Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
No one would expect such a collection to be here.
I am Beth Kilmarx. I am a curator of rare books and special collections at the Binghamton
University libraries. Tilly Losch is one of the archival collections
that I've been working with and it was just by luck that we found the whole connection
between her and Downton Abbey last spring. Tilly Losch had been married to the 6th Earl
of Carnarvon, the owner of Highclere Castle which is known as Downton Abbey.
Tilly was born in Vienna in 1903 and was a ballet dancer. She was a dancer for at least
10 years before she made her debut. Being in the theatre world, she caught the eye of
various theatre directors and producers. She met Max Reinhardt in Vienna. He had worked
with her as a dancer and had used her as an actress in his famous "Miracle" play. Max
Reinhardt's materials came here in the early 70s and then shortly before her death, she
put in her will that her collections of manuscripts, photographs, and artworks would also come
to special collections because of the Max Reinhardt collection.
We have materials from the late 1930s up until her death. We have correspondence letters.
We have found many incidences that truly parallel Downton Abbey and Highclere Castle.
During the war, valets and butlers left the estate to go fight the war and so you have
that letter from Tilly where she asks what are you going to do without a manservant?
You also see the housekeeper Mrs. Hughes, she suffers from cancer and has to go to London
for treatment. Highclere Castle's housekeeper, Mrs. Sanderson, suffered from Hodgkin's Disease
and had to go to London for treatment. During the wars, slum children were evacuated
to Highclere Castle and in Downton Abbey, you see the castle turned into a hospital.
So, the more we delve into the collections, the more that we see the high number of coincidences
between actual life and the show. The correspondence also shows that she knew
everybody in Hollywood. There wasn't a famous person that Tilly didn't know and correspondence
that we didn't have from that person starting with Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando, all the
way through the alphabet to Orson Welles. The wealth of old Hollywood that's in the
correspondence is just another aspect to study that people can look at.
In addition to the correspondence in the collection, we have photographs. Photographs of her taken
by famous photographers such as Cecil Beaton. We have also over 350 paintings of hers in
the collection. Tilly had a very traumatic divorce from her
first husband, Edward James. It was from after the divorce that she suffered from severe
clinical depression and she spent time in a sanitarium, and that's where she picked
up painting. I would say that 90% of paintings that we
have of her in Binghamton do represent her life. At first when we had the collection,
it's not well used but just the wealth of the information and resources that are available
at Binghamton University today is just waiting to be discovered.