Nick Darke born Nicholas Temperley Watson Darke (1948 - 2005) was best known as playwright but was also a writer, poet, lobster fisherman, environmentalist, beachcomber, politician, broadcaster, film-maker and chairman of St Eval Parish Council. He attended Newquay Grammar School and trained as an actor at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. After making his professional début in repertory at the Lyric, Belfast, he went on to learn his craft at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, England, where he acted in over 80 plays and directed Man Is Man, The Miser, Absurd Person Singular, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and A Cuckoo in the Nest, 1977-79. He wrote over 25 stage plays which have been performed both within Cornwall and nationally. Many of his plays reflect Cornish society and culture such as the tin mining, countryside, fishermen and the quirky nature of country living. During the later part of his career he worked regularly with the Cornish theatre company Kneehigh Theatre. One of his last works, the documentary The Wrecking Season (2004) which he wrote and narrated, charts the lives of Cornish beachcombers, of which he himself was one having moved permanently back home to Porthcothan in 1990. He married the painter Jane Spurway in 1993 and is the father of film-maker Henry and stepfather of Jim, a marine scientist. He was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1996 taking the Bardic name Scryfer Gwaryow ('Writer of Plays').
