Sculptor, decorative artist and stained-glass window designer. Born in Liverpool, the twelfth child of Dr David and Sarah Bland Williams, she studied at Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art, 1895–1900, where her tutors included Charles John Allen, Robert Anning Bell and Herbert McNair. Awarded a £60 prize for the range and quality of her student work, she arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1900. She studied sculpture at the Académie Colarossi (with Jean-Antoine Injalbert) and made wash jug and bowl sets for the commercial market, to supplement her income.
In Paris she met her future husband, painter and illustrator Morris Meredith Williams (1881–1973). She returned to Liverpool in 1905 with a view to earning money and making new contacts. She spent three months designing one-off pieces for the Della Robbia Pottery in Birkenhead and sold her designs for stained glass windows to Guthrie & Wells in Glasgow. She and Morris married in 1906 and moved to Edinburgh, where Morris had a part-time job teaching drawing at Fettes College. For the next decade, most of the pieces she showed and sold (through exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and elsewhere) were decorative – designs for stained glass, painted plaster overmantels and small sculptures (often of mythical characters) in terracotta, plaster and bronze.
From spring 1915 until spring 1919, while Morris was in the army, her base was Peppard, in Oxfordshire. During this period, she designed her first war memorial (a painted plaster low relief for the family of a soldier), two stained glass windows and most significantly, eight large, painted plaster panoramas, for the Women’s Work Sub-Committee of the Imperial War Museum, depicting some of the roles played by women during the war. Six of them were shown in The Nation’s War Paintings and Other Records at the Royal Academy in 1919.
The following year, the architect Sir Robert Lorimer was designing a war memorial for Queenstown (now Komani) in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. He commissioned Alice Meredith Williams to model four panels in low relief, to be cast in bronze, and a more-than-life-size sculpture of St George and the Dragon, also to be cast in bronze. This first large-scale and well-paid commission enabled her, finally, to move her workspace out of the spare bedroom and into a studio of her own, a former stable in Edinburgh’s Circus Lane. Two years later (1922), she and Lorimer won the contract to design a war memorial for Paisley, which features her three-dimensional sculptural group, in bronze, The Spirit of the Crusaders. The 1:3 scale model from which she worked can be seen on the stairs of the National Museum Cardiff.
The largest single collection of Alice Meredith Williams’ work can be seen on and within the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, which opened to the public in 1927. She designed and modelled twelve works (including several groups) which were carved in stone (by William Donaldson), or wood (by William and Alexander Clow), or cast in bronze. Morris co-created three of them, the largest and best known of which is a low-relief frieze in the Shrine, illustrating, through sixty individual, almost life-size figures, the roles played by Scottish men and women in the First World War.
In the spring of 1929, Alice and Morris Meredith Williams left Edinburgh for Devon. From here she continued to accept commissions, mainly for ecclesiastical settings. For the pieces she modelled for wood, her chosen carver in this period was Thomas Good. Alice Meredith Williams died from cancer on 3 March 1934 and is buried at St Andrew’s Church, South Tawton, beneath a stone designed by her husband.
Bibliography: R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 99–100, 108, 482, vol. 2, pp. 20–21; D. Macmillan, Scotland’s Shrine: The Scottish National War Memorial, Farnham, 2014, pp. 71–74; P. Shaw, An Artist’s War. The art and letters of Morris and Alice Meredith Williams, Stroud, 2017; P. Shaw, Undaunted Spirit. The art and craft of Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams, Wedmore, 2018; P. Shaw, ‘Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams ARBS. Decorative Artist and Monumental Sculptor’, Decorative Art Society Journal, 46, 2022; P. Shaw, ‘Undaunted Spirit – Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams, ARBS (1877–1934)’, in M. Trusted and J. Barnes, Discovering Women Sculptors, Watford, 2023, pp. 111–20.
Phyllida Shaw, 2024
Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams working in her Edinburgh studio on the figure of St George and the Dragon for Queenstown (now Komani) War Memorial, 1922. In the foreground on the left, Wind and Wave, with Pan, behind. In the foreground on the right, a scale model of the Paisley War Memorial, co-designed with Sir Robert Lorimer and featuring The Spirit of the Crusaders. (Credit: photograph by Frances Pyatt)