Alfred Shaughnessy; wrote "Upstairs, Downstairs" (COOL)
Hyfler/Rosner
07 November 2005
Alfred James Shaughnessy, film and television producer,
director and writer: born London 19 May 1916; married 1948
Jean Lodge (two sons); died Plymouth 2 November 2005.
Even thirty years after it was first broadcast, Upstairs,
Downstairs is remembered by television viewers with similar
affection as for The Forsyte Saga or Brideshead Revisited.
In a pre-video age, the London Weekend Television series
pinned some 300 million in front of their sets, across 36
countries, including Britain, the United States, Australia
and even Saudi Arabia.
The script-editor and principal writer of the series was
Alfred Shaughnessy. The idea for Upstairs, Downstairs
developed when the actresses Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins
were staying with the Sunday Times columnist Patrick
Campbell in his villa in the South of France, and dreamt up
the idea of a comedy series in which two maids in a
Victorian country house were involved in a romp called
"Below Stairs". The television producer John Hawkesworth and
his colleague John Witney were shrewd enough to move this to
Edwardian London, and extend it to include the story of an
MP and his family as well as the staff that served them.
Shaughnessy developed the MP, Richard Bellamy, into a kind
of Duff Cooper figure - brilliant, Foreign Office, the son
of a parson, married into one of the great landed families.
He sought echoes of the Macmillans, Duff Coopers, and even
Lord Harlech and his Cecil wife, which would enable the
Bellamys to entertain grandly - even in one episode
extending an invitation to Edward VII himself. The series
took four years to develop, and inspired memorable
performances from Gordon Jackson as the butler, Hudson,
Rachel Gurney as the MP's wife, Lady Marjorie, David Langton
as Bellamy and Angela Baddeley as the cook, Mrs Bridges.
So much did the series impinge on the national consciousness
that one elderly lady in Nuneaton wrote to LWT to say that
her butler was presently retiring, and would Hudson be
available to present himself for an interview?
Freddie Shaughnessy could not have been better placed to
bring this series to life. He came from the same kind of
background, and yet he was always a little removed from the
centre, and thus an acute observer from the wings. The
Shaughnessys were an Irish family from Limerick that
emigrated to Wisconcin. Freddie's grandfather Thomas,
President of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, was
ennobled as the first Baron Shaughnessy. Thomas's son Capt
the Hon Alfred Shaughnessy, was killed in March 1916 serving
with the 60th Canadian Infantry, and young Freddie, his
second son, was born that May.
Freddie's mother, Sarah Polk Bradford, a great-niece of
James Knox Polk, 11th President of the United States, came
from Tennessee. In 1920 she was married again, to the Hon
Sir Piers "Joey" Legh, whose court life included serving as
Equerry to Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales and King,
and then being invited to serve George VI as Equerry and
later Master of the Household. In 1989, Freddie Shaughnessy
edited his mother's letters and diaries in a delightful
book, Sarah.
Freddie's mother and stepfather lived a life which circled
round the court, and young Freddie often entertained and
danced with the young princesses. He went via Summerfields
to Eton with a scholarship. There he enjoyed success in
athletics, became second Keeper of the Field, won a boxing
Blue, and was elected to "Pop". He then went to the Royal
Military College, Sandhurst, the intention being that he
would be commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, but he
lacked the necessary private income.
Instead he was billeted on the London Stock Exchange firm
Nathan and Rosselli, for which he was admirably unsuited.
More appealing to him, and ultimately more useful, was his
enjoyment of the social season. He plied his way between
Belvoir and Luton Hoo, although he was thrown out of
Chatsworth for rowdy behaviour. From January 1936 he was
based with his mother in a grace-and-favour house at St
James's Palace. When Edward VIII abdicated, Joey Legh
accompanied the ex-King on his poignant voyage from
Portsmouth.
At the earliest opportunity, Freddie Shaughnessy followed
his dream and headed towards the theatre. His first effort
as a theatre manager, aged 20, was not a success, but in
1937 he teamed up with Robert Ellison, a Daily Express
show-business columnist, and an agent, Dennis van Thal, to
handle publicity for plays such as The Corn is Green by
Emlyn Williams. As things began to go more promisingly, so
war was declared against Germany and Shaughnessy immediately
joined the Grenadier Guards.
After long periods of training, he finally saw battle in
Normandy in July 1944 - "quite soon enough for me", as he
put it. He recalled war as being far from glamorous, but
gruesome, remembering a dead officer as "an obscene twisted
human trunk hanging bent and blackened out of the turret of
a wrecked armoured car, rotting in the sun, at the mercy of
flies and the putrefaction". That, he wrote, was war.
In the immediate post-war period, he was given the job of
giving pleasure and enlightenment to troops still stationed
in Germany by organising German prisoners of war into
orchestras, and boosting morale on both sides by getting
them to perform, a job for which his inherent kindness and
natural sympathy well suited him.
Demobilised in 1946, Shaughnessy secured a job at Ealing
Studios with Michael Balcon by writing to him on Windsor
Castle writing paper (his mother was living there at the
time). He became a "reader" and his foot was in the door.
One of his contributions was to secure Leeds Castle as the
ducal residence for the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets.
In 1948 Shaughnessy married a Yorkshire girl, Jean Lodge,
who worked at the fashion house Spectator Sports. He soon
converted her into an actress in various films, repertory
productions and television plays, although her career
eventually took second place to motherhood. She gave him, he
wrote, "a lifetime of exquisite happiness" and enabled him
to "bask in the rare luxury of a wonderful marriage, blessed
with two splendid sons".
Shaughnessy's film career continued with the making,
directing and producing of a number of movies, work on
theatre and film scripts, a radio play and various
television productions. He was successful, but never more so
than when the many elements of his earlier life crystallised
in Upstairs, Downstairs, by which time he was 56. It ran to
five series, and for Shaughnessy there were two special
moments of triumph - when the Edward VII episode was shown
to a packed audience at the 1975 Prix Italia Festival in
Florence and when the brilliant New Yorker television critic
Michael J. Arlen reprinted an entire scene written by
Shaughnessy as an example of the quality of his scripts.
Freddie Shaughnessy remained a popular figure in the social
world, and he and his wife entertained a great deal - I once
met the redoubtable Sonia Cubitt (grandmother of the Duchess
of Cornwall, and sister of Violet Trefusis) at their table.
He had the ability to sit down at a piano and play and sing
any number from any musical of the last 50 years.
He wrote scripts for The Irish RM and All Creatures Great
and Small and in 1991 wrote a novel, Dearest Enemy, based on
a deeply romantic wartime encounter with a German girl, whom
he did not see again for 44 years (risking the irritation of
his wife by so doing). In 1975 he published his memoirs,
Both Ends of the Candle, in which names are not so much
dropped but rather bubble up on every page. Other novels
followed, and in 1997 came a further volume of memoirs, A
Confession in Writing.
Hugo Vickers