Life Downstairs at Downton Abbey

Actress and Historian Tames Alan combines her skills to create an educational program for people of all ages. In this program, Tames talks about what it was like to live and work downstairs in a late-Victorian house such as Downton Abbey. With fifty percent of England’s population “in service,” this program gives insight into how this “unseen” half of the population lived and what went on below stairs. She explains the complicated hierarchy between upper and lower servants, everyone’s duties, the loneliness of a half-day off, and gives a lively account of high jinks downstairs that accompanied the long hours of drudgery.