Not a Single Excuse

This book will be of value to anyone involved in ancestry research or social history of the 19th and 20th Centuries. It will also be fascinating to anyone interested in local politics.The book starts as a family history. Some of the characters are military people, and their adventures in many ways epitomise Britain in the 19th Century. We follow William Ward, for example, from his birthplace in Colchester to the plains of India, the Crimean Peninsula and via Ireland to his final days in Canada. We meet his son, William James Ward, who found himself in a school for orphans at the age of seven and became an army schoolmaster, moving to the Indian sub-continent, and ending his army days as a Warrant Officer Class One with the Coldstream Guards. We hear, also, about his wife Ellen Jane, who gave birth to nine children, two of them on the Indian frontier with Afghanistan. The book then continues as a personal memoir of the author, from his early life at the outbreak of the Second World War to his experiences as a local politician and council leader in the last decades of the century. This gives us some personal insights into education in the post war decades, from the perspective of a London schoolboy, a Surrey schoolmaster, and a visitor to the USA on a teacher exchange programme in the dramatic year of 1969-70. You will see life for a boy growing up, the workings of politics in Berkshire at the absolute grassroots level, and the philosophy that prompted the author to name this book ‘Not a Single Excuse’.