Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis, CBE, MC (28 May 1883 – 9 April 1978) was an English-born Welsh architect known chiefly as creator of the Italianate village of Portmeirion in North Wales.
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Life

[edit]Origins, education and early career
Clough Williams-Ellis was born in Gayton, Northamptonshire, England, but his family moved back to his father's native North Wales when he was four. The family have strong Welsh roots and Clough Williams-Ellis claimed direct descent from Owain Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales.

Village Hall, Stone. Clough Williams-Ellis, 1910.
He was educated at Oundle School in Northamptonshire. Though he read for the natural sciences tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, he never graduated. After a few months at the Architectural Association in London in 1903/4 (which he located by looking up "Architecture" in the London telephone directory) he worked for an architect for a few short months before setting up his own practice in London.
[edit]Plas Brondanw and Portmeirion


In 1908, he inherited a small country house, Plas Brondanw from his father, restoring and embellishing it over the rest of his life, and rebuilding it after a fire in 1951. He served with distinction in World War I serving first with the Royal Fusiliers and then the Welsh Guards with whom he was awarded the Military Cross. During the 1920s, he began work on Portmeirion, later the location for The Prisoner (1967-68) TV seres, .

[edit]Later life

A fashionable architect in the inter-war years, Williams-Ellis' other works include buildings at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, and groups of cottages at Cornwell, Oxfordshire; Tattenhall in Cheshire and Cushendun, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Williams-Ellis is also known for his design (in the 1930s) of the former summit building on Snowdon, which - after unsympathetic alteration in the 1960s and a long-term lack of maintenance - was described by Prince Charles as "the highest slum in Wales".

Williams-Ellis also served on several government committees concerned with design and conservation and was instrumental in setting up the British National Parks after 1945. He wrote and broadcast extensively on architecture, design and the preservation of the rural landscape.

[edit]Family

In 1915, Williams-Ellis married the writer Amabel Strachey. Their son, Christopher Moelwyn Strachey Williams-Ellis (1923-13 March 1944), a Lieutenant in the Welsh Guards was killed in action in Italy during the Second World War and was subsequently buried in plot VIII, row C, grave 24 at Minturno War Cemetery.[2] Their elder daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, used the name Portmeirion Pottery for the company she created with her husband in 1961. Clough Williams-Ellis' great-nephew David Williams-Ellis is a renowned contemporary figurative sculptor.

[edit]Honours

In 1958, Williams-Ellis was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire "for public services".[3] He was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 1972 "for services to the preservation of the environment and to architecture".[4] At the time, he was the oldest person ever to be knighted. [5]

[edit]Death

Sir Clough Williams-Ellis died in April 1978, aged 94. In accordance with his wishes, he was cremated, and his ashes went to make up a marine rocket, which was part of a New Year’s Eve firework display over the estuary at Portmeirion some twenty years after his death.