Henry George Ward - Journalism, Colonies and Railways

Journalism, Colonies and Railways

Ward bought from Charles Buller and Henry Cole the loss-making Weekly Chronicle, and used it to campaign for his views.

Ward supported the colonisation aims and methods of Edward Gibbon Wakefield; and was a committee member of the South Australian Association set up in 1834 by Wakefield, with Buller and Grote, and also William Clay, Rowland Hill, William Molesworth, Southwood Smith, Henry Warburton and William Wolryche-Whitmore. Ward chaired the 1836 select committee on Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies. The other members of the committee were Francis Baring, Henry Lytton Bulwer, William Ewart Gladstone, George Grey, William Hutt, John Arthur Roebuck, and George Poulett Scrope. Eleven witnesses were called, but colonists were not well represented among them, and Wakefield was given a platform for his views. The committee's report was in effect an endorsement of the "Wakefield system" and its recent implementation in Australasia.

Ward was also on the committee of the New Zealand Association set up in 1837, with a number of the same people; and brought resolutions to Parliament on colonisation in June 1839. The initiative then floundered in face of opposition from Lord John Russell and Robert Vernon Smith in the Commons, and from Tories, with widespread indifference. Ward and Hutt supported William Smith O'Brien on colonisation in Wakefield's style in June 1840, but the House was not convinced of the practicality of further schemes and disliked the expense.

In the days of the early speculation, Ward was much involved with railway enterprises. He spoke in Parliament on the detrimental effect of the seekers of stag profit who invested, often fraudulently, in public offerings of railway shares; he put a figure of only 40% on the allocation to "genuine" investors. After a period in which he had put his own finances on a sounder basis, he lost heavily in the Railway Mania of 1846. Those close to the family believed he had dissipated the large fortune that had come from his Plumer stepmother.