Arthur Caddick, according to his publisher Michael Williams in The Western Morning News in 1968, a few months before the poet’s death at the age of 76, “had more than the hint of the Shakespearean actor…He had that rare aility to make his reders chuckle, sometimes laugh”. Caddick, a Yorkshireman, read Law at Oxford. His first verses were published in Punch.

For many years Caddick and his wife Peggy lived in an isolated cottage at Nancledra, and he spent much of his time in St Ives pubs. His obituary in The St Ives Times & Echo of 17 April 1987 reads: “His great booming voice can still in imagination be heard reverberating around the bars of Downlong pubs as in the days when St Ives painters hung their pictures on the walls, when conversation was worth the breath it cost and the rolling Cornish road home was safer for the unsteady pedestrian than today.

He made many broadcasts and appeared on television. He was the author of some sixteen titles, some of them slim. They include:

            Alphabet of West Cornwall

            One Hundred Doors are Open

            Call of the West

AFifty Year Span (1979) and The Bucchic Bicycle (1986), both finely illustrated and printed on hand0made paper, can be seen at the Archive Study Centre.

Caddick became friends of many of the painters, potters and sculptors of St Ives. He had a less than successful friendship with Sven Berlin, whom he sued over publication of Berlin’s book The Dark Monarch, in which he was parodied in the character ‘Eldred Haddock’.

Arthur Caddick’s autobiography Laughter from Land’s End, edited by Rod Humphries, was published By St Ives Printing & Publishing Company in December 2005.