Despite the existence in nineteenth century editions of Burke’s Landed Gentry of pedigrees covering five generations of this Member’s family, some obscurities remain concerning his immediate antecedents. His father William Ward (b.1743) was the youngest son of Samuel Ward (1707-47), described by Burke (although it cannot be verified) as a barrister, and his wife Elizabeth Dodgson of Leeds. After being widowed, she raised their sons in a house in the precincts of York Minster, inherited by her first husband. William Ward married a Lancashire heiress, probably the daughter of a Blackburn attorney, and was in business by 1795 as a merchant in London, trading variously as Ward and Company or William Ward and Son of 3 Basinghall Street. The Blackburn property and their father’s trading fortune (his will was proved under £25,000, 19 Feb. 1813) devolved upon Ward, then of Grove House, Tooting and his brother Samuel Nevill Ward (1773-1850) of Balham House, Surrey.
In January 1830, having made overtures in London the previous year, Ward came forward on a vacancy for the open and venal borough of Leominster, where the incumbent Rowland Stephenson had been bankrupted under the twelve-month rule. Notices described him as a man of ‘large property’ and ‘independent principles’, with no party affiliation. Having ‘tied up his election’ before the writ was ordered, 4 Feb., he easily saw off his challengers.
To my great regret that great object [remaining a healthy and active Member] has been disappointed by the want of method and arrangement in the conduct, or rather in the mismanagement, of the business of the ... Commons, where the time and health of its Members have been sacrificed without result, and where desultory conversations and equally frivolous discussions have absorbed nearly the whole of that attention which should have been occupied by useful business; so that during the late laborious session of six months, no more business has been effected than might well have been performed in a single month.
Hereford Jnl. 28 July 1830.
Ward’s investment in urban development was matched by his brother, who in 1845 owned 39 leasehold houses in Albany Street, Gloucester Terrace, Park Square and St. Andrew’s Place on the Regent’s Park scheme. John Ward had properties in Clarence Terrace and York Terrace in the same area, and he seems to have sold Holwood to the railway contractor Thomas Brassey before he made his will, 13 Aug. 1852. He died in February 1855 at his London residence in Park Street, Grosvenor Square, having devised and divided the Calverley estate and his other property equally between his surviving sons Arthur Wellesley Ward (1813-1900) and Neville Ward (1814-72).