The real Downton, the real Countess

Article by: Michael O'Donnell
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Downton Abbey is filmed in the home of the very real present day Earl and Countess Carnarvon – Highclere Castle. And the story behind Highclere’s real inhabitants in Edwardian times has inspired many of the twists of Downton’s tale.

The fifth Lady Carnarvon was a wealthy benefactor who really did
care for her staff and turn her castle into a hospital during World War I.

Lady Almina was the illegitimate daughter of the hugely wealthy financier Alfred de Rothschild and his mistress Marie Wombwell.

Although Marie was married to Captain Frederick Charles Wombwell, a bit of a cad, Rothschild always treated Almina as his own beloved child. And his money easily overcame most social discomfort over Almina’s lack of legitimacy.

A beauty and one of the great socialites of her time, Almina was determined always to do the best for those in her care, as well as in her own social sphere.

So while historians like Alison Light, who appears in Sunday Night’s peek behind the Downton myth this week, can show that many of the aristocracy were not good to the staff and others below them, there were notable exceptions.

In 1895, when she was only 19, Almina married George Herbert, Earl of Carnarvon, the fifth to hold the title. Just like Cora, the American heiress who marries into the Grantham family in the series, Almina brought her own money – scads of it – and her own social whirl to the halls of the family seat.

In the Carnarvons’ case the stately home in question was and is Highclere Castle, not some mediaeval ruin but a large, working country house, built to cater for the sumptuous gatherings of the elite, including Prime Ministers, Cabinet and royalty.

While his wife ran the social agenda, the real fifth Lord Carnarvon was more interested in funding archaeological digs in Egypt – it was he who financed the discovery of Tutankhamen. Some of the artefacts from Tut’s tomb, those the Earl did not sell to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, remain in the castle’s basement today.

Today’s Countess of Carnarvon, Fiona, is a woman of simpler means and tastes but she has closely researched the life of her predecessor to produce a fascinating book of the time and the place which inspires writer Julian Fellowes in his dramatisation of Edwardian England.

It will be no surprise to keen Downton viewers that the second series moves from the glamorous pre-war years of the Titanic, when social structures were rigidly maintained, to the chaotic and socially liberating days of the Great War.

And in the real war years the real Countess Almina and her mother-in-law were determined to do their part. During the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign the casualty rate was shocking. Elsie, the Dowager Countess of Carnarvon (Almina’s step-mother-in-law) took it upon herself to organise the hospital ships evacuating the wounded. That was how it was done back then. The big sponsors and philanthropists were not the banks and major corporations but the wealthy aristocracy.

When the military hospitals in Egypt were overwhelmed, Elsie and Almina recruited and paid for extra nurses. Elsie established a canteen for the recovering ANZACs in Alexandria. When some of the rowdy Australians broke the crockery she provided, the dowager lady confronted them and broke up the party. What would their mothers say? Realising who this aristocratic lady was, the lads lined up to apologise.

At home in England, the beautiful Almina was just as personally involved. Rather than grudgingly concede the need for hospital space in her home like Downton’s American countess, Almina insisted that Highclere be transformed into a medical refuge for officers back from the front. She used her high-placed connections to make it happen. And, as always, her generous if unofficial father, Baron Rothschild, footed the bill.

And everything had to be the best. The best doctors, best surroundings, best new treatments. At a time when 80 per cent of broken legs resulting from artillery shells would lead to death, the doctors at Highclere tried a revolutionary new splinting system, stretching the limb. Most of Highclere’s leg patients survived and the technique was then applied elsewhere.

As today’s Lady Carnarvon writes: “It is deliciously typical of Almina that the thing she did next was commission a high-fashion uniform for her nurses. Their dresses were made of fine wool in a cheerful crushed-strawberry-pink, with starched white aprons and caps.”

The wounded were fed from Highclere’s own kitchens, on the best available. Almina greeted every new arrival. A young officer could literally lose consciousness in the shelling on the Western Front and wake up at Highclere, with a gentle, pink-swathed nurse attending him and a countess reading to him at the foot of his bed.

Photographs from the time show the recovering men, along with their nurses, lounging in Highclere’s famous gardens.

“There can be no better solace than to wander over the cool green grass and sit under the cedars,” wrote one to his family.

The Quarter-Master–General of the British Army, General sir John Cowans visited and later wrote to Alfred de Rothschild: “It is simply the best…and its little Lady is a marvel, another Florence Nightingale.”

As echoed in the TV series, sometimes relations between the castle personalities were even closer. One evening Almina stumbled across a patient, Major George Paynter from the Scots Guards, wrapped in the arms of a particularly pretty auburn-haired nurse. While Almina discreetly withdrew, the next day she confronted the nurse: “Look here, my dear, I’m afraid you’ll have to go. I cannot have my nurses behaving in this fashion. It must have put a great strain on the patient’s heart. He might have died as a result!”

Lady Carnarvon has combed the family archives and uncovered hundreds of letters from the wounded and their families, thanking Almina for the uniquely personal treatment at Highclere. In the wartime visitors book is a wonderful drawing by Captain H. Oakes Jones of the 19th Royal Fusiliers, who spent January to May in 1916 at Highclere. It features a wounded soldier, one leg missing, pointing to his newly-painted sign exhorting the troops: “ Walk up, walk up, you can’t do better than come to Lady Carnarvon’s. Come and a smile makes you well. Meet the first shell and come along.”

With series two of Downton Abbey taking the Granthams and their servants through wartime, where will the projected third series take these much-loved characters?

Will Lord Grantham develop an interest in the archaeological wonders uncovered post-war? It was a dangerous pursuit for the real fifth Lord Carnarvon. Famously he was bitten by a mosquito, nicked the bite with his razor. The resulting infection led to his death in 1923, soon after the tomb of Tutankhamen was opened. Will Downton have its own curse?

Almina suvived her Egyptologist husband for five decades, until 1969, and Highclere’s position as a key meeting place for the great before the Great War never quite recovered. Like so many, of high class and low, Almina discovered her true vocation during the War and in later years went on to found and foster a hospital in London, using the fortune she inherited from Rothschild.

Fiona, author of Almina’s biography says the fifth countess has been her inspiration in how to be the wife of the Earl and run Highclere. As Almina discovered nursing, Fiona has found writing as a vocation to fill out the job description. That’s when she’s not wrangling film crews, catering vans, charity events and the thousands of Downton-obsessed visitors now streaming through Highclere every year.

To buy the book, Lady Almina, The Real Downton Abbey go to Highclere Castle at www.highclerecastle.co.uk

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