Williams was born at St Just, Cornwall, the son of a Cornish mining engineer who had returned from South Africa and his wife, a Welshwoman.
[1] Like his elder brother he studied at Camborne School of Mines and went on to serve as an officer in the Devonshire Regiment of the British Army in the Middle East during the First World War and in Afghanistan, 1919–20.
After demobilisation he decided to join the Bombay-Burmah Trading Corporation as a forester working with elephants to extract teak logs.
He had read a book by Hawkes, The Diseases of the Camel and the Elephant, and decided he would be interested in a postwar job in Burma.
He was responsible for seventy elephants and their oozies in ten camps, in an area of about 400 square miles (1,000 km2) in the Myittha Valley, in the Indaung Forest Reserve.
The road to Assam went up the Chindwin to Kalewa, then up the Kabaw Valley to Tamu, and across five thousand foot mountains into Manipur and the Imphal Plain.
While elephants were used as "sappers" i.e. as part of the Royal Engineers for use in bridge building in places where heavy equipment could otherwise not be brought in, the Royal Indian Army Service Corps wanted them to be regarded simply as a branch of transport, an under-utilization of the real benefit of elephants Williams believed.