How Lord Fellowes’ brush with the law inspired Downton

AS JULIAN Fellowes plots a follow-up to his hit film version of Downton Abbey, the Oscar-winning screenwriter has revealed a very unlikely secret about the costume drama.

Lord Fellowes has disclosed that the title of his main characters, the Earl and Countess of Grantham, was inspired by the Lincolnshire town where he was stopped by police when running away from boarding school.

Grantham was as far as he got while fleeing the famous Catholic boarding school Ampleforth, in North Yorkshire, which he attended from 11 to 18.

Asked if he enjoyed his time there, Fellowes says: ‘I’m not sure how much I enjoyed it, except towards the end when everything gets better.

‘In fact, when I was 11, I ran away with a friend of mine called Peter Collingridge.

‘ We managed to borrow enough money to get the bus into York and buy a ticket to London.

‘We got on the train and we were pulled off it by police in Grantham, which is why I called Robert Crawley the Earl Of Grantham when I eventually wrote Downton Abbey.’

Fellowes, 70, adds that the escapade wasn’t provoked by any great unhapppiness at £36,486-per-year Ampleforth, whose alumni include actors Rupert Everett and James Norton, rugby player Lawrence Dallaglio, and Angel Of The North sculptor Antony Gormley.

‘It was all rather a big thing, but I’m not sure I was really as unhappy as all that; I think I just wanted something to happen,’ he said in a new podcast for Ampleforth.

‘I got very bored with being a child. I wanted to be an adult, and I think I wasted a lot of my young years just wanting to get on and be grown up and that was a manifestation of it, really.’

Ampleforth went fully co-educational in 2010 and Fellowes adds: ‘When I was there, girls and boys mixing in the school was about as likely as landing on the Moon.’