JamesM

Alfred Shaughnessy, director, producer and writer for films (Just My Luck, Laxdale Hall) and televsion (Upstairs, Downstairs and The Saint), died yesterday in Cornwall.

julian_craster

From The Independent
Obituaries

Alfred Shaughnessy
Principal writer of the Edwardian drama 'Upstairs, Downstairs'
Published: 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