It’s always interesting to find elements of truth in the fictional storylines that grace our TV screens.
Downton Abbey fans will love this yarn about Lady Mary’s skeleton in the closet, which happened during Season 1 of the beloved period drama.
During episode 1 of the new official Downton Abbey rewatch podcast from Focus Features, creator and writer Julian Fellowes revealed he borrowed a true story from history as the inspiration behind Lady Mary Crawley’s dalliance with handsome Turkish diplomat Kemal Pamuk, which ended in a brush with scandal.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, spoiler alert.
For a quick refresh, in Season 1, episode 3, Kemal Pamuk (Theo James) and Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) enjoyed a fleeting steamy romance, which ended when the pair got into bed together and Pamuk died in flagrante delicto.
With a fresh corpse lying in her bed, and the prospect of her reputation being shattered by the scandal looming, Lady Mary wakes Anna Smith, her lady’s maid (Joanne Froggatt), and her mother, the Countess of Grantham, Cora Crawley (Elizabeth McGovern). Then, the trio carry Pemuk’s lifeless body back to his own room to make it look like he died in his sleep, alone.
Where might Fellowes have dreamed up such a dramatic moment of such gargantuan proportions? Why, from real life, of course!
“In an English country house, there had been a house party…”
During the podcast episode, Fellowes tells host Jacqueline Coley, “When Mary pulls her mother in and says Mr Pamuk is dead, that was a real story.”
In fact, the true story was told to him by a friend who owns a big country house in England, who discovered diaries from the 1890s detailing the impropriety and subsequent chaos.
“In an English country house, there had been a house party. It was a little earlier [than Downton is set], it was in 1890, and this house was unusual in that it had one gallery of bedrooms only for single women,” Fellowes explained.
He added that lots of houses had “bachelor corridors” for single men, but it wasn’t the case for single women.
“One day, one of them [the ladies] was sleeping. She’d had a flirtation with a man at the house party and he was in her bed and he died — he had a heart attack,” he continued.
This story was written in the diary of the great great aunt of the owner of the house, which had been found by Fellowes’ friend. Of course, the lady whose paramour had suddenly passed away didn’t know what to do.
“She sat there for a bit with this dead body. Finally, she got up and knocked on the door of the woman next door,” Fellowes said.
“This woman [next door] who was a blameless matron, she knew that if this story got out, they would all be tarred by it, it would be all round London by Monday,” he continued. “So they woke the women up along the corridor and carried this dead body through one of England’s great houses to get him back into his real bed.”
Just as the women of Downton carried Pamuk back to his room, so too did the women who inspired that scene.
“This group of women led by a debutante holding a candle smuggled this guy back to his bed. The next day he was found by his valet,” he said.
“My friend who owned the house looked up his great great grandfather’s diary and it said, ‘Very sad, this morning Mr Turton was discovered dead in his bed by his valet. We are all so sorry.’ He was never told. It never got out,” he concluded.
“This group of women led by a debutante holding a candle smuggled this guy back to his bed. The next day he was found by his valet.”
As fans of the show will know, the same cannot be said of Lady Mary, whose story did not entirely go untold. Afterwards, rumours swirled in London that she was not virtuous, fuelled by Mary’s sister, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) sending a letter to the Turkish ambassador who regaled all of London with reports of Mary’s impropriety.
Thankfully, Lady Mary took up with a newspaper magnate called Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen) who suppressed the story from being picked up by the newspapers, so Mary’s reputation wouldn’t be left in tatters. As we know, Lady Mary eventually broke it off with Sir Richard and married her one true love, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens).
You can listen to the full podcast to hear more Downton stories as they’re released, streaming on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music.
