the world she had known, that of wealth and privilege, along with its accompanying strict social hierarchy, where everyone knew their place, was fast passing into history. Of course, Violet being Violet she did her very best to try and stem the flood of what she saw as Red Revolution, leaving handsome legacies to her three grand-daughters, their husbands, and those of her great grand children that she lived to see born. Violet even made financial provision for her old sparring partner, Matthew's mother.
But, said Isobel, if by so doing the late Dowager Countess expected her to be forever in Violet's debt, she was having none of it, and promptly donated the not inconsiderable sum to the local cottage hospital for the provision of a small but fully equipped operating theatre.
However, Isobel saw to it that Violet's part in all this local munificence was duly recognised by the erection of a small, some might even say, insignificant, stone plaque commemorating the fact, which was then mounted prominently on the west wall of the newly opened operating theatre. Unfortunately, the prominence of the plaque, in the middle of a large expanse of wall, merely served to emphasise how small it actually was.
IN GRATEFUL THANKS
ON THE DEATH OF VIOLET CRAWLEY, LATE DOWAGER COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM, THIS OPERATING THEATRE AND EQUIPMENT WERE PROVIDED BY MONIES GENEROUSLY GIVEN BY MRS ISOBEL CRAWLEY.
1927
The unveiling of the commemorative plaque was met with a stunned silence on the part of all the assembled members of the Crawley family, with everyone realising the same thing; which it fell to Matthew to duly put into words. There was, he said, something missing after the third word. As presently carved, said Matthew, the wording implied that one and all were glad to see the back of the Dowager Countess, which was surely not what his mother had intended.
"Perish the thought" replied Isobel and promptly said that she would arrange for the local stone mason to be duly summoned to rectify the omission. Five years later when the Bransons and the Crawleys left England for the Continent, the missing comma was still conspicuous by its absence.
That the world Robert's late mother had known was disappearing into history did not go unnoticed, even by her own son. For whether Robert Crawley liked it or not, and not surprisingly he didn't, things would never return to the way they had been before the Great War. That appalling conflict, with its senseless squandering of the lives of an entire generation of young men, had altered everything irrevocably; destroyed all the old certainties, and swept empires which had existed for centuries from off the face of Europe forever.
In the face of such monumental change, all the fifth earl of Grantham could do was try and ensure that Downton weathered the coming storm rather than succumb to the winds of change as had several of the neighbouring estates, now sold off, the families who once owned them moved elsewhere to more modest dwellings, the large houses themselves demolished or else turned into hotels, their ancestral contents dispersed to the four winds.
Haxby, which Mary and Sir Richard Carlisle had once considered purchasing as their family home, was a good case in point; was now in use as an asylum. After Mary broke off her engagement to him, Carlisle had eventually married and had a family, but from all accounts the marriage was not a happy one. Then, in 1928, having had a vote of no confidence passed in him by his board of directors, he lost control of much of the business empire he had been at such pains to build up. Thereafter, having also lost very heavily in the crash of 1929, towards the end of that same year Carlisle put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. On hearing of his passing, Mary's expressions of regret were, to say the least, perfunctory.
During the 1920s, Robert himself had gradually mellowed, had come to realise that whatever their backgrounds, what indisputably fine men both his sons-in-law were, now recognised that when two people loved each other, then class really did not matter one iota. Whether or not he agreed with the politics of his Irish son-in-law, and of course he didn't, Robert was very proud indeed of Tom Branson's success as a journalist and when, in 1929, Tom became deputy editor of the Irish Independent, Robert's congratulatory telegram was so effusive, that Tom had it framed and placed in a position of honour behind his desk in his office in Talbot Street.
Robert was equally very proud of what Matthew had achieved for Downton, not just a massive injection of sorely needed new capital, but overseeing the gradual modernisation of the estate for the benefit not only of the Crawleys, but also for their tenants by way of long overdue improvements to the cottages and the farms. Whether the latter had anything to do with Tom Branson's Socialist influence, Robert never knew. What he did know was that both Tom and Matthew were as thick as thieves; indeed had been ever since, at short notice, Tom had stood in for Matthew as his Best Man back in the spring of 1920.
Certainly an unlikely pairing, in Tom's own words "for sure"- that of the middle class solicitor from Manchester and the Irish republican journalist from Dublin, but there was no denying that it was a deep and lasting friendship based on mutual admiration, genuine feeling, and heartfelt respect. In Tom and Matthew, Robert came to realise that both Sybil and Mary had found kindred spirits. And, hardly surprisingly, each of his sons-in-law worshipped the very ground on which their wives both walked.
He was equally proud of his daughters too. Despite parental opposition, through her own feisty tenacity and refusal to conform, Sybil had carved out a nursing career for herself, and was now matron of a ward in the Coombe hospital over in Dublin and the mother of three children, while Mary likewise a mother of three, had proved to be of inestimable support to Matthew during his modernisation of the Downton Abbey estate.
It was such a shame, thought Robert that Edith had never found a man to love as had her two sisters. Her ill starred involvement with Sir Anthony Strallan had produced nothing but heartbreak on both sides, which may have accounted for, at least in part, her deep love of all her nephews and nieces, as an antidote to her own thwarted maternal instincts, and also to her all consuming lately developed interest in archaeology, which for Edith became something of a passion and which took her to increasingly far flung parts of the British Empire.
Edith was there in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922, when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun, spent several seasons excavating in the newly created kingdom of Iraq, was in Baghdad along with Gertrude Bell for the opening of the new Archaeological Museum there in June 1926, and thereafter with Flinders Petrie at Luxor in 1928, and in 1930, having returned to Iraq was working with Max Mallowan and his wife the novelist Agatha Christie at Ur. And in 1932 when the Bransons and the Crawleys all arrived in Calais to catch the Rome Express to begin their trip to Italy, Edith was in Palestine, excavating a Roman temple.
As Mary pithily remarked one evening over dinner, given Edith's obsession with old relics, was it any wonder that she had fallen for Sir Anthony Strallan? It was said Mary such a shame that their wedding had never taken place, for given the considerable differences in their respective ages it was more than likely that Edith would have survived Strallan by many years. After a suitable interval had elapsed, continued Mary, no doubt Edith would have been quite content to have dug the old duffer up and presented him to the city museum in York.
Whether Branson or Crawley, Robert Crawley adored all his grandchildren in equal measure, but if he could be said to have had a favourite, something which he himself would never ever have admitted to, then undoubtedly he was most fond of his eldest grandson, Danny Branson, to whom at the early age of seven, Robert had taught fly fishing, first in the lake at Downton and thereafter in fast flowing streams elsewhere on the estate.
And it was in the summer of 1931, while out alone with Danny on just one such fly fishing expedition, that Robert suffered a fatal heart attack. Young Danny had raised the alarm, by running like the wind to the nearest farm, but by the time Matthew, Tom, and a group of workers from the estate had reached the isolated spot, it was too late. According to Danny, who was found kneeling by his grandfather's body, sobbing inconsolably, Robert's very last words had gone not to his wife, not to his daughters, not even to Matthew, but to Tom.
"And ... t...tell... your Da... wheezed Robert gasping for breath.
"Tell Da what Grandpapa?" asked Danny fighting back his tears.
"Tell your Da that I love him".
Of course, all the family had been stunned by the unexpected suddenness of Robert's death, but none more so than Tom on learning that his father-in-law's very last words had been for him.
That autumn, a dignified memorial service was held for Robert in the parish church of St. Mary at Downton. Long after the service was over and the family and all the other mourners had returned to the abbey, telling Sybil that there was something he had to do - she never asked him what, in fact she probably guessed - Tom had slipped quietly out of the great house and made his way back down to the church.
There in the quiet and the lengthening shadows, standing alone before his late father-in-law's newly erected memorial tablet, with tears running down his cheeks, Tom Branson, ex-chauffeur and Irish republican journalist made his own private heartfelt last farewell to Robert Crawley, fifth earl of Grantham.
Author's Note:
Probably the best known and most loved of all cross-Channel ferries, launched in 1928, the S.S. Canterbury was owned by the Southern Railway. Later she would help rescue British troops from Dunkirk in 1940 and took part in the D-Day Landings in 1944. She was scrapped in 1965.
The Number 7 set of Meccano mentioned above was the largest one then available and much sought after. Of course, in the 1930s, the cost of such toys still placed them beyond the reach of the mass of the population.
The General Strike lasted for ten days in May 1926. Mounted in a vain attempt to try and force the British government to stop a reduction in wages and worsening working conditions for 800,000 locked-out coal miners, it was supported by some 1.7 million workers, mainly those in transport and heavy industry.
The 1920s saw many archaeological excavations, of which the most famous was undoubtedly the discovery, in 1922, by Howard Carter, of the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun. That particular excavation was funded by none other than George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, DL (1866 – 1923), then owner of Highclere Castle, which today is known the world over as the setting for the fictional Downton Abbey.
The Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq was established in 1921 and lasted until 1958 when the monarchy was overthrown in a bloody military coup.
Max Mallowan was a very famous archaeologist and became (in 1930) the second husband of the renowned novelist Agatha Christie.