A G U I D E to E N G L I S H T E A
HIGHCLERE CASTLE SOAPS, TEAS & BOOKS
– Stories and scents from the “real Downton Abbey” – We would like to introduce you to Highclere Castle, the setting of Focus Features’ new film, Downton Abbey, of which Viking is a proud partner. The true story of Highclere is remarkably similar to that told in Downton Abbey—it owes its survival to an heiress who married into a family of earls. In 1895, at the young age of 19, Almina Wombwell, the illegitimate daughter of millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild, married the 5th Earl of Carnarvon of Highclere. She brought to the family a huge dowry of £500,000 (about £50 million today), which helped sustain the castle through the next fifty years and two world wars. Lady Almina Carnarvon was an extraordinary woman who transformed Highclere into a hospital in August 1914. Acting as head matron, with the best surgeons and nurses, she welcomed severely injured soldiers who wrote that Highclere was something like a “paradise” after the battlefields and trenches of Gallipoli and northern France. Tirelessly, she saved lives and limbs, reassuring families and patients throughout the war and the devastating flu pandemic that 20