| Description | The collection represents a very full record of Arthur Caddick's published career and of his engagement in the political and cultural landscape of West Penrith, Cornwall. Included are: correspondence with authors, publishers and artists (including Poetry Review editor Derek Parker, artists Peter Lanyon and William Redgrave, the publishers Toni Savage and Eric Quayle, and writer and critic Denys Val Baker), autograph manuscripts and typescripts (published and unpublished), legal papers, presscuttings, personal and family correspondence, diaries and notebooks, memoirs by Caddick's wife and daughter, and copies of Caddick's publications (these are now listed on the Library's online OPAC catalogue and form part of the Reserve Collection).
Add.1 CD of Arthur Caddick: reading 'The tilting of the scale'
Add. 2 'I'll raise the wind tomorrow' a memoir of a childhood written by his daughter Diana Calvert. Includes a CD of Arthur Caddick reading his poetry. |
| Admin History | Arthur Caddick (1911-1987) was born in 1911 in Coatham in Yorkshire. He was educated at Sedburgh and Wadham College, Oxford, graduating in Jurisprudence. Caddick married his wife, Peggy, in 1938 and the couple went to live in Brittany, France, leaving when Germany invaded Poland. Arthur Caddick was employed at the War Office during the Second World War, before moving his family (eventually including five children) to Cornwall in 1945. For thirty-six years he lived in the same cottage, 'Windswept', above the village of Nancledra in West Penwith, until ill health necessitated a move to North Devon. Caddick arrived in Cornwall intending to pursue a writing career, and quickly found the inspiration he was searching for in the place and people of his adopted home. Much of his published work is deeply connected to Cornwall, where he mixed with artists and writers and became involved in the rise of the Cornish nationalist movement, an aspect of Cornish life which his writing both celebrates and satirises.
His published poetry books include 'The Ballad of Michael Joseph, the Captain of Cornwall' (1947), 'Alphabet of West Cornwall' (1963), 'A Croft in Cornwall' (1968), and 'Broadsides from Bohemia, in praise of painters, publicans and other Cornish Saints' (1973). His autobiography 'Laughter at Land's End' was published post-humously in 2005. |