Born in Hampstead, London, the son of an art dealer, Ward was educated at St Joseph's RC school in Highgate before training at the Slade School under Henry Tonks. His father died early which meant that he had to set to work to support his mother and himself.

He succeeded primarily in the commercial sector and worked for publishers such as the Medici Society, W R Royle, Frost and Reed, Solomon and Whitehead and W N Sharpe of Bradford.  Many reproductions of Ward's work were to be found on chocolate boxes,  jigsaw puzzles, greeting cards and commercial prints. Though he continued to paint seriously for his own pleasure, it was not until 1976 that he held his first solo show of work at the King Street Galleries.

It is not known when he spent time in Cornwall, but the results are in his prints. For much of his working life, he had the use of only one eye, due to an accident. In the 1960s he had a severe nervous breakdown, and was later crippled with arthritis.  His own memoirs form the major part of the book about his life as a child of the Edwardian era. (Walpole)