Educated outside the influences of Oxford or a public school, Wilfrid Ward developed into a thinker and a controversialist after an individual and tolerant manner. As a young man he crossed swords with Herbert Spencer and Frederic Harrison. His first work, The Wish to Believe, appeared in the Nineteenth Century (1882), and was followed by The Clothes of Religion (1886), a reply to popular positivism, and Witnesses to the Unseen (1893). But he found his most congenial field in biography, and it was here that he displayed an original talent. In 1889 he published the first volume of his father's life, William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, the second volume appearing in 1893, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival. The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman, which Cardinal Vaughan requested him to write, occupied him for five years and appeared in 1897. The first edition was sold in a week, but an interesting chapter was omitted in subsequent editions. He then wrote a memoir of Aubrey Thomas de Vere [q.v.], the poet-convert (1904). Seven years' unremitting work led to his Life of Cardinal Newman (1912), a work of 1,300 pages into which he wove about 1,000 of the Cardinal's letters. In it he said the last word on Newman, and identified himself with Newmanism even to the extent of opposing his father's opinions.
The Life of Newman was written during the Modernist controversy, when many Catholic thinkers, such as George Tyrrell [q.v.], Lagrange, the Abbé Duchesne, and Baron von Hügel, were incurring the suspicion of the Holy See. More than any single man Ward held the balance and kept comparative peace among the thinkers of English Catholicism. His apologetic was based on his axiom that since the Reformation the Catholic Church was in ‘a state of siege’. He was a liberal without being found guilty of liberalism by authority. The balance which Ward held amongst his fellow Catholics corresponded with his position amongst non-Catholics. He understood and appreciated Anglicanism, enjoying the friendship of Lord Halifax, George Wyndham [q.v.], and John Neville Figgis [q.v.]. Richard Holt Hutton [q.v.] had also deeply influenced him. He helped to revive the old Metaphysical Society under the name of the Synthetic Society. He was elected to the Athenæum Club honoris causa. His genius for friendship and portraiture found its fulfilment in a series of books, Problems and Persons (1903), Ten Personal Studies (1908), and Men and Matters (1914). The Life of Newman led to two successful lecturing tours in America in the course of which he delivered the Lowell lectures at Boston (1914). His last days were spent in preparing for publication the letters of his friend Father Basil Maturin [q.v.]. In 1916 he retired to Hampstead, where he died on 9 April. He was buried at Freshwater in the Isle of Wight. He married in 1887 Josephine Mary, second daughter of James Robert Hope-Scott Q.C. [q.v.], of Abbotsford, and left two sons and two daughters.
[Last Lectures (1916) edited by Mrs. Ward; obituary notices in The Times, 10 April 1916, Dublin Review, and Tablet; private information.]
WARNEFORD, REGINALD ALEXANDER JOHN (1891–1915), airman, was born at Darjeeling, India, 15 October 1891, the eldest child and only son of Reginald William Henry Warneford, civil engineer, of Puddletrenthide, Dorset, by his wife, Dora Alexandra Campbell. He was educated at the English College, Simla, and at King Edward's grammar school, Stratford-on-Avon, from which he entered the merchant service. On the outbreak of the European War, Warneford joined the second (‘Sportsmen's’) battalion, Royal Fusiliers, in August 1914. In February 1915 he was granted a commission as probationary flight sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service, and gained his certificate at Hendon, flying a Bristol biplane, on 25 February. He was sent to No. 1 wing at Dunkirk, where his commanding officer reported on his ‘remarkable keenness and ability’. On 7 June, flying a Morane monoplane, he attacked at 6,000 feet, between Ghent and Bruges, a zeppelin airship, on which he dropped six bombs from close range. The last bomb set fire to the zeppelin, but the force of the bomb's explosion turned the aeroplane upside down, the engine stopped, and Warneford was compelled to land in enemy territory. He was able to restart his engine after fifteen minutes and to return to his aerodrome. His achievement, brilliant in itself, robbed the zeppelin of much of its terror and pointed the way to the true method of defending England against airship raids. He was awarded the Victoria cross—the first officer of the naval air service to be so honoured. He did not long survive to enjoy his fame. On 17 June he went up from the aerodrome at Buc, near Paris, to test a Henri Farman machine which he was to fly to Dunkirk. The machine broke in the air, and Warneford and an
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