The youngest son of Sir Edward Knatchbull, 9th Baronet and his second wife Fanny, Knatchbull-Hugessen was born William Western Knatchbull at the family estate of Mersham-le-Hatch near Ashford in Kent in 1837.
[5][6] He was a member of the management committee which set up the Maidstone based Kent County Club in 1859 and played one first-class match for the side that year.
[5] At the 1861 census, Knatchbull-Hugessen was farming at Provender House at Norton, close to Faversham in Kent,[5] an estate which had been in the Hugessen family since the 17th-century.
[7] He resigned from the Kent management committee in 1863 due to ill health and died of tuberculosis at St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex in September 1864, aged 27.
[5][8] A memorial tablet was erected in the church of St John the Baptist in Mersham.