‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ writer’s story

Press, 8 March 1978, Page 13

‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ writer’s story

By

JOHN WALKER

LONDON Hudson, the Scottish butlei of the television series “Upstairs, DownStairs,” who nas replaced Jeeves as the perfect servant in the minds of many of the programme’s 300 M viewers in more than 35 countries, is a pompous, two-faced prig, according to Alfred Shaughnessy, the script editor who wrote most of his lines. That’s not just his opinion. It is also the view of Gordon Jackson, the actor who played the part. “Gordon detested Hudson,” said Shaughnessy. Shaughnessy, who is aged 61, was chosen by producers John Hawkesworth and John Whitney to mastermind the series and write many of its scripts He was able to draw on his own background of life among “the titled uppercrust” and knowledge of high society in Britain and North America.

As a schoolboy, his exercise books — “cram-

med with badly done sums, illiterate essays and inaccurate history” — had been politely admired by the Duke of Windsor (then the dashing Prince of Wales) who frequently dined at his step-father’s house; on such occasions,

a red carpet was always laid across the pavement to the front door. Later, at a ball at the Duke of Wellington’s London home, he remembers being stood up by the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth. She had promised him “the next dance but two” and then had gone home earlv because news of her engagement to Prince Philip had leaked out and crowds were gathering outside the house. In a letter, she apologised — “a typically amusing and thoughtful

letter, which I shall treasure always,” he said. As a playwright, film producer, director and screenwriter, Shaughnessy’s professional verdict on Princess Margaret is that “she is so witty and such a clever mimic

that she could have earned her living on the stage at any time.” Shaughnessy’s own life, he says, has hovered awkwardly between high society and showbusiness. In both, his credentials are impeccable. His mother, born in Nashville, Tennessee, was descended on her mother’s side from two American Presidents — James Knox Polk and Andrew Jackson. His father, killed in World War I two months before he was born, was a son of the Milwaukee-born Thomas Shaughnessy who

emigrated to Canada and rose to become Lord Shaughnessy of Montreal, the first American to sit in the House of Lords. Lord Shaughnessy was also President of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, and Alfred’s earliest memories are of riding in his grandfather’s private railroad car between Canada and his mother’s Southern mansion on the outskirts of Nashville, with its large staff of servants — “all affectionate, pearlytoothed, ostensibly happy blacks.”

When his mother remarried in 1920, it was to Piers Leigh, an aristocratic English Grenadier Guards officer, who was to become equerry first to the then Prince of Wales and, after the abdication, to King George VI, living in the Palace of St James. Shaughnessy is still surprised at the success of the television series which those involved called “Updown.” “1 often wonder what viewers in Saudi Arabia, Muscat, Oman or Zambia make of such episodes as the daughter of the household letting down the servants by running away from a ball at Londonderry House so that she fails to become debutante of the year,” he said. “When the series began I thought that, these days, the idea of 12 servants waiting on four people would seem quite outrageous, 1 expected viewers to think it distasteful and appalling.

“But, being a good old conservative myself, I was very careful to see that Richard Bellamy, the head of the household, was a gentlemanly chap who treated his servants well.

“I think the programme’s success was due to viewers liking the people they saw on the screen. They enjoyed watching people who respected one another.

“It made them aware of a society which had a style and gentle dignity

that perhaps modern life hasn’t got.” Among the many letters from viewers were some from his step-father’s old servants, saying that the series evoked “the good old days of the servants’ hall.” And there was also a letter from an old lady, whose butler had retired, asking if Hudson would care to come for an interview for the job. The relationship between servants and those they waited on was sometimes strained. He remembers that in the 19305, when staying at stately homes for week-ends, the custom was for guests to pretend servants weren’t there if they met them on the stairs or in the corridors.

“Few people could unpack one’s rather worn and shabby clothing and lay it on the bed — evening socks so placed to show the holes in them — more pointedly than a butler or footman in a great house,” he recalls. “Updown” was ended after the Bellamy family had been taken through 28 years of British history, from 1902 onwards, without any of the characters ageing at all. “Lord Bellamy should have been in his late seventies and Hudson would have been an octogenarian,” said Shaughnessy.