Ward was born in Darlington, New South Wales on March 21, 1899. His father was a tramway ganger and money was tight in the grim industrial suburb of Sydney. He left school at 14 to take on a succession of jobs - fruit-picker, printer's devil, hardware store clerk and tarpaulin maker.
World War One further radicalised Ward. He joined his local ALP branch at 16 and lost his job at the Eveleigh railway workshops because of his active involvement in the Great Strike of 1917.
With a height of over six foot tall Ward was a big man, in addition he was a non-smoker, a teetotaler, a boxer and a voracious reader. In the 1920s the boxing supplemented his income, which as a laborer for the tramways was meager.
Ward was also heavily involved in the tumultuous world of the NSW labor movement in the 1920s. He was an admirer of Jack Lang and a friend of Jack Beasley. Ward was Beasley's campaign manager at the 1929 Federal election which saw Beasley successfully elected as a member of the incoming Scullin Government.
The Scullin government was already on the ropes thanks to the impact of The Great Depression and Lang's constant attacks when Ward won a by-election in 1931 for the "safe" electoral seat of East Sydney. Ward came to Canberra as an uncompromising Lang supporter - at his first Caucus meeting in March 1931 he, Beasley and four others walked out, marking the disintegration of Federal Labor. In November of that year these dissenters voted with the anti-Labor parliamentary forces to bring down the Scullin government.
This is a stub! Please fix me!