Arthur Garner was born in Hemel Hempstead on Thursday, 28th March 1894, the second son and third child born to Edward Garner and Louisa Jane Wilton. Edward and Louisa had nine children together who were: Reginald, Lilian, Arthur, Muriel, James, Francis John, Edward, Joseph and Guy Cecil. The oldest son Reginald died just before Christmas in 1894 when he was only four years old. Arthur’s father Edward was a "Coach Builder" and "Wheelwright" who ran his own business around Cotterells and Bury Road in Hemel Hempstead. Arthur first attended Bury Mill Road school, before he moved to Boxmoor JMI in 1903, which he left in February 1908 aged thirteen, to start work as a "Gardener". Not long afterwards, he joined his father in the coach building business and by 1911, he was recorded as an "Apprentice Coachbuilder".

It appears that Arthur had enlisted with the Hertfordshire Regiment as a Territorial soldier before the outbreak of war. This meant that he was mobilised immediately war was declared and he went overseas with the 1/1st Battalion Hertfordshire Regiment on the 6th November 1914, as part of the British Expeditionary Force. His time at the Front was brief however, and in early February 1915 he was wounded as the Battalion was leaving trenches at La Bassee, where it was involved in the Winter Actions at Cuinchy. Arthur was wounded in the leg and it was serious enough to send him to a base hospital in France, before he was evacuated to England and admitted to the 2nd Southern General Territorial Force hospital at Southmead in Bristol.

He wrote to his father from there and briefly described what had happened. The communication was published in the Hemel Gazette. It is not known how long Arthur’s recovery took, but he may have returned to his unit in France as early as the end of April 1915, when the Battalion War Diaries recorded that “…21 men rejoined the Battalion from hospital.” Over the next two years, Arthur saw action in some of the most significant battles of the war, fighting in the Somme Offensive in 1916 and then at Ypres and Passchendaele in 1917.

In early 1918, he was with the Battalion as the Germans launched their Spring Offensive in which the 1st Herts suffered huge losses. The depletion of the unit resulted in many of the men being transferred to other regiments as reinforcements and this was Arthur’s fate. At the beginning of May he was posted to the 8th Battalion Leicestershire Regiment which was in the same Division as the Hertfordshires. Just a few weeks after this move, he was in the trenches just to the south of Reims, on the eastern bank of the Aisne-Marne Canal when the Germans laid down a heavy bombardment with gas shells on the 8th Leicesters position. This continued until the morning of the 27th and it was during this action that Arthur died.

Arthur was Killed in Action on Monday, 27th May 1918.

He was commemorated on the war memorial plaque in St John the Evangelist church in Boxmoor, where he and his family had worshipped.

Arthur is Remembered with Honour on the Soissons Memorial, Aisne, Picardy, France, Stone 10B.

He was 24 years old when he died.

Arthur was eligible for the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Allied Victory Medal.