‘Flattery will get you everywhere,” said Robert Crawley, the 7th Earl of Grantham, plummily. I had congratulated him on his memoir. He was on the other end of that newfangled invention, the telephone. Of course he wasn’t. The earl of Downton Abbey isn’t real. We all know that, and so he couldn’t have written a memoir. But I am enjoying imagining that Hugh Bonneville, who, as we also know, played the earl for six seasons and in the two Downton films, is calling me from the abbey while wearing, perhaps, one of his posh smoking jackets and imbibing, say, Château Lafite Rothschild in a crystal glass.
This is easy to imagine. Bonneville is less plummy than the earl, but he is plummy enough. It’s the result, presumably, of his quite posh education at Sherborne School in Dorset: “a very traditional boys’ boarding school. Looking back on it, I think I do find single-sex education strange, and I find the boarding system even more peculiar, but it’s something that is uniquely British.”
There has been a school on the same site for more than 1300 years, so it is as uniquely British as and might be said to have been good training for playing a toff.
