Downton star’s bitter battle with girls’ school
HIS wife, Imelda Staunton, has been lavished with plaudits for her unerring portrayal of the Queen in the latest series of The Crown.
But never assume that Jim Carter — best known as Carson the butler in Downton Abbey — is content to remain meek, still less mute, when at the £3.25 million townhouse he and Staunton ( pictured) share in genteel North-West London.
Indeed, I can reveal that Carter, 74, has just launched an extraordinary attack against a proposal to facilitate what he demonises as
‘an aggressive game with associated aggressive levels of sound from players and equipment’ on a small patch of ground at nearby Hampstead
Cricket Club.
So what has prompted the outburst? A proposal to build a boxing ring, or a rugby club gym?
No, It’s a plea to the local council by the Girls’ Day School Trust, which wants pupils at private South Hampstead High School to have the chance to play padel — a mixture of tennis and squash — on a new, purpose-built court. ‘Noise level assessments for tennis bear little relationship to the explosive noise associated with padel,’ Carter howls in an anguished letter to the council. ‘A brief visit to the public padel courts at Regent’s Park or Hyde Park reveals that the heavy sound of a padel ball on bat and ball on side panels drowns out the sounds of tennis.’ Perhaps Carter is as hostile to change as Carson was at Downton? Or perhaps he has especially acute hearing? The proposed court is a hundred yards from his and Staunton’s house — and screened from it by Hampstead Cricket club’s clubhouse and its changing rooms.