Etchel Binns was born at Batley, Yorkshire.  He worked as a self-employed signwriter while studying art in the Sheffield area where he belonged to several societies of artists.  It is believed that he was a founder member of the Rotherham Society of Artists.

Immediately after WWI he began to visit West Cornwall and met members of the artists' colony at Newlyn and Lamorna.  He was greatly attracted to the unspoilt fishing cove of Penberth and in 1922 bought a small plot of land on the hillside in the Penberth Valley. In 1927 he moved permanently to Cornwall and though he never had done any manual work, he designed and built a bungalow.

Sadly in 1930 he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx which required a lengthy stay in a London Nursing Home, and afterwards could only speak in a whisper. Though this curtailed his social life and interaction with fellow painters, he remained quite prolific in his work with oils, water colours and etchings. In the early 1930s until his death in 1945, he kept a studio at Porthgwarra in a disused seine loft rented from the St Aubyn Estate.  Most of his work was sold from there, though he also exhibited at the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery, Newlyn, as a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists.