I apologize that this comment comes so late after Episode 7 aired.  I know there are readers who cannot fully digest an episode without reading this commentary.  For them, there is no apology I can offer that will be adequate.  I am quite sure that there are such people, by the way.

I feel that with this episode we have returned to the Downton Abbey that we came to appreciate over the previous three seasons.  When I came to the end of this episode, I realized that the previous week had been a turning point in my enjoyment of the series.  Once Mr. Green sealed his fate, without himself realizing it, I knew that the story could now get back on track.  The wound that he inflicted will leave irreparable scars, both on Anna and the audience, but the rest of the body will be able to heal and to grow.

This episode was remarkable in that so many characters were part of the story.  The only exception I can think of is poor Mr. Napier.  In the previous episode, he was allowed one sentence, which he didn’t even get to finish.  In this episode, he was completely silent.  I can just see the director working with the hapless actor who plays Mr. N.  “Now, Mr. Napier, I wonder if could have you stand just there, in front of the fireplace, and I wonder if I might trouble you to hold this glass of wine. . . .”

Although the writers have returned us to the Downton of old, their use of completely unbelievable plot devices continues to fascinate.  Take Tom’s contemplated political career.  At Isobel’s prompting, Tom has rekindled his interest in politics.  In an earlier episode, it was Isobel who sent him off to that Liberal Party meeting where he filled the empty chair next to his future wife.  In this episode, Isobel encourages Tom to run for office in the upcoming Parliamentary elections.

But how much sense does Tom make as a political candidate?  While he has been politically active in the past, his focus was not electoral politics.  He was an agitator in Ireland and his principal political action was to help burn an English upper crust family out of their home.  Possibly the Labor Party would have let that pass, but there would still be the fact that he is Irish and Catholic.  I was curious about how many Catholic members of Parliament there are in today’s House of Commons.  There are approximately 70, out of a total membership of about 650.  I doubt that the proportion would have been higher in the less tolerant 1920s.  A further count against him as a candidate of a party of the Left would have been that he is the son-in-law of a peer and manages the family’s estate.  If Leon Trotsky’s qualifications were that he was an accountant at Macy’s, would Lenin have taken him on?

On top of that, he has no experience running for office and has displayed none of the talent for constituency work that is essential for a successful candidate.  Nevertheless, Isobel thinks the best way for Tom to prepare for the upcoming election would be to drive into town and buy some books about modern politics.  Given all of Tom’s electoral disabilities, it is hard to believe there is a bookshop in Yorkshire big enough to supply these deficiencies.

Of course, for the writers, the point of going to the bookstore is not to help Tom get elected.  The point is to provide him with an opportunity to run into the young woman from the political meeting, whose name, we learn, is Sarah Bunting.  I thought she would work in the book shop but apparently that was too much coincidence even for the Downton writing crew, so she and Tom simply ran into each other on the street.  Turns out she is a teacher.

Their next meeting occurs under circumstances that further strain our credulity.  Her car has broken down on a country road, and who should turn up with his own car and a full set of tools, but Tom Branson!  I was surprised that a teacher in an out-of-the-way district could afford a car that nice.  And how did she pick that particular road for her journey that day?  Tom spent possibly an hour of story time fixing her car and not one other vehicle went by during that time.  Theirs were the only two cars on that road for an extended period of time.  I know that love will always find a way, but this level of coincidence is stretching the point.

And how sincere is Tom in his belief in the brotherhood of man?  When he saw Rose and Mr. Ross having lunch on highly friendly terms, he might have reacted by thinking that this was exactly his situation just a few years ago.  He was the unqualified suitor for the hand of a lass of a noble family.  That relationship worked out quite well (for those who survived to look back on it), so why not let Mr. Ross and Rose seek happiness on their own terms?  Instead, he heads back to the Abbey and rats them out to Mary, who is emerging as the capo di tutti capi of the Downton gang.

The Rose-Ross relationship is another example of an unexplained turn in the story that makes little sense.  During the previous episode, while Ross is rowing their boat, he asks Rose where their relationship is heading.  She tells him that she just wants to live for the moment.  In the present episode, Rose is set on marriage and Ross is the one wondering if it makes sense to move forward.  She is pursuing the relationship to shock her mother, but in that case, why in the previous episode did she treat Ross’s obviously serious intentions so frivolously?

The relationship is not going to move forward, as Ross explains to Mary, because he would not want to be responsible for diminishing Rose’s social standing.  The conversation implies that they both agree that Ross’s race would be the main impediment.  I wonder if this is true.  I don’t think that marrying an African American would have helped launch Rose’s career as a hostess, but there are other features of Mr. Ross that her peers might have found even more disabling.  He is not a member of the English upper crust and he has no money.  It’s one thing for Robert to marry Cora with all her money, a different thing for a woman to marry a penniless man from a different class.  On top of that, he actually works for a living and not in a respectable profession, but as an entertainer in a night club.  On top of everything else, he is an American.  He could be as white as a slice of cream cheese and still be completely unsuitable for Rose in the eyes of the social class that she is part of.

As Lord Gillingham, Mr. Blake, and the hapless Mr. Napier all piled into Blake’s car to leave the Abbey (until the next episode presumably), the three ladies standing at the front door to say goodbye got off a good line.  I think the trio was Aunt Rosalind, Edith, and Violet.  They joked about the proper name for a group of suitors and settled on “A Desire of Suitors”.  English is rich in unusual names for groups of things (a group of larks is an “exaltation”), which reminds me of an old joke.  What do you call a group of prostitutes?  A Blare of Strumpets or, if you prefer, an Anthology of Pros.

I thought Rosalind was also funny in her choice of Switzerland as the ideal place to go to improve one’s French.  So much better than going to France, which has the unfortunate quality of being filled up with French people.  Her on-the-spot invention was good enough to get past Cora (not a very stern test, let’s be honest) but was an open book to Violet, who did not even break a sweat in figuring the whole thing out.  Well, Munich is closer to Geneva than it is to Yorkshire, so when Mr. Gregson finally turns up he will have less far to travel.

I do not own a Meerschaum pipe or a deerstalker hat, so I do not feel qualified to offer help in the solution of crimes generally, but in the strange case of the death of Mr. Green I feel that I along with everyone else can safely venture an opinion.  The discordant music that played as Mr. Bates walked off the grounds of the Abbey toward his fateful appointment in York told us all we needed to know.  At the end of Episode 6, I was wondering how Mister, I mean Bates, was going to manage the mechanics of Mr. Green’s death.  Green is after all a younger man and appears to be in good physical condition.  Bates is a few years past his prime and requires the use of a cane.  However, Bates had justice on his side along with a white-hot desire for vengeance.  Did Green and Bates make eye contact as Green fell into the street?  It would be nice to think that he knew what hit him.

Mr. Bates’s account with the criminal justice system seems now to be in balance.  He went to prison to pay for a murder he did not commit, one that was actually a suicide.  He is out only due to the extraordinary efforts of Chief Inspector Anna.  Now he himself has dressed a murder to look like an accident.  If Lord Gillingham is to be believed (and he has not misled us yet), the police are treating Green’s death as an accident.  The only people who know that it was not an accident are Bates, who obviously will remain mum, Anna, who doesn’t want to believe it, and Mary, who has been convinced to say nothing.  So Mr. Bates has committed what may be the perfect crime, one that is not even recognized by the authorities to be a crime. 

So much more happened that calls out for comment, but the season finale is only fifteen minutes away as I write.  I think I hear Mr. Napier clearing his throat in case he is called upon to make a witty remark, or a remark of any kind.  Stranger thing have happened within Downton’s walls.  Until next time.

Palmolive is a reliable brand, as is Dial.  Lux is a great brand, but can be hard to find.  I wonder about Ivory.  It has been 99 and 44/100 % pure for decades.  Can’t the manufacturer improve on that level of purity?  And what exactly is in the 56/100% that is not pure?  That quibble aside, there are a lot of really good soaps.

Which brings us to this week’s episode of Downton, another good soap.

It’s interesting that whenever the writers want to advance an important story line, they just move right out.  Last week, Edith found out she is pregnant, had a good cry, and made the grave decision (off camera) to terminate her pregnancy.  In this episode, she makes her way to London, having somehow found a doctor in London who can perform the procedure.  I don’t think they had Yellow Pages in England at this time and if they did, the doctor she was looking for wouldn’t have been listed.  She gets to London, breaks down under questioning from Aunt Rosamund, who turns out to be a peach of an aunt.  The two go off to the disreputable clinic, where we play out a scene like the one in the old silent movies where the heroine is tied to the railroad tracks.  As the train bears down on her, she makes her escape.  In this case, Edith is next in line to have the procedure performed, realizes that she can’t go through with it for a dozen good reasons, including her future relationships with Mr. Gregson, with her niece and nephew, and with her parents and sister.  Having spent most of the episode projecting her feelings of guilt onto her Aunt Roz, she comes to her senses and leaves the clinic.  All that in one episode!

The Anna-Bates situation has been brewing longer, but it too advanced rapidly.  The story of the rape moves through the house like the flu.  To keep Mr. Bates from the trip to America, Mrs. Hughes must tell the story to Mary, leaving out the identity of the perpetrator.  Mary must tell Cora and Cora, without telling the story, must arrange for Robert to take Barrow instead of Bates.  With all that done, we are just about to relax with a cup of tea and a nice slice of one of Mrs. Patmore’s cakes when who should arrive but Lord Gillingham and his degenerate man Green.  As the episode ends, Green tells the assembled servants that he went downstairs during the Melba concert, which seals his fate.  Mr. Bates now knows the identity of the rapist, whose days are now numbered.  My point is that we started with Bates in the dark and the story of the rape limited to Anna, Bates, and Mrs. Hughes.  We ended 40 minutes later with the tale spread to Mary and Cora and with Mr. Bates now completely in the picture.  Brisk, efficient storytelling.

On the other hand, when it comes to the minor characters, we end up with an exhausting amount of over-plotting.  Think about Albert’s planned visit to the Abbey.  Mrs. Patmore decides he must be headed off, lest the Ivy-Daisy feud disrupt the smooth functioning of the kitchen.  She enlists Mrs. Hughes, always a good person to have on your side.  Mrs. Hughes enlists Mr. Carson after the requisite brow-beating.  Mr. Carson maneuvers Albert to the pub, tells him the house is infected with the flu, buys him a drink, gives him dinner and a room and heads back to the Abbey.  Albert turns up the next day anyway.  Neither of the scullery maids sees through the tissue-thin excuse ginned up by the Patmore-Hughes-Carson triumvirate.  Ivy shows Albert the interest that she withheld while he worked at Downton.  He leaves with his heart fluttering and Mrs. Patmore’s worst fears are now realized.  The writers even allow Mrs. Patmore a dose of poetry, when she complains that for weeks her puddings will be flavored with tears.  Anyway, the whole thing involved an awful lot of screen time, scene changes, one-on-one confrontations, dissembling, and fretting in order to make a slight change in the situation of a few quite minor characters.  Tiring.

Mary is showing signs of complexity.  When Mrs. Hughes seeks relief for Bates, Mary plays the “we pay you and expect service in return” card.  (You know that card.)  A year ago, Mary would have thought such a statement to be vulgar in the extreme.  Her growing experience managing the farm is turning her into a manager of the household, too.  Then she jokes with her father about what a nice time Barrow will have on board the ship chasing after the male stewards.  He actually has to warn her not to be vulgar, in his own light-hearted way.  Given Mary’s class prejudice, it’s nice to see that she has a certain tolerance where sexual orientation is concerned.

But the real breakthrough comes when she decides to take a walk down to the piggery with Mr. Blake.  And a lucky thing it was that they chose that destination!  The pig man had violated a basic tenet of the pig man’s creed by not ensuring that the pigs had sufficient water.  As we all know, a pig who is thirsty at sundown will be dead at dawn.  Mary and Blake keep the pumps working and use the conveniently available pails to save the pigs (the writers even allow Mary a pun) and then have a bit of fun slinging mud at each other.  Then Mary outdoes herself and cooks eggs.  I would say their relationship is advancing right on schedule.

And Tom has met the next Mrs. Branson!  True, she is not a born revolutionary like dear Sibyl, only a Liberal.  Still, I think she’ll do.  I don’t know how Tom will run into her again, but I’m sure the writers have that all worked out.

Tom got to that political meeting through the intercession of Isobel, whose purity of heart and all-round goodness were on full display in this episode.  I chuckled that she referred to the then Prime Minister as “dear Mr. Lloyd George”.  I don’t know that much about him, but what I do know suggests that it is just possible that his mother and his wife referred to him as “dear” but if they did, that was it.  No one else would have thought of using the word.  Here is how John Maynard Keynes described him at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference: “a half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity.”  Not a fan.  To be fair, Keynes later said some very positive things about Lloyd George, consistent with the observation that if you find a pithy and incisive quote from Keynes on any subject, you will also find an equally incisive statement from him to the contrary.  The Liberals, who had been in power continuously since 1910, were demolished in the 1922 election.  The party never again won a majority in the House of Commons and saw its position as the principal opponent of the Tories taken by Labor.

But Isobel was only warming up.  When Violet fell ill, Isobel had the opportunity to rebalance the scales of charity, on which Violet had placed her just treatment of Peg in the previous episode.  The scales are again in balance, as Isobel gave all her strength and devotion to restoring Violet to health.  Violet perhaps gains an ounce of advantage by agreeing to play cards with Isobel, but it’s a debatable point.

There were a number of plot details in this episode that I found annoying.  Jimmy wishes he could go to America, but remember that he came to Downton because his former employer – a Duchess – was going abroad and he didn’t want to go along.  Robert is called to America by his mother-in-law so that he can help his brother-in-law, her son.  The son has gotten himself into some serious financial difficulties involving oil leases.  But remember that when Mrs. Levinson (Cora’s mother, Shirley MacLaine) visited Downton, she was a witness to Robert’s near destruction of the family fortune.  The family was hitting her up for an advance.  So there she is, a wealthy woman living in the country that was emerging as the world’s financial powerhouse, and she calls for help to her English son-in-law who knows little of America and even less about investing.  The whole thing seems highly contrived.

There was frustratingly little to talk about when it comes to Rose and Mr. Ross.  We knew that she was going to use Edith’s trip to London to re-establish contact.  And when Rose establishes contact, she really means it!  I thought for a moment that the two of them would tip the boat over, but perhaps that would be overdoing it, what with Mary and Blake having a water and mud fest of their own back in Yorkshire.  I remain interested in learning more about Mr. Ross, although Rose shows so little interest in anything outside of the present moment that I begin to doubt that my questions will be answered.

So, we’re left with the question of what will happen to Edith and her baby.  The previews of next week’s episode indicate that she will give the child away to that worthy farm family that she spent time with during the war.  I’m not sure they would show us that preview if that is where they mean to take us.  I think Mr. Gregson will turn up in the nick of time.  It’s a pure guess, but I think the writers found a device to get him out of the story temporarily during Edith’s pregnancy crisis.  Perhaps he was hit by a car or a bus while out for a morning constitutional in Munich.  He didn’t have his ID with him, or the ever efficient German police would have figured out who he was.  He was taken to a German hospital and suffered from amnesia when he awoke.  He’ll be back sometime during the third trimester.  With any luck, he’ll have his German divorce papers in hand.  I know I have gotten these things wrong in the past, but I have a hunch this time . . . .

Finally, I think the actor who plays Mr. Green needs a new agent.  If you were representing him, wouldn’t you fight like a tiger to avoid having his character admit in front of Mr. Bates that he went downstairs during the Nellie Melba concert?  You lose that fight and the next thing you know your client is being fitted out with stage blood, a broken neck, the whole bag of tricks at the disposal of the make-up department.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving character than the debased and degenerate Mr. Green, but surely the actor who plays him is innocent and need not be sacrificed to our desire for vengeance.  Well, I fear it is too late for these regrets.  Mr. Bates means to have his revenge.  Or will someone else beat him to it?

Until now, I have treated Downton Abbey as if it were in the same postal code as classics such as Brideshead Revisited or The Way We Live Now, and perhaps we will someday conclude that it belongs in this company.  At the moment, we seem to be in soap opera territory.  We have some teapot-sized tempests and we have some standard elements of melodrama, but for now, that’s about it.  I’d like to take a brief look at some plot developments and then spend a few minutes on some historical musings that occurred to me as I was watching.

First, the melodrama.  Edith has a letter from her doctor telling her that she is in the first trimester of pregnancy.  Even if she were to marry within the next month – I assume that even a hurried wedding could not be arranged any sooner – the father of her child is married to someone else, he was last heard of in Munich, and now no one knows where he is.  I believe the political situation in Germany at this time was relatively calm.  Things got pretty bad in 1923 (hyperinflation, French occupation of the Ruhr, political violence), but that’s in the future.  So what can explain Michael’s disappearance?  Edith needs some answers fast.  There can’t be enough time for him to get his divorce and get back to England and marry Edith before her condition becomes obvious, so I expect this particular subplot to become more and more emotional but not necessarily more interesting.  I bet there are drug stores in Mr. Gregson’s London neighborhood, but it’s too late now.  Sorry, Edith.

Most of the rest of the developments in this week’s episode seem trivial and overworked.  Alfred gets to go to the cooking school at the Ritz after all.  Daisy is sorry to see him go and lashes out at Ivy who drove Alfred away by not caring for him.  Of course, if she had cared for him, that would have left Daisy out in the cold where she is anyway, but love is blind and irrational, so Daisy lashes out.  In the meantime, Ivy finally sees Jimmy as he really is.  He makes his move on a bench in the moonlight.  By the standards of 2014, nothing terribly shocking seems to have happened, but this is 1922 and Ivy is outraged.  Shallow lad that he is, Jimmy is taking what to him seems a logical step.  He is out of pocket the cost of several nights on the town (well, village) and he now expects a return on his investment.  Ivy doesn’t see it that way, nor do Mrs. Patmore and Mrs. Hughes, to whom Ivy dutifully reports the attempt on her virtue.  An awful lot of screen time has been spent on getting us to this rather predictable and uninteresting situation.

Now that Alfred is finally off to London, you would think that things would be looking up, at least modestly, for Mr. Molesely, but Mr. Carson is not a man to forgive a slight and that means that Mr. Molesely may be condemned to manual labor for the rest of his days.  Incidentally, I apologize that I have misspelled his name as Mosely until now.  Fortunately, Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Patmore team up once again and eventually Mr. Molesely finds work as a footman at the Abbey.  He will even retain the dignity of being addressed by his last name, a breach of protocol that clearly has Mr. Carson off balance for a moment, although not as far out of balance as he will be a bit later when the American jazz singer enters the house.

Another overworked development had to do with the merry battle between the earnest Isobel and her nemesis Lady Grantham.  Lady Grantham wins a round when her noblesse oblige trumps Isobel’s upper middle class sense of fair play, but what a lot of over-plotting we had to go through to get to the punchline!  Isobel has to feign illness at Violet’s front door when she finds Violet not at home, then toss the parlor where the precious letter opener went missing, then find the missing item in a seat cushion – really a stretch – then later confront Violet only to find that Violet has already done the right thing voluntarily.  I have no doubt that Violet restored Peg to his job so that she could show Isobel up in the end, but we spent a lot of time and attention on an incident that does not really advance the wider story line at all.

At least Violet is getting off a few decent zingers.  I thought that until now in this season her one-liners had been weak.  Tonight she was able to tell Edith to “Let your time in London rub off on you a little” (if she only knew) and when asked what she thought about the jazz band wondered “Do you think they know what the others are playing?”  (Would she say the same of a Bach concerto?)  She put down Isobel by saying that “Indignation is her fuel.”  These are not up to her earlier standard, but she is getting back into form.

We shall see what develops between Mary and Mr. Napier or Mary and Mr. Blake.  If I had to bet on one of them, I’d pick Mr. Blake.  Napier seems to have no personality at all, although his upper class credentials may give him an edge with the snobbish Mary.  Mary and Mr. Blake seem to dislike each other on sight, which is usually a sign of romantic complications ahead.  Mr. Blake has inspired Mary to use for the first time in years that sharp tongue she inherited from her grandmother.  And Mr. Blake finds Mary’s upper class manners and attitude completely off-putting.  I think we have the start of a beautiful relationship.

I’ll come to Rose and the singer in a minute, because there is not much else left to talk about.  Anna and Bates have a night out and get to show up a snobby maître d’.  Lady Cora helps the situation and reminds us all what a good person she is.  Baxter begins to chafe under the constant pestering by Barrow to provide more information about the doings upstairs.  He acts and talks as if he has some kind of hold on her, but it’s not clear what that is.

It was obvious a couple of episodes ago that Rose wanted to get back in touch with Mr. Ross, the American jazz singer.  I thought she was going to send Robert’s birthday celebration to the club where Ross sings, but instead she brought him and his band to the Abbey.  Mr. Carson has just finished explaining to Rose, who has come downstairs to warn of the band’s imminent arrival, that even simple Yorkshiremen know something of life’s diversity.  He has barely finished his little speech when in walks Mr. Ross and Mr. Carson nearly sends his teacup to the floor, something rarely seen beneath the battlements of Downton Abbey.

I do hope that we get to learn more about Mr. Ross.  We know that he is an American.  His accent combines with his self-possession and self-confidence to suggest that he is not a product of the Jim Crow South.  The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing at this time and Mr. Ross may have been an active participant, but in that case why did he leave that exciting cultural milieu to sing in the stuffy confines of a London night club?  He may have an interesting tale and I hope we get a chance to hear it.

In the meantime, Rose has decided to cross the class barrier that she has tip-toed up to in the past.  Mary descends the stairs to arrange for the band’s bill to be sent to Robert and finds that Rose and Mr. Ross are kissing in the shadows.  Ross steps out of the shadows without any hint of embarrassment.  He is ready to pursue this adventure where it leads him.  Rose’s intentions are less clear.  She went below stairs to spend time with Ross.  She did not invite him to come upstairs to a sitting room.  Is this because she wants to neck and cannot do that (with Mr. Ross or anyone else) upstairs?  Or is it because she is not really crossing the class barrier in any interesting way, but just visiting as a tourist?  Does Mr. Ross’s race add a touch of adventure for Rose, or is she genuinely attracted by his talent and his manner, race aside?  She has displayed a most shallow personality until now, so I would bet on the former until proven wrong.  Again, we would have a much more interesting story if Rose and Ross were to develop a romance, but Mr. Fellowes’s plans may be to work up nothing more than soap bubbles.

Ross’s conversation with Mr. Carson concerning England’s role in the antislavery crusade sent me to the history books.  I am not sure that Mr. Carson has the story exactly right.  Mr. Carson proudly points out that an English jurist in 1763 declared that any person who sets foot on English soil became free at that instant.  William Blackstone made a similar declaration in the first edition of his commentaries published in 1765 and it appeared that the emerging view of the Common Law was that slavery was unlawful in England (but not in the colonies) in the absence of legislation making it lawful.  The point was made poetically through the statement that “The air of England is too pure for slaves to breathe”.  Unfortunately, this view was ahead of its time.  The statement in the 1763 case was not necessary to the disposition of the lawsuit and came to be dismissed as “dictum”.  Blackstone altered his view three years after he initially expressed it, to suggest that the slaveholder who brought a slave to England might still have the legal right to demand the other’s services when they left.

The issue was revisited in 1772 in Somersett’s Case.  An English slaveholder purchased another person as a slave in Boston(!) and brought him to England.  When the slaveholder attempted to leave England with his slave, as he considered him, antislavery activists sought a writ of habeas corpus.  The English court had the opportunity to declare slavery unlawful and seemed to come close to doing so, but in the end held that the slaveholder did not have the right to compel another person to leave England against his will.  However, the case was widely believed by persons held as slaves throughout the British Empire to render slavery illegal.  The details are in a marvelous book titled “Rough Crossings”.

I will say that the English did a much better job attempting to end the slave trade than did the United States.  Both countries had made the trade illegal early in the 19^th century, and both declared that engaging in the trade was piracy, but the U.S. made only desultory efforts at enforcement, while the British devoted considerable resources to eradicating the trade.  It’s interesting to note that Britain outlawed slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.  Had the United States lost the Revolutionary War, slavery might have ended in the U.S. without the loss of 600,000 lives.  Of course, we would all have bad teeth, drink tea and warm beer, and beat each other up after soccer matches.

So, all in all, I think Mr. Carson recovered nicely from the shock of having a person of color in the servants’ hall, in all likelihood for the first time.

I was curious whether the inquiry of Messrs. Napier and Blake into the finances of the great houses of Yorkshire was based on any particular historical event.  It doesn’t seem to be.  They state that the inquiry was directed by Lloyd George, who became prime minister in December 1916 in the middle of the First World War and remained prime minister until October 1922.  By late summer 1922, where we now seem to be in our story, his political position was deteriorating rapidly.  He had been accused of selling peerages and honors and the charges seemed to be backed by evidence.  He was so busy putting out political fires that it’s hard to believe he had time to undertake a technical inquiry into upper class finances.  He remained active in politics for the next two decades until his death in 1945 and appears to have taken up an interest in land reform after he left the premiership.  I can’t say that there never was such an inquiry in 1922 but it seems unlikely.

Anyway, all this got me wondering about how these gigantic establishments sustained themselves.  Where did the vast amounts of money come from that were needed to keep them going?  The answer seems to be that originally they sustained themselves through collection of rents.  A noble family would receive a grant of land in payment for military or other service and if the grant were large enough, the tenants’ rents could pay for the upkeep of a sizeable establishment.  However, over the course of centuries, it inevitably happened through bad management or bad luck that many of these houses could not be sustained without outside help.  As the British Empire expanded in the 18^th century, fortunes were made in the Caribbean or in India and the newly enriched English colonials would find their way to England and buy into a stately home, either through purchase or by marrying into the family.  In the 19^th century, many industrial fortunes beat the same path.  Another course was to find a wealthy American or Canadian heiress and bring new money into the establishment through marriage.  That’s the solution that Robert’s father worked out by having Robert marry Cora.

An agricultural depression hit Britain in the 1880s as American and Canadian grain began flooding British markets.  The huge industrialized farming operations of the American and Canadian plains could produce grain at half the cost of the less efficient British farms.  The houses that depended on rents began to lose revenue.  Taxes began to bite as the 20^th century began.  The cost of the First World War, then the ravages of inflation (there was almost no change in prices from Waterloo to the outbreak of WWI), then increased taxation took a greater toll.  The Great Depression and the Second World War finished off a great number of these homes.  I have read that over 1,000 have been demolished since the end of WWII.

But in 1922, the tougher ones were still going strong.  An English poet wrote in 1827: The stately homes of England / How beautiful they stand! / Amidst their tall ancestral trees, / O’er all the pleasant land!  For purposes of our story, this alteration by Noel Coward is more appropriate:  The stately homes of England / How beautiful they stand / To prove the upper classes / Have still the upper hand.[1]

On a final note, the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry” was written in 1921 by Eubie Blake, himself an important participant in the Harlem Renaissance.  He died in 1983 just a week after his 96^th birthday.  He famously said “If I had known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”  The song was part of the first Broadway musical to feature an African American cast in a play about African Americans.  So, coming back to Mr. Ross, why did he not stay in New York to do things like that, rather than hang around below stairs in drafty English houses?

Until next time.