Bernard William Meadows was born at Norwich in 1915 and educated at the City of Norwich School, he trained as a painter at the Norwich School of Art. In 1937 he moved to London and studied at the Royal College of Art and the Courtauld Institute while working as an assistant to Henry Moore in his studio at Hampstead and from 1983, as acting director, and later consultant, of the Henry Moore Foundation.
Meadows began the second world war as a conscientious objector, but when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union he recanted and joined the RAF. He spent most of his war in the Cocos islands, where the greatest natural hazard was a variety of gigantic crabs, which fascinated Meadows and whose forms he later adapted to his sculpture. He found in crabs and, later, birds, a way of escaping the influence of Moore; he was able to express extreme violence without resorting to the human figure, though later, through various academic he was able to work his way through to powerful semi-abstract versions of armed and dangerous human figures, condottieri, soldiers, tyrants.
In 1960, after a dozen years teaching at Chelsea School of Art, he was to become for 20 years an influential and inspirational professor of sculpture at the RCA, whose high-quality pupils included Elisabeth Frink.
During the 1960's, he began to combine bulky torsos with legs that tapered to tiny ankles; this style may have derived from the weathered figures of the sculptor Germaine Richier. Meadows explained that his work was 'all about the human condition. The crabs, and the birds, and the armed figures, the pointing figures, are all about fear ... perhaps not fear, it's vulnerability' the body unsettled in space, barely coping with gravity and beset by implacable forces.
Bernard Meadows work can be found in the permanent collections of most major museums of modern art. 1995 marked his 80th birthday, with an exhibition of his work at the Gimpel Fils gallery in London. He served as a member of the Fine Art Commission from 1971 to 1976 and was offered, but declined, a CBE.