Lord and Lady St Levan will unveil the new St Ives Mariners Memorial on Smeaton’s Pier at 2pm on Saturday (19th September).
This marks the completion of a four-year community-funded project celebrating the generations of mariners who helped to shape St Ives.
Created by Cornish sculptor Tom Leaper, the life-size bronze memorial depicts two fishermen seated opposite one another, absorbed in the familiar task of working with their nets.
Rather than portraying the fishermen as heroic figures looking out to sea, Leaper wanted to capture something quieter and more familiar. Two working men concentrating on the job in front of them, reflecting the skill, companionship, and repetitive labour that formed part of everyday fishing life in St Ives for generations.
The project began around four years ago when members of the St Ives fishing community approached Leaper with the idea of creating a permanent sculpture celebrating the town’s fishermen and maritime heritage.
It developed into an extraordinary community effort, with approximately £70,000 raised without major external grant funding. Much of this came through an edition of 50 small bronze maquettes, sold through the Penwith Gallery, in St Ives. The gallery took no commission, allowing the proceeds to go directly towards creating the full-size memorial.
Wherever possible, the work remained within Cornwall. Specialist bronze casting was carried out by Fabrication Facility at Longdowns, while LaserMaster produced the precision laser-cut components.
The original fundraising maquette
The full-size sculpture was created from approximately 50 individual bronze castings, subsequently assembled, welded, dressed, and patinated before installation. Its bronze-clad plinth was specially engineered for the exposed marine environment of Smeaton’s Pier.
“There is something very appropriate about using the skills of people working in Cornwall today to create a memorial celebrating the skills and working lives of generations who came before them,” said Leaper.
“I hope that, in years to come, people will walk along Smeaton’s Pier, come across these two fishermen working away at their nets, and be reminded that long before St Ives became internationally known for its art, this was a working fishing town.”
The project has some remarkable connections with the history of St Ives. The original full-size pattern was made in the former Methodist Chapel, opposite the Penwith Gallery — particularly appropriate given the historic relationship between Methodism and the fishing families of St Ives.
The Penwith Gallery itself occupies buildings formerly associated with the Pilchard Press, providing another direct connection with the town’s fishing past. The buildings subsequently became an important centre of the St Ives modern art movement, and today house the Penwith Society of Arts.
The St Ives Mariners Memorial is deliberately different in character from Leaper’s earlier Newlyn Fishermen Memorial, unveiled by HRH The Princess Royal in 2007. While the Newlyn memorial is concerned particularly with remembrance and those lost at sea, the St Ives sculpture is a celebration of the working fishing community — the fishermen, their skills, boats and nets, and the industry around which generations of St Ives families built their lives.
