Cor blimey! Lady Mary’s an Eastender
Don’t tell the Dowager Countess but Downton’s Michelle Dockery is descended from fish hawkers, charladies and lorry drivers
AREDBRICK terrace in the unlovely East London suburb of Romford couldn’t be further removed from the dining halls and drawing rooms of Downton Abbey. This unremarkable house is surrounded by urban blight, fast food restaurants and betting shops. And yet, it is here — 100 miles from the Jacobean splendour of Highclere Castle, the 19th-century Hampshire manor house that doubles as the fictional seat of the Grantham family — that Downton star Michelle Dockery spent much of her youth.
In an interview this week, the actress — known to millions as the aristocratic English rose Lady Mary Crawley — admitted to being a salt-of-the-earth ‘Essex girl’.
‘I’m not like Lady Mary at all,’ she said. ‘For one thing, I’m not actually posh. I come from a very humble, working-class background.’
She continued: ‘I had a very strong Essex accent when I was younger, and I don’t think I would have got the role of Lady Mary if I’d walked into the audition going, “Allo, nice ter meet ya!”’
The revelations will no doubt surprise many Downton fans — not least given the fictional Lady Mary’s cut-glass accent.
Dockery plays the eldest daughter of Lord and Lady Grantham — who, when we last saw her, had just been widowed following the death of her beloved husband and father of her newborn baby, Matthew Crawley, in a car accident.
From the first episode of the hit ITV drama, which draws 120 million viewers in more than 100 countries and returns to our screens next month, Lady Mary has been the epitome of the upper-class ice queen.
But though 31-year-old Dockery may be utterly convincing in the role, with her snowwhite complexion and upright posture, her family history reveals her to be no more blueblooded than your average fishwife.
The youngest daughter of 69-year-old Michael Dockery, an Irish former lorry driver, and Lorraine Witton, 60, a shorthand typist-turnedcare worker, she was raised in a modest street in Essex.
School was the local comprehensive, the Chadwell Heath Foundation School — now the Chadwell Heath Academy. There, she was nicknamed ‘Dockers’ thanks to her heavy estuary accent. Indeed, it was this accent that lost her one early theatre audition, for the role of one of the von Trapp children in a West End production of The Sound Of Music.
‘When I was asked what experience I had, I replied, “Well, I’ve done lots of shows round Essex but I ain’t done nuffink up the West End,”’ she’s said. ‘I suspected I’d blown it. And I had.’
Dance and drama lessons in the dilapidated church hall a few doors down from the Dockery family home were paid for with money Michelle earned working weekend jobs — including one in a pie and mash shop.
As her drama teacher, Linda Finch, who still teaches at the nearby Redbridge Sports And Leisure Centre, recalls: ‘The hall was full of splinters and draughts, freezing in the winter and boiling hot in the summer. Michelle was a real proper Essex girl — she had a good old Essex accent.’
HER drama degree — where her East End accent fell by the wayside — could be afforded thanks only to the year she spent working in a recruitment office after her A-levels. Appropriately, it was while playing Eliza Doolittle — a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons in order to pass herself off as an upper-class lady — in a 2008 production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic that Dockery caught the eye of TV producers.
After a series of small screen roles, she was cast as the eldest of Lord and Lady Grantham’s daughter in 2010.
But when you look deeper into the Dockery family history, it is the Cockney Doolittle with whom her ancestors have more in common.
Public records lay bare how Michelle descends from a long line of poor Irish peasants and working- class East End labourers, whose lives were marked by grinding poverty and heart-rending tragedy.
Take the tale of George, her maternal great-great-grandfather.
The 1911 census — taken a year before Downton’s fictional opening in 1912 — reveals that, far from being to the manor born, Michelle’s ancestors spent their lives in the squalid slums of the East End.
George, aged 23 at the time of the census, was a hawker who sold fruit and vegetables on the streets.
Born in August 1888 in West Ham — then a densely populated and disease-ridden manufacturing centre in East London — he was the sixth of nine children born to Edward Oakman, an East End plumber, and his washerwoman wife, Jessie. Their life in Victorian London would have been brutal and bleak. Thanks to a mid- century population boom, families like the Oakmans were squeezed into dirty tenement blocks, a dozen to a room, run by unscrupulous landlords.
Food was scarce and sanitation was poor. In an article for the Morning Chronicle, the 19th-century investigative journalist Henry Mayhew described gutters overflowing with sewage ‘the colour of strong green tea’.
Diseases such as cholera, scarlet fever and measles were rife.
As children, George and his siblings were forced to work to supplement the family’s meagre income, taking jobs as errand boys, railway carriage cleaners and rope spinners’ helpers.
In May 1908, George married Elizabeth Melsom — known as Lizzie — a girl from a similarly deprived background and the only daughter of an East End fish hawker named William Melsom.
The pair lived in West Ham, where Lizzie worked as a charwoman. The lowest form of domestic servant, charwomen were part-time maids, who typically earned around two shillings a day.
Their home would almost certainly have been shared with other families, and surely would have been squalid.
In his collection of non-fiction essays, Sketches By Boz, Charles Dickens described one such charwoman’s home — shared with half-a- dozen or so families — as ‘wretched’ with ‘broken windows patched with rags and paper’ and ‘filth everywhere.’ George and Lizzie had three sons, one of whom was Michelle’s great-grandfather William Henry, born in January 1910.
Four years later, World War I began and tragedy struck. In an echo of the plot of Downton’s second series — which sees the Granthams’ footman, William, perish after sustaining injuries whilst serving on the frontline — George was killed while fighting in the trenches of the Somme in 1916. He had just turned 28. He was buried hundreds of miles from home, at a military cemetery at Flers, north-west France, and Lizzie was left to raise the boys alone.
So Michelle’s great-grandfather William Henry grew up fatherless, and when he was old enough to work found a job as a grocer’s assistant.
He married an East End girl called Maud, then just 17, at the West Ham register office in the spring of 1928. Their daughter Elizabeth, Michelle’s maternal grandmother, was born a year later.
Though war broke out again a decade later — and men over 18 were sent off to fight for their country — William Henry survived, dying in 1988. His widow Maud died six years later. Meanwhile, their daughter Elizabeth had married Arthur J. Witton, a leather merchant from West Ham, in 1949.
By the time Michelle’s mother, Lorraine Witton, was born in February 1953, Arthur and Elizabeth were living in Stepney, one of the most deprived and bomb-damaged parts of London. When Lorraine grew up, she, like many Eastenders in recent decades, moved out to London’s leafier suburbs. She married Michelle’s father Michael F. Dockery, an Irish immigrant from the small town of Athlone, in 1974, and they moved to Essex.
Born to John Dockery, a soldier, and Patricia Bannon, a farmer’s daughter, Michael descends from a long line of Roman Catholic Irish peasants.
Both his grandfather and greatgrandfather worked as small-scale farmers in the Western parish of Baslick. According to the 1911 census, the Dockery house was little more than a three-room stone hut, with a stable, cow house, piggery, barn and shed surrounding it.
THE family later moved to England and the East End, where Michelle’s father Michael worked as a lorry driver, while her mother Lorraine found work as a shorthand typist before becoming a delivery-woman for a meals on wheels company.
The couple, who Michelle has described as ‘ grafters’, had three daughters: Louise, Joanne and Michelle.
From the beginning, she has said, she knew she wanted to act. ‘I think my parents knew before I did that I was going to be an actress, because I was doing impressions of Margaret Thatcher at the age of four.’
At drama class, says Linda Finch, she ‘outshone everybody’. ‘She played the Cat in a Dick Whittington pantomime, at around nine years old. She was hysterical — she stole the show. We knew at that moment that she really had something.’
Since then, her career has taken her from Essex to the red carpets of Hollywood. She was nominated for a Golden Globe in January, and is reported to have acquired the services of a Hollywood agent. Nevertheless, Dockery insists that fame has not wiped out all memory of her workingclass roots.
‘There’s nothing I love more than going back,’ she has said of Romford. ‘It brings me straight back down to earth and ensures I never become lost in the celebrity side of things.’
She appears to be as good as her word. Earlier this year, she returned to watch a production by local drama students. Witnesses describe her laughing with fellow former pupils.
As Finch puts it: ‘One day she’s up there in Hollywood on the red carpet and then she’s here with her mum and dad going to McDonald’s.’
And, in the literal sense at least, she remains an East End girl. When she isn’t at Highclere filming Downton, or attending premieres and award ceremonies, she resides in Clerkenwell, a short walk from the neighbourhoods where her ancestors once lived.
Of course, the area — now filled with designer boutiques, private members’ bars and fashionable restaurants — is almost unrecognisable from the squalid, diseased and rat-infested corner of London it was in her relatives’ day.
What they would make of it now — or, indeed, of one of their own ruling the roost at Downton Abbey — one can only imagine.