Frank Kingdon-Ward

Explorer, plant collector, and author 1885 - 1958

Francis Kingdon Ward website.

Winifred Mary Ward

A.K.A. Winifred Kingdon-Ward

Winifred Mary Ward was the daughter of Harry Marshall Ward, Cambridge professor of botany, and the sister of Frank Kingdon-Ward, the plant collector. She was always active and occupied herself in a variety of ways. Following the musical path which her brother was expected to follow she became a singing teacher.

After the first world war she became involved in helping soldiers with speech dificulties caused by their head wounds or by shell shock. She worked at the West London hospital, Maida Vale, and Pembury, in Kent. She began taking on students or apprentices and then later set up a school of speech therapy; The London hospitals school of speech therapy, renamed "the Kingdon-Ward school" on her retirement in 1952.

She was a founder fellow of the college of speech therapists now the royal college of speech and language therapists. She wrote several works on the subject of speech therapy one of which "STAMMERING" is described as "the first major British text book on the subject of speech therapy".

Her christened name was Winifred Mary Ward but her famous brother published so many books under the name Kingdon-Ward that she became known as Winifred Kingdon-Ward by default. Since she adored her brother she probably didn't mind this.

She wrote a great deal. Much of which was never published. A long (and arguably long winded) biography of her brother Frank Kingdon-Ward was rejected numerous times but formed a large part of the research material for Charles Lyte's later biography "Last of the great plant hunters" and indeed for my own biography on the web.