Memoirs of a Private Man

Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

• Winston Graham
  
• Preface
  
• BOOK ONE
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• BOOK TWO
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  

Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark' novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.

Aside from the Poldark series, Graham's most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham's other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.

I was in Pratt's Club one evening recently and sat next to Patrick Leigh Fermor. Talk came round to the subject of autobiographies, and I told him I had written a large part of mine some few years ago but then, self-doubting, had put it away in my safe pending further thought. Only four people had read it, and of those the only ‘ outsider' was an old friend who had been the chief editor at a large London publishing firm. Her view was one of general approval of what I had written, with one proviso – she felt that my life, at least as I had depicted it, was a little too ‘exemplary' to attract attention these days.

When I told him this, Paddy looked at me with a quizzical scrutiny. ‘Surely you must have committed
some
sins?'

‘ Of course,' I replied, ‘but these are all
ordinary
sins, which only
just
come into that category now. No one is interested in reading about them. The trouble is, I have not committed any of the fashionable sins, such as murder, burglary, buggery, sodomy, child abuse, gang rape, necrophilia—'

He interrupted firmly: ‘Have you ever committed simony?'

‘ Um – er – what's that?' I asked.

He lowered his voice, his eyes globular with tidings. ‘Church bribery,' he said.

This closed the conversation for a while, but after another glass of wine he returned to the subject.

‘ When I get back to Greece I'll send you a letter listing all the sins I think you
might
have committed.'

‘ Fair enough,' I said, ‘but put it in a brown envelope, won't you.'

‘ Of course,' he agreed. He finished his wine. ‘But I shall print SINS on the corner.'

I have waited hopefully, but so far have heard nothing. Perhaps he has forgotten. (Of course he is always the despair of his publisher for writing his books so slowly.) Or perhaps it was all the fantasy of a jolly evening.

Anyway, this tells the reader what to expect.
‘May it please Your Lordship …'

About five years ago I met a well-dressed stranger at the Savile Club who, in the course of conversation, asked me what my profession was. I said I was a novelist. ‘Oh, really?' he said. ‘But what do you do for a living?'

This is an extreme case of one of the amiable misconceptions that exist in the minds of the public about the rewards of authorship. At the other extreme are those who assume that, after beginning one's writing life in an attic smoking pot in company with a dandruffed girlfriend, one only has to write one successful book and one is able to buy a lemon-yellow Rolls-Royce and escape to the Bahamas to avoid tax. (This pretty well happened to Michael Arlen many years ago when he wrote
The Green Hat
, but it is still rare.) Between these extremes are as many gradations as there are authors writing.

I am, I suppose, what is generally called a popular novelist. So I am not particularly regarded by the literary trend-makers of our time. When my first Poldark book,
Ross Poldark
, was published it was a Book Society Recommendation. (Much later, another Cornish novel,
The Grove of Eagles
, was a Book Society Choice.) But when the
Poldark
novels were put on as a series on television, most critics disliked them. Some absolutely hated them. When the series became an enormous success they just preferred to avoid reference to it. Like people in a Victorian drawing room when someone has loudly and vulgarly broken wind, they tried to pretend it hadn't happened.

But I have been successful, yes. And very lucky too. When my father died I was nineteen and my mother knew there was only one thing I wanted to do in life, and as she could just afford to support me if I lived at home, she offered to do so. It suited her well, for my elder brother was married, and she didn't like the thought of living alone. It suited me, for I could dream and write the days away, madly anxious, of course, to justify my existence by making a living out of this chosen profession but not having to depend on it for bed and board. The novelist George Gissing, when told of some rising young writer of whom everyone had great hopes, would look out from under his heavy brows and say: ‘Has he
starved
?' By that criterion I never qualified.

But one lived on a
tight
rein. There was never money to spare for being adventurous. Money for all essentials, but little else. When at the age of twenty-five I gathered together enough money for my first ever trip abroad – to Paris – I came home with seven shillings left. And by then I was a fully-fledged novelist, with two books published.

I was born in Victoria Park, Manchester, before the First World War. My mother's grandfather had started his own business as a wholesale grocer in Gorton, Manchester, in 1825, and later moved to Shudehill, where the firm remained until it was bombed out in 1941. In the Thirties it began to expand into the pharmaceutical trade, and gradually this took over so that by the 1950s the grocery side had been altogether dropped. Mawdsley's is now the largest privately owned pharmaceutical firm in England.

My mother's father was a big man – 6 ft and at his heaviest weighed 21 stone 7 lbs, or 301 lbs. His wife was tiny, and they had nine children, of whom five survived. One of my mother's earliest memories was of
her
mother sitting beside the fire in tears, her long black hair down, weeping for the loss of another baby. My grandmother – this same one – became very delicate between pregnancies and frequently felt faint. The doctor prescribed a teaspoon of brandy, and she followed his advice. When that doctor died the new doctor found that she was getting through four bottles a week. He forbade all spirits. My grandmother desperately and loudly proclaimed that she would
die
, but she did not, and thereafter recovered.

She was a Greenhow, and I know very little about her family except that her grandfather had five wives – a considerable achievement in the days when divorce was scarcely to be thought of and the average man did not have Henry VIII's advantage of being able to send them to the block. My grandfather was a Mawdsley – a name of minor consequence in the city of Manchester. His father, Thomas Mawdsley (1800–1880), was a Chartist and helped to found one of the first trade unions, the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners, in 1845. I do not know what his business was – presumably to do with cotton – but by the time he was forty he had made enough money to retire, thereafter spending his time and energies on schemes for educating the working man. For ten years he was secretary of the Lancashire Short Time Committee, working with his counterparts in Yorkshire and under the Earl of Shaftesbury to get the Ten Hours Bill on the statute books.

In 1849 he led a delegation to London, where he stayed six months, testifying about conditions in the cotton mills of Lancashire to a select committee of the House of Commons. When the Ten Hours Act was finally passed in 1850, a dinner was held in London to celebrate the great occasion and he was invited to speak. He refused, saying that he was ‘only good at pot-hooks'. It is a good Lancashire expression and is the only evidence I can find in my ancestry that anyone else may have had some aptitude for writing. It also shows a peculiarly Mawdsley sense of humour.

When he died he was given a public funeral, and a flattering, if not altogether grammatical, tribute to his activities was put on his tall gravestone, which is in Harpurhey Cemetery.

My grandfather's cousin, James Mawdsley (1848–1902), was also prominent in the trade union movement, taking over the Secretaryship of the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners in 1878, but always on the side of moderation and tending to deplore the politicizing of the trade unions. So in 1899 he stood for Parliament for the double constituency of Oldham as a ‘Tory Trade Unionist', opposing two Liberals. His running mate was that famous Socialist, Winston Churchill, fighting his first election; but in spite of all they could do the issues became so confused that the electorate played safe and voted for the Liberals, Alfred (later Baron) Emmott and Walter Runciman (later Viscount Runciman of Doxford).