Arthur Harden died on 17 June 1940 at his home at Bourne End. Harden was born in Manchester on 12 October 1865. His father was Albert Tyas Harden, a Manchester business man, who had married Miss Eliza MacAlister, of Paisley. He was the only son, but there were several sisters, and the family was brought up in an austere nonconformist atmosphere, abjuring the theatre and regarding Christmas as a pagan festival. At the age of seven years he was sent to a private school kept by Dr Ernest Adam in Victoria Park, Manchester, and four years later he went on to the Tettenhall College in Staffordshire, where he stayed until he was sixteen. In January 1882 he entered the Owen’s College, Manchester, and studied chemistry under Professor Roscoe, then at the height of his fame as a teacher. In 1885 he graduated in the Victoria University with first-class honours in chemistry. A year later he was awarded the Dalton scholarship. It was J. B. Cohen, to whose stimulating teaching Harden doubtless owed much, who suggested the subject of his first research, ‘The action of silicon tetrachloride on aromatic amide-compounds’, and in the following year the results of this investigation were published in the Transactions of the Chemical Society (1886). From Manchester he proceeded to Erlangen, and under the direction of Otto Fischer prepared β-nitroso-naphthylamine and investigated its properties. Having been awarded the degree of Ph.D., he returned to Manchester and there became first junior and then senior lecturer and demonstrator under Professor H. B. Dixon, who had meantime succeeded Sir Henry Roscoe as professor of Chemistry. During part of this time Harden shared the laboratory teaching with Hartog (later Sir Philip), and for some years he lectured to the honours students on the history of chemistry, a subject in which he was greatly interested.