Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle

Lady Almina is the history of the life and times of the 5th Countess of Carnarvon, i.e., the real-life counterpart of Cora Crawley. Almina Wombwell was an heiress to the Rothschild fortune whose marriage to the Earl of Carnarvon shored up Highclere Castle, aka Downton Abbey, at the turn of the 20th century. Lady Almina was a bit of a fireball, traveling regularly with her husband to Egypt (where he would eventually discover King Tut's tomb, then die of blood poisoning on the eve of its full uncovering) and, perhaps most importantly, helping to make nursing a proper and respectable profession for women - young and old - of the upper class. The ladies who came of age a decade later (whose own remarkable stories are told in Debs at War), likely owe much Lady Almina (and a small handful of similarly minded women like her).

Lady Almina is remarkable not only for its connections to Downton Abbey - for example, the distinctive green wall coverings in the drawing room that figures prominently in many DA episodes, were the work of Lady Almina  - but for the family and castle's own history during World War I. Highclere, yes, was a hospital for wounded officers during the war and the author, the current Countess of Carnarvon, reminds her readers that such hospitals were the backbone of a healthcare system that largely did not otherwise exist, hospitals and doctors being largely, almost exclusively, funded by wealthy individuals. Before and after it was a hospital, though, Highclere was the playground of the good and great of English society. T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, was a family friend and Highclere visitor; Lady Almina provides an interesting perspective on some of the events described in Hero, particularly in relation to the partitioning of the Middle East. Lady A's husband and brother-in-law were well-regarded experts on the Middle East and their despair at the broken promises of self-government and nationhood are as palpable as those of Lawrence in Hero. 

Although the reader is treated to plenty of grand spectacles, especially early in the book (after all, Almina reigned as Countess for nearly twenty years before World War I), Lady Almina does not shy away from the horrors of the Great War. Many of the passages surrounding the war itself, particularly the battle of Gallipoli, rival the intensity of the descriptions in The Beauty and the Sorrow (still the best, most complete book I have read on World War I).

The Countess of Carnarvon does an exquisite job of illuminating a bygone era and anyone with even a passing interest in late Victorian, Edwardian, or World War I history should find it fascinating - to say nothing of Downton Abbey fans. Lady Almina seems to have been quite a character and one can only imagine that she would highly approve of her literary reincarnation.