Downton Abbey – An American Perspective

In December we went to England to spend Christmas with the English side of the family.

The visit coincided with ITV’s airing of the Downton Abbey Christmas Special.

The British side of the family gathered around the ‘telly’.  The Americans had to retreat to the living room.  We’re one season behind.

Last Sunday night, PBS aired the first two hours of Season 3, so we could start catching up.

Downton Abbey may be fiction, but it speaks volumes (perhaps too many) about English history – sometimes without perhaps meaning to.

In Season 3 (spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it yet), The Crawley family is faced with the loss of Downton Abbey, as Lord Crawley has lost his fortune following a bad investment in a Canadian railway.

The response of the entire Crawley family to this financial setback is to figure out who they can sponge enough money from to keep the family manse afloat.

Now, here is the thing that struck me as strange:

Does it ever occur to anyone in the Crawley family to actually go out and get a job?

Apparently not.

They would rather be spongers than go to work.  Or hope that Matthew will inherit something to save their bacon.

I would guess it was not always that way. Someone had to have made something of a fortune to have built the joint in the first place.

It happens I am watching Downton while I am reading William Manchester’s fantastic biography of Winston Churchill - The Last Lion.

I am about half way through. It is 1941 and the British are facing defeat after defeat all over the world.

Rommel is punishing the British Army in North Africa, pushing westward on his way to Cairo and latterly Basra and the British oil fields in Iraq.  The British navy is suffering frightful losses, including its most powerful battleships – often sunk after only a few minutes encounter with the Japanese.  The British have been pushed out of Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete.  And in the Pacific, the Japanese have kicked in the door to the British Empire in Hong Kong and Singapore to discover that the whole structure is rotten and that the Empire collapses at first encounter.

Harrowing.

What happened?

For more than 200 years, Britain ruled 1/4 of the planet’s land mass and 1/4 of the planet’s population.  The British navy was undefeatable.  The British pound was the most powerful currency in the world. This was Britain – a nation that invented the Industrial Revolution. A nation that pretty much invented capitalism, particularly on a global basis.  What happened to England.

I think what happened to England.

What happened to the Crawley family is perhaps what happened to the British Empire.

No one wanted to go to work any more.

What Lord Crawley and Matthew now need is the arrival of Winston Churchill at Downton.

They might try and schnoor some money out of Churchill so that they could maintain their comfortable lifestyle.

He should sit down with Lord Crawley and the rest of the family and lay it out straight:

“I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat”.

Maggie Smith might pass out on the scene, but it would be good advice!

I don’t think this is the way the story is going to unfold.

But one never knows….