The Founders

Clough and Amabel Williams-Ellis, who founded the Trust whose website you are reading, lived long and varied lives together in a partnership that lasted more than 60 years.

Clough, born in 1883, always felt he was born an architect ‘Although much else has befallen me in the course of a long and varied life seems quite irrelevant to my master passion, yet even as a scientist, engineer, soldier, amateur sailor, country landowner, traveller and writer, the architect within me has been ever present, no matter how heavily overlaid by more immediate concerns.’ Architecture lead naturally to conservation and town planning as he became a passionate advocate for preserving beautiful places for the nation.

Amabel Strachey his wife was a writer of novels, political pamphlets, books for children on science and history as well as notable collections of fairy stories and science fiction. ‘An Anatomy of Poetry’ her first book is still a classic nearly 100 years later. Her pamphlets warning of the dangers of Nazism are displayed in London’s Holocaust museum. Her lively writing has been recently included in a volume of “radical writing for children” and her post-war feminist work The Art of being a Woman has had recent academic interest.

They were both prolific authors and wrote several books together, see details on the Library page.

Of their three children Susan achieved fame as a designer, notably of ceramics at Portmeirion Potteries, a firm run by her and her husband. Plas Brondanw now houses a gallery run by a Trust devoted to her work. Younger daughter Charlotte, a biologist, married a New Zealand serviceman who was seconded during the war to undertake research at Cambridge University where she gained her PhD. They moved back to New Zealand in 1946, where Charlotte became a founding member of the science faculty at the University of Waikato. The youngest child and only son Christopher sadly died in action in WWII, a devastating loss for the family.