Robin Mason

This small painting of my great uncle Tel — Tom Ellis Lewis (1900 - 1978), imagines him as one of the trees in the Welsh forest on the path to Bryn Myrddin, standing inside memory’s light, rooted and returning with everything he carried in life. Born into a family of miners and tin-plate workers, his early world was one of labour, fire, and industry — a life shaped by the valley and the weight of its work.

 

In the painting, he remembers the day in 1912, the moment that changed everything — when he threw bullets into the fire, and the explosion took off the fingers and thumb of his right hand. A childhood mistake that severed one future and opened another entirely. Out of that accident grew a scholar. No longer able to follow into the physicality of industry, his mother encouraged him towards education and learning.

 

Tel became the first student at Cambridge University ever to be awarded a Doctorate in Law — a remarkable transformation from a boy of the valley to a thinker of national significance.

 

During the war, he was invited by the Welsh Parliamentary Committee to gather evidence, testimony, and civic expertise for early investigations into Welsh self-governance — laying the groundwork for what would later become the Secretary of State for Wales and the Welsh Office.

 

He lectured in law at Aberystwyth University, before returning to Cambridge as a Fellow and Law Don at Trinity Hall, editing leading law journals and teaching students who would become some of the UK’s most influential legal minds.In the painting, Tel stands as a tree carrying all these rings of experience— the accident, the scholarships that paid for his education, the labouring roots, the civic imagination, the long arc from coal-valley childhood to shaping the legal thinking of a nation. A life transformed, and then returned to the forest that first formed him.