The real-life stars of Upstairs, Downstairs: The intriguing (and very sexy) families who lived at 165 Eaton Place

By Geoffrey Wansell UPDATED: 17:35, 14 December 2010

The magnificent, five-storey home was one of the most famous addresses in the world.

One billion television viewers in 36 countries would tune in during the early Seventies to watch the goings-on behind the door of 165 Eaton Place in London’s Belgravia.

It was here that all 68 episodes of ITV’s Upstairs, Downstairs were set between 1903 and 1930 — featuring its fictional inhabitants Lord and Lady Bellamy and their servants, including the gruff butler Hudson and the ever-cheery cook, Mrs Bridges.

Prestigious address: You would be hard pressed to find 165 Eaton Place. To protect residents' privacy, producers used 65 Eaton Place and painted a '1' before the house's number

And now, this address is to star again in a new three-part version of the series, which will be screened over Christmas on BBC1.

In this incarnation, new masters, ladies and servants have moved into Eaton Place in 1936.

Jean Marsh, who conceived the original idea with her friend Dame Eileen Atkins, will reprise her role as Rose, by now promoted from head parlour maid to housekeeper.

Atkins is back, too, as the formidable matriarch of the new owners, the Holland family.

Like the Bellamys, the Hollands find their lives set against the great events of the first half of the 20th century. But instead of women’s suffrage and World War I, Britain is facing a threat from Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts, the politics of appeasement and the gathering storm of another war.

The original cast of the Seventies drama: (Top row) Jean Marsh, Christopher Beeny, Angela Baddeley, Gordon Jackson, Jacqueline Tong. (Middle row) Simon Williams, Meg Wynn Owen, David Langton. (Floor) Lesley-Anne Down and Jenny Tomasin

But what of the real-life families who lived behind that famous door just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace?

The Mail has traced the stories of the successive inhabitants — offering a fascinating snapshot of life in 19th and 20th-century London.

They included a clutch of political grandees and a society hostess who was one of the most notorious women of her day — with lovers ranging from Mosley to a Cabinet minister and an American filmstar.

Not that you would know any of that today.

Indeed, walking through Belgravia, you would be hard pressed to find 165 Eaton Place. The original producers, keen to protect the inhabitants from a trail of gawping TV fans, used 65 Eaton Place instead and simply painted a ‘1’ before the house’s number.

The house is now divided into four flats, with the mews at the rear forming a fifth. The basement, inhabited by the Upstairs, Downstairs staff, is now home to a Portuguese caretaker, Maria Araujo.

Modern twist: Stars of the modern BBC version, with Keeley Hawes (centre)

The property was part of an 1824 development commissioned by the Conservative MP Richard Grosvenor, the 2nd Marquess of Westminster. He hired Thomas Cubitt, one of London’s most sought-after builders (and great-great-grandfather of the Duchess of Cornwall).

Eaton Place had ten bedrooms, two drawing rooms, a dining room, library, morning room, nursery floor at the top and basement servants’ quarters. In the mews was stabling for five horses and two carriages.

But the Marquess never lived there. It was one of his many property developments in Belgravia.

In 1855, it was sold to Viscount Midleton. After he and his wife died, the lease was taken over in 1879 by their daughter Mary-Emma, with her Tory MP husband, and fossil collector, the Earl of Enniskillen. In 1888, after they had died, the lease was sold to a baronet, Sir Walter Riddell, a county court judge who lived there until he died in 1892. His widow, Alicia, stayed on until her death in 1912.

There followed a tenancy by a Shropshire landowner and then the lease went to a Lieutenant Colonel just before World War I. Five years later, he passed the lease to his cousin, John Cuthbert Denison-Pender, who had been Tory MP for Newmarket.

Glamorous: Claire Foy co-stars

He lived there with his wife Irene, and children, John, Richard and Gaynor. Denison-Pender, who served as an Newmarket MP from 1913- 1918, became a member of the Coalition Government under David Lloyd George in 1916 and was elected MP for the Balham and Tooting in 1918.

He had fought in France and Belgium during the War, which gave him his political nickname, Captain Jack, but he was recalled to London to help to run the Government’s legislative programme from the War Office.

Pender retired from politics in 1922 to devote the rest of his life to a career in business, and in 1937, he became the 1st Baron Pender.

Like their fictional Upstairs, Downstairs counterparts, the Penders had a domestic staff of seven.

Pender’s grandson, the present Lord Pender, 76, remembers visiting the house as a boy. ‘Huge, glamorous parties were regularly held there,’ he recalls. ‘It was the “high 1930s” and the house positively buzzed. But World War II in 1939 brought an end to all that gaiety.’

Tragedy struck the family when Irene Pender died in 1943, and her devastated husband deserted Eaton Place and spent the rest of his life at his country house in Buckinghamshire.

The great house at 65 Eaton Place was never again to be occupied by a single family. During most of the Fifties, it was empty while it was divided into flats.

Then, in 1959, the grand first and second floor apartment saw the property’s most controversial and flamboyant resident.

Lady Alexandra Metcalfe was the youngest daughter of Lord Curzon, a former Foreign Secretary and Viceroy of India. Together with her elder sisters, Irene and Cynthia (known as Cimmie), she had sent shockwaves through the Thirties British establishment with her sexual adventures.

Born in India and named after her godmother, Queen Alexandra, she was brought up by a series of nannies and governesses after her American heiress mother died when she was two. By the time she was 18, and hit the London social scene in 1922, she was described as ‘the prettiest debutante of the season’ and as ‘distinctly racy’.

Wilful and with an appetite for cocktails, Alexandra waltzed through the 1920s with a succession of lovers. She became the first lover of the King’s fourth son, Prince George, but then married Army Major Edward Dudley Metcalfe.

In a sign of how close-knit her circle was, however, her husband was equerry to the Prince of Wales, who was destined to become, briefly, King Edward VIII.

‘Huge, glamorous parties were regularly held there. It was the “high 1930s” and the house positively buzzed. But World War II in 1939 brought an end to all that gaiety’

Meanwhile, sister Cimmie married Sir Oswald Mosley. But heartbroken at her husband’s promiscuity, she died at the age of just 34.

It didn’t take long for Alexandra (who was still married) to begin a scandalous affair with Mosley, who was also sexually involved with Diana Guinness, one of the famous Mitford sisters, whom he eventually married.

Alexandra was besotted with Mosley and acted as a go-between between him and Dino Grandi, Mussolini’s ambassador to London (and another of her lovers).

Throughout this time she remained close to Edward VIII and supported him during the Abdication Crisis in 1936. She was also one of the seven guests at his wedding to Wallis Simpson in 1937.

According to a friend, her morals were ‘positively Sicilian’ despite her marriage, and she continued to have a string of glamorous lovers throughout her life, including the movie star Douglas Fairbanks and the American diplomat Averill Harriman. Another admirer was Lord Halifax (Foreign Secretary at the start of the war) who wrote her long and passionate letters.

As the years passed, however, Lady Alexandra’s appetites mellowed. After her husband’s death in 1947, she devoted her energies to charity work — in particular the Save The Children Fund.

Old clothes, new faces: Jean Marsh with Gordon Jackson in 1972 and Keeley Hawes with Ed Stoppard today

By the time she moved into 65 Eaton Place, she was travelling the world doing charitable works — for which she was made a CBE in 1975.

With her black poodle, Sambo, Lady Alexandra remained at 65 Eaton Place until her death at the age of 91 in 1995.

Since then, the flats have mostly been lived in by a string of bankers, financiers and property developer In part, because they’re the ones who can afford the pricetags. Flats in Eaton Place now sell for between £2 million and £6 million; a house nearby went on the market last year for £27 million.

At the top of the building, in the fourth-floor flat, are a banking couple — he works for an investment bank called Altium Capital, she for Barclays.

On the third-floor, is a flat generally left empty but owned by a Portuguese company. The first and second floors are rented out by an award- winning Greek woman poet and her lawyer husband.

The owner of the ground and first-floor flat is a director of capital management firm who has his own domestic staff and a chauffeur.

The job of the caretaker, Maria, who lives in the basement, is to keep the communal areas tidy and sort the residents’ post.

After all, it’s not as if the home of Upstairs, Downstairs could survive without staff.

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