Arthur Williams was born on 31 December 1905 in Swansea, the son of David Edward Williams, a schoolmaster, and Katherine Hannah, née Humphries. He attended Swansea Grammar School and Swansea University College as a scholar, before going on to the Welsh National School of Medicine in Cardiff. He chose to come to London for his clinical work and moved to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he qualified in 1929. After a series of junior surgical appointments in and around London and gaining his FRCS he took the post of resident surgical officer at the Royal Salop Infirmary, Shrewsbury. He was later appointed consultant surgeon at the same hospital and spent his entire career there, being retained during the war as essential to the local service. He was active in the local BMA as Secretary and later President of the mid-Wales branch. He married first in 1938 but unhappily his wife died as the result of an ectopic pregnancy in 1940. He remained single until 1960 when he married again, to Dodo Elsa May. There were no children of either marriage. Having been a considerable sportsman in his youth, he was in later years content to retire to the peace of the Shropshire countryside, where he died on 14 February 1991.