Brentwood's 'Downton Abbey' had a Link with Mrs Isabella Beeton

Jan 10, 2012
Sylvia Kent

Pilgrims Hall Brentwood Essex - Mrs Lesley Lewis

TV show Downton Abbey has broken viewing records this Christmas, but it is pure fiction. Brentwood's Pilgrims Hall boasted a high society family of its own.

British viewers may have been glued to the television this Christmas for the latest edition of the best selling series Downton Abbey, but as we and Julian Fellowes, the author, know, his tales of daily life "above and below stairs" were entirely fictitious.

Pilgrims Hall

Not so the wonderful building in the ancient town of Brentwood, Essex, just twenty miles from the City of London. This is Pilgrims Hall which was built in the early nineteenth century by a Roman Catholic priest, Emanuel Dias Santos. It was Lesley Lewis' (nee Lawrence) father, a distinguished, wealthy London lawyer who purchased the building in 1912 for his family.

Mrs Lesley Lewis' Recollections

Lesley Lewis was born in 1909 and much adored her beautiful home. When writing her vivid memoir in later life, she carefully recalled minute details of the large staff, with more than 15 servants to keep the panelled house in perfect order. She recalled, "It was a wonderful home, one that had originally been a chapel when a leading Essex Catholic family lived there two hundred years earlier. Pilgrims Hall had served also as an academy in Victorian times. One of the most notable students at the school had been Samuel Beeton, who in later life, married Isabella (1836-1865) and the couple went on to publishing fame. Their famous book Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management was published in 1861 and has never been out of print."

Educating the Upper Classes

In Mrs Lewis's book "The Private Life of a Country House", she describes her life when girls from wealthy upper class homes were invariably looked after by nannies at home and later educated by governesses who came each day. By concentrating on social and domestic details and on everyday events and objects, this excellent writer offers her readers a rare insight into family relationships and into the running of the upper class household in a period which now seems so remote from today's life.

Downton Abbey revisited

Similiarly to the fictional Downton Abbey, Lesley Lewis' recollections are set in the context of Pilgrims Hall itself. She carefully recalls each of the main rooms, and describes the precious and ordinary everyday objects they contained. The result is an intriguing and original glimpse into the recent English past and into the routines and traditions of a lost way of life.