Barbara Ward - Later Life

Later Life

Ward had recovered from cancer in the late 1940s thanks, she believed, to the spiritual support of Padre Pio. The illness recurred twenty years later but surgery did not cure her. In 1973 she retired from Columbia University where she had been Schweitzer Professor of Economic Development for the previous five years and went to live in Lodsworth, Sussex. The next year she was made a DBE, and in 1976 a life peer as Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, of Lodsworth in the County of West Sussex; she and her both hold noble titles in their own right. She wrote her last book, Progress for a Small Planet, despite her deteriorating health, discussing the "planetary community", dwindling resources used up too fast by wealthy countries, and the needs of poorer parts of the world. It was published in 1979, two years before her death on 31 May 1981, aged 67.

Pope John Paul II sent a Cardinal to represent him at Ward's requiem service. At her own request, she was buried in the graveyard of the local Anglican parish church.

Her brother, John Ward, was a noted civil engineer who, after his work on the M4 motorway in the 1960s, was awarded the O.B.E. Her great-niece, Marsha Shandur, is now a music presenter on radio.