Though he did not go to public school himself, Graham sent his son, Andrew, to Charterhouse and saw him become, in 2001, Master of Balliol, which the author jokingly regarded as being 'next door to being God'.īut in his monetarily leaner youth it was the Cornish terrain that created the atmosphere and character of the Poldark saga Graham experienced it at first hand through a family tragedy. The Liberals won in each case Churchill joined that party, and the author's mother, a keen Liberal, later insisted on calling her second son Winston. Graham had every reason to be aware of social class - his father was a tea importer, his mother was a member of the Mawdsley family, who ran a firm of grocery wholesalers, and his great uncle, James Mawdsley, contested the two-seat Oldham constituency for the Conservative party alongside Winston Churchill. Ross Poldark was created as a hero with shades of Cornish barrenness and darkness, including an unpredictable wife of lower social class, Demelza.

But in 1945, Ross Poldark: A Novel Of Cornwall 1783-1787, was published, the first of the sequence, all bestsellers. Graham always maintained that he had never received a rejection slip, but his first novel, published when he was 23, The House With the Stained Glass Windows (a title typical of his flair for the off-centre) made him only £29, and his first 16 novels, written in longhand when he was still a very young man, were also not successful he had to be subsidised by his widowed mother. His creation of Ross Poldark, Cornish mine-owner and saturnine adventurer, is likely to be the factor which keeps him in the literary canon. But this was a defensive professional ploy, and evidence of a conventional upper middle-class mistrust of self-hype, rather than a mark of reclusiveness: he did in fact enjoy being a member of several London clubs. He rejoiced in being described as 'the most successful unknown novelist in England', and gave few interviews. They made Graham a fortune, though even at the height of their popularity - they were first shown from 1975 to 1977 - he himself remained a strangely (by modern standards) unknown figure. On video, the stories were the most popular historical series ever, after Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice. In Cornwall, churches altered the times of their services to avoid clashing with Poldark. The television series made from his dozen Poldark historical novels were watched by 15 million people. He wrote over 40 novels, which were translated into 17 languages.

Winston graham saga poldark