St Ives is frankly unsympathetic to the little colony of disillusionment in its midst. When several prime members, bearded and be-jeaned, broke down and asked for jobs at the local Employment Exchange, the manager hid his embarrassment and firmly told them to return when they had had a wash. “It would have been an insult “to send them round to an employer,” he explained, with true local pride.

The feeling here against the “weirdies” might be attributed in Chelsea or Greenwich Village to the narrowness of a small town if St Ives were not already such a tolerant community and the meeting place of two worlds. Mixed together here in the same borough are about eight thousand laymen and what is claimed to be the largest colony of artists outside London. And if the laymen who include such “respectable” people as fishermen and hotel managers frown on the “weirdies,” so do the artists who range from traditionalists to the most abstract of moderns. The rebels without a cause seem to appeal to no one. “They give me the pip,” is a typical comment. One painter described how six “weirdies” he knew were living in a single room in a cottage. “I started off being sympathetic to the kids,” he said, “but now they just seem dirty and I can’t stand the way the girls come puffing along carrying all the luggage while the boys saunter along behind them.”

Miss Barbara Hepworth, one of the best-known local residents, was too busy preparing her sculpture for an exhibition overseas to be bothered about the “weirdies.’ Her latest work stood up in her tropical-looking garden as if it had grown there. But her industry helped to explain how St Ives has come to accept its artists. Beginning with all the solid old English prejudices about the artistic life, the local people seem now to accept that the real artist means business. The town lives partly on the tourist trade, and the artists’ colony helps that, but above all the best of the artists – like Miss Hepworth – are plainly as industrious as the fishermen themselves or the local bank manager.

Barbara Hepworth (1903 - 1975) at work in her studio in St Ives, 1967.

Photograph: Express Newspapers/Getty

The local galleries, at least one for each school, are full to overflowing. And even one of the older residents who until quite recently, condemned the artists as a “social problem” says now that things must be all right in St Ives after all because there wasn’t a single case of drunkenness last year. Having an artists’ colony has certainly not meant an excess of bohemianism and even with the “weirdies” registering their protest against convention here St Ives at night is still as peaceful as any other Cornish holiday resort.

Those who want to give the artists’ colony a bad name choose not to distinguish between the real thing and the imitation, for the colony attracts hangers-on just as much as St Ives attracts tourists. They arrive in the summer straight from London and are soon stalking the harbour looking every inch the popular conception of an artist, but apparently disinclined actually to put paint to canvas. There are local murmurings against them, if only because their obvious ability to survive without doing any work may be likely to set a bad example.

It is a test of the colony’s standing that these parasites do not spoil its good name. Besides them even the “weirdies” might achieve a little popularity, particularly when they respond to the helpfulness of the Employment Exchange, have a wash and go to work as washer-ups in one of the hotels. A true beatnik really living his own way of life might be unwilling to do anything like that, but then there are not many of them even in Greenwich Village, and in St Ives they are surrounded by good examples of industry.

Not all the hard work being done may be valuable – or even worth the prices given it in the exhibition catalogues – but a colony that includes artists like Hepworth and Bernard Leach, the potter, to mention but two, has nothing to be ashamed of. And it continues to shatter one of the worst illusions of the English – that they cannot get on with artists.