Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
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 Graham
Memoirs of a Private Man
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 …’
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
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.
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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).
Mr Churchill and Mr Mawdsley remained friends until James died, but by the time I was born Mr Churchill had himself become a Liberal and my mother, having imbibed Liberalism at her father’s knee, decided it would be a good idea if I bore his name.
My grandfather had a substantial house in Dickenson Road, and a carriage and pair for when he took his wife out. But a tramway was laid down the road, and, still in the days of horse trams, he would run after a tram, in spite of his great bulk, and jump on it to take him to his business in the mornings. When he was transferring his business from Gorton to the more central and larger premises at Shudehill his sons were still at school, and his eldest daughter had run away from home to marry a sailor, so he came to rely on my mother, his second daughter, who managed the Gorton premises for him while he was establishing the other. Perhaps this was how my mother came to have such a good business head, though, after she was married, she did not employ it gainfully.
My mother was looked on as ‘delicate’. As a girl she was pretty but very slight – ‘like a yard of pump water’, as her elder sister tartly observed – and although she had a number of suitors, it was not until she met my father at a church outing, when she was twenty-seven, that the magic worked. As very much the younger son (my brother Cecil was ten years older), I was not able to observe my parents through all their married life; but they did seem to be completely devoted to each other for the whole of the thirty years they had together. If it is true in marriage that one is always the lover and one the loved, he was certainly the lover.
My father always gave me the impression of having more cultural and intellectual interests than the Mawdsleys (who by this generation had lost all the public-spirited zeal of their forebears), but he was of a slightly lower social status. His father had kept a shop of some sort, and his mother was a sturdy, benign, broad-spoken, vigorous Blackburn woman who had somehow surprisingly produced three children of unmistakable gentility and ambition, all of them with educated voices, though their schooling had been slight. My father when he married was with a firm of tea importers in Sheffield. He played the cello. His younger brother, who worked on a Liverpool newspaper, played the violin. Their sister was intensely musical, and for a time ran her own orchestra. Though no performer herself – I remember some excruciating evenings – she was a good teacher both of the piano and the violin. (For a short time she taught the young Kathleen Ferrier.)
My mother played the piano extremely well but with a restricted repertoire of things she knew and had long practised. As a girl she would practise four hours a day. She was no sight-reader. Some of the pleasantest memories of my youth were the Sunday evenings when I would sit in the drawing room reading a book and humming or whistling the familiar Mozart or Schubert. She didn’t seem to mind my accompaniment.
Before my parents married, my mother’s mother told my father that they could never have children: ‘Anne is too delicate.’ Yet in fact Anne lived to be eighty and produced two sons, both of whom have handsomely exceeded their mother’s age.
At the reception after their wedding my mother remembers that her old sweetheart, Will Bowker, who had a good tenor voice, was singing ‘Son of my Soul’ as she came down the stairs in her going-away costume. Later, catching the train to take them on their honeymoon, my father leaned out to wave goodbye to those who had come to see them off, and sat back on his silk hat.
They went to Llandudno, and no doubt made gentle love in the long September evenings. When she was old I took her back there. She had not been to Llandudno in the interval, but with characteristic reserve forbore to make any comment other than the casual remarks she had made in other places we had visited.
Eventually I volunteered the question that coming to this town again after so long must bring back many memories. She said: ‘ Everything I look at is like a stone in my heart.’
I don’t know where my parents lived when they were first married, but after a while they moved to Huby, near Sheffield, so that my father should be near his business. But the hard water did not suit my mother, who was living up to her reputation of being delicate, and they moved back to Manchester. About this time the tea firm went into liquidation, and my grandfather invited my father to join him in running the firm of D. Mawdsley & Co. This aroused intense jealousy on the part of his eldest son, Tom, who by now had left school and was expecting to inherit control of the firm. Tom had all the makings of an excellent engineer but had no talent for commerce, and when eventually he did come into the firm, followed by his ineffectual but well-meaning brother Daniel, the jealousy continued. My father, who did not suffer fools gladly (or even silently), could certainly have been a more tactful man; but it meant that for about twenty years this incompatible partnership, constantly engendering petty backbiting and rancour, continued, until it was broken by my father’s premature illness – at fifty-four – and death – at sixty.
I was born at 66 Langdale Road, Victoria Park – film producer Monja Danischewsky later suggested there should be a plaque put on the house marked ‘Watch this Space’ – but when I was two my
parents moved to a somewhat better house in Curzon Avenue – No. 18. One of my first memories is of being allowed into the front door of the empty house, toddling the length of the long hall into the dining room and trying to peer out of the windows at the back garden. But the window sills were too high for me to see out. I soon learned my new address but it came out as ‘Eighteen Cur-daddy Addy’.
Victoria Park was something of an anachronism even in those days, being a partly independent, self-ruling small district only three miles from the centre of Manchester. One paid the city rates, of course, but an additional rate was levied to cover the special facilities offered – manned barricades at all entry points, to keep out beggars and other undesirables, park-keepers to see that a decent order was maintained inside the confines, no public transport nearer than the gates, which was a considerable disadvantage to the frail and the elderly. Motor cars and carriages of course went in and out, when the frontier barriers had to be raised for them. This was no park in the ordinary sense of being a publicly owned place of recreation. For that one went to Birch Park, just outside the confines.
Victoria Park had been initiated by a group of wealthy merchants – building their heavy-stuccoed, porticoed, sash-windowed Victorian mansions set amid heavy Victorian trees – who wanted privacy and privilege and were prepared to pay for it by forming a quiet enclave within the noisy city; and this was precisely what they had achieved. By about the turn of the century part of the original park was developed and a number of avenues of smaller houses built to accommodate a much less well-to-do but still fairly select type of city dweller who shared and helped to pay for the amenities of the park.
18 Curzon Avenue was a tall, narrow semi-detached house with a long hall flanked by a sizeable drawing room and a kitchen and scullery, with a dining room at the back. Stairs led up to five bedrooms, a bathroom, a lavatory, and there was also an outside lavatory, and fairly extensive cellars, one of which, I think, was intended for wine. If so, it was sadly neglected during our occupancy. Not that my family was ever teetotal on principle, but we scarcely ever drank liquor of any sort, and certainly not wine.