William Garden Fraser (1856-1921) was born at Chatham, Kent, shortly before his father retired from the Army Medical Department. The Frasers were a Scottish family, but the Surgeon Major, his wife and nine children settled in Bedford where their seven sons were educated at Bedford School.
Six of the seven boys became artists, and Garden changed his name to William Fraser Garden in order to distinguish himself from his brothers. Garden settled at the House in the Fields near Hemingford Abbots, Huntingdonshire until 1898.
William Fraser Garden married Ethel in 1889 but she was not overly fond of Huntingdonshire life and Garden’s somewhat eccentric ways and left him in 1904.
Garden’s life went downhill from then, after drinking and depressing he lived at the Ferryboat Inn in Holywell towards the end of his life, paying his bills with drawings. His eccentricities led him to a nocturnal existence and one night, in January 1921, he missed his step outside the inn and died from head injuries two weeks later.
