Lady Mary Crawley, ready for a day’s hunting in Downton Abbey’s concluding season
According to one of our experts, Downton Abbey’s costume designer got it right. But was it just by luck?
While the “correctness” of one’s foxhunting attire doesn’t help hounds one iota in giving us a good day’s hunting, it’s always fun to wrangle over what’s “correct” and what’s not. Especially when we see faux foxhunting scenes on the screen. So when I saw the images of Lady Mary Crawley and her father Robert, Earl of Grantham dressed to go hunting, I wondered why the costume designer hadn’t checked in with Foxhunting Life’s Panel of Experts first.
Robert, Earl of Grantham joins his daughter in the field.We reported earlier that the upcoming season of Downton Abbey will conclude the five-year series. The final season promises to resolve all those Grantham family dramas that have captivated viewers in 250 countries.
Through a single family, we have witnessed the British aristocracy and its seemingly inviolate traditions crumble in the path of world events through the first half of the twentieth century. We have cared greatly about the characters, some of whom have been able to accept the inexorable changes, while other could not. Just like in the real world.
Wars, endemic class distinctions, and social revolution may have been the major glaciers that scoured Britain, reshaping the social landscape, but caught up in the crush of these events was the sport of foxhunting. Although storylines for the final episodes are still under wraps, it has been disclosed that foxhunting will be one of the contemporary themes of relevance to be aired. The sixth and final season is just getting underway in Britain this month, but in the U.S. we will have to wait until January.
Back to my question on foxhunting attire. It was the shirt collar that caught my eye. I had never seen hunting stock ties under collared shirts, so I contacted our well-read, English-born huntsman Hugh Robards, ex-MFH.
“What do you make of the stock ties under the collars?” I asked Hugh. “Is this an authentic style of attire in early-20th century England?”
Hugh admitted that he had to do some research on the question, but his answer surprised me.
“I have come up with three people that you have heard of who wore the hunting tie with a collar,” Hugh wrote. “First we have the Reverend Jack Russell, then Frank Gillard, who found fame hunting the Quorn and Belvoir during the second half of the nineteenth century, thirdly, Nimrod (Charles James Apperley). The difference with these three gentlemen being the fact that their ties were tidy; the two in your pictures are rather messy!”
There you have it. Not very important in the larger scheme of hunting, but at least we can’t scoff at Lady Mary and the Earl of Grantham when we see them on the screen this winter. There was respected precedent. The costume designer got it right. But I have to wonder if that was just a stroke of luck!
Posted September 26, 2015