William Medway Ward (1828-1898).
My 2nd great-grand uncle.
William was born on 14 July 1828 and baptised on 14 September at All Hallows Church in Tottenham, Middlesex, to parents William Ward and Mary Ann Downer.
He married Maria Earnshaw on 25 November 1850 at St John’s Church in Hackney. She’d been born on 1 March 1816 at Kimberworth in Rotherham, Yorkshire, and baptised on 1 April that year at Masbrough Independent Chapel, to parents John and Mary Earnshaw. He was a mason and it’s possible that Maria came south to work.
The marriage record suggests they were living at Morning Lane, Hackney, at the time but they went on to live in Homerton Grove, Hackney, (his employment record and censuses shows it as 28 The Grove). There is no record of them having any children.
William was listed as a police constable at the time of his marriage but he was discharged from the force and awarded a pension of £39 per year on 23 October 1869 after 21 years service owing to ‘infirmity of body’. It was said in the records that he’d received a scalp wound and concussion during his career and it’s therefore highly likely that he was the Constable William Ward who was hit in the head with a brick and rendered senseless during a disturbance at the brick fields in Lea Bridge in the spring of that year.
As the Tottenham and Edmonton Weekly Herald reported on the 17 July 1869, 19-year-old labourer David White was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude after admitting assaulting and causing actual bodily harm to William. The paper reported that William had told White, who had previous convictions for assault and theft, to go home during the incident but he’d refused, attacked the officer and felled him to the ground. A medical officer told the court that it would be a long time before William recovered.
His pension record shows he joined the police on 29 November 1848 and that he was 5ft 8ins tall, had blue eyes and dark brown hair. William was recorded as a police pensioner from the 1871 census so perhaps he never worked again. He was listed as a widower in the 1891 census and he died on 25 May 1898, leaving effects to the value of £249. Maria most likely died in 1884 – a woman by this name was registered as dying in Hackney with an age that fits.
Sources: BMD and other records at Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk. British Newspaper Archive records as listed in the text.