The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era by Jessica Fellowes Read Free Book Online Page B

valet in Bates’s absence.
    No longer tethered to the butler’s pantry nor working under the control and watchful eye of Carson, Thomas has joined the select group of upper servants, which includes the cook, the lady’s maid, the butler and the housekeeper. Nor is he in his handsome livery anymore. He remains, however, as vain as ever; his suit is more contemporary than Bates’s was as valet. ‘He has single-pleat trousers and a three-button jacket, rather than the four buttons his predecessor would have worn,’ says Caroline McCall. ‘The jacket has a nipped-in waist and so do the trousers. His collars are more modern: an Albany rather than Bates’s double round. And he has a special fine-leather glove to cover his wounded hand.’

    He might look slightly less striking out of his footman’s livery and dressed instead in an ordinary suit, but he is proudly conscious of his promotion, a role that both he and Molesley have long aspired to. Moreover, his new job as a ‘body servant’ gives him far greater knowledge of his master’s affairs – knowledge that might prove useful to him, and of interest to his old ally, O’Brien.
    But in post-war Downton we discover that O’Brien’s loyalties have shifted from Thomas to her nephew, Alfred, the newly appointed footman. The arrival of this young upstart rather punctures Thomas’s pleasure in his own promotion. Everyone seems to prefer Alfred and it is not long before Thomas begins to plot to find ways in which he can scupper the boy’s chances in the house. The biggest problem that Thomas faces is that O’Brien has Alfred’s back; and she of all people knows how best to get back at her old compatriot and has no compunction in doing so when the need arises.
    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