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| The Legacy of Poldark |
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Page 4 of 5 Poldark’s Cornwall - The Life and Works of Winston Graham will run from June 14 to September 9, and will be open from 10am to 430 pm, admission is free.  Robin Ellis frequently took to horseback in the filming of Poldark, falling off his steed while galloping on one occasion. 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Winston Graham: 1. Graham lied about his age, telling many that he was born in 1910 rather than his actual date of birth, 1908. Many of his obituary notices therefore wrongly recorded him as being 93, when he died in 2003. 2. His first novel The House with the Stained Glass Windows, published in 1934, made him only £29. 3. Graham had a great fear of climbing, rather than a fear of heights, which stemmed from an occasion in Cornwall when, exploring on the cliffs, he slipped six feet down a mineshaft called Sobey’s Ladder. Sobey, a miner who kept a boat there for fishing, was renamed Kellow by Graham and featured in Poldark. 4. Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco, was originally intended to play the heroine (of sorts) in Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Marnie, but the principality refused when they discovered the character was a sexually repressed thief. Tippi Hedren, star of Hitchcock’s The Birds, instead took the lead. 5. The Poldark television series outsold every other historical drama on video, except Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. 6. In his autobiography, Graham compares critics’ initial response to the Poldark books and television programmes to the response to one who has loudly and vulgarly broken wind in a Victorian drawing room. 7. The character of Jud Paynter, one of Ross Poldark’s servants, was based on three different men. One of these was an old sailor called Sampson that Graham served with as a coastguard during the Second World War. 8. The Poldark television series was so popular that Sunday evening church services were rescheduled around the programme. 9. Research was a major aspect of Graham’s writing, so much so that he even had a historical advisor, Fred Harris. When researching his novel The Walking Stick, which features a robbery, Graham took a real-life safe-breaker to lunch. 10. Strangers Meeting, his eighth novel, was based on a failed play, Forsaking All Others. Evidently, Graham considered the novel little better: he identified it as the worst novel he ever wrote. |
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