THE creator of hit TV drama Downton Abbey has been investigating how the real-life stately home of Blenheim Palace coped with the First World War.

Julian Fellowes visited Blenheim Palace in Woodstock to help make the ITV documentary Blenheim Palace: Great War House.

Screened tomorrow at 9pm, the documentary shows how the Great War affected those “upstairs and downstairs” at the home of the Dukes of Marlborough and Spencer-Churchill family.

Mr Fellowes said: “When I created Downton Abbey I wanted to tell the story of this very moment in our history.

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“I wanted to tell about the men and women of a real house, Blenheim Palace, the war stories of a real Downton Abbey.”

By delving into archives, and speaking to experts and relatives of the house’s inhabitants, Mr Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey filmed in Bampton, has revealed stories of men and women who worked and lived at Blenheim during the war.

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He discovered tales of heroism and tragedy, and how the war was the making of Blenheim’s most famous son, Sir Winston Churchill.

The screenwriter discovered that when war was declared Lady Sarah Wilson, the then Duke's sister, volunteered.

She travelled to France to set up a hospital, helping the wounded, while her husband Colonel Gordon Wilson went to fight on the frontline.

The First World War had a great effect on Winston Churchill, as shown in the documentary.

As first Lord of the Admiralty he was held responsible for the disastrous invasion at Gallipoli and was forced out of office, but his response was to go to the Western Front as an ordinary battalion commander.

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Mr Fellowes added: “The First World War made him the man to win the Second World War.”

He also discovered more about Arthur Hine, a lowly clerk on Blenheim estate, who fought on the frontline at Ypres.

Sgt Hine was selected as a dispatch rider by Churchill and travelled through Antwerp in Belgium while it was being bombarded.

He helped a Belgian girl whose parents had both been killed during the bombing, taking her back to England to live with his family.

Following the war, the 9th Duke dedicated his life to Blenheim, spending money on the house and gardens, a legacy continued today by his ancestor the 11th Duke of Marlborough.

Mr Fellowes added: “The Churchill family, and in fact the whole Blenheim community, had entered the Great War still governed by the ways of the 19th century.

“They emerged from it to find themselves in the 20th.”

  • Watch the trailer for Blenheim Palace: Great War House

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