Stephen Ward was born and brought up in Tamworth, Staffordshire in 1952. Taking his A-Levels at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School* in the days before it became Queen Elizabeth’s Mercian Comprehensive, Steve went on to obtain a B.A. (Hons) in European Studies at Bath University. A red-brick Midlander at heart, he nevertheless saw some advantages in living in the West Country, and that’s where he eventually settled. (*see footnote)

Married with three children, his job took him to Bristol in 1990, and the family moved to nearby Bishop Sutton in the Chew Valley. After a career in the banking industry, he seized the chance of early retirement in 2006 to concentrate on his hobbies and interests: social and postal history, languages, Germany and France, travel, walking and a general fascination in the unusual and obscure.

His years as a governor at the primary school which his children attended introduced Steve to the good old days of punishment books, logbooks and smelly toilets. In his mind’s eye he could picture the seeds of the book that he’d always wanted to write.
Hence ‘Don’t Learn my Son no Sums’.

Other books in the planning stage include a wry look at postal history, an even wrier (wryer?) look at the world through an 1836 Anglo-French phrasebook (being the snappily named ‘Blagdon’s French Interpreter, consisting of Copious and Familiar Conversations on every Topic which can be Useful or Interesting’), and an examination of life in a British World War II Prisoner of War camp as portrayed in German prisoners’ letters home.

These books, as with ‘Don’t Learn my Son no Sums’, will be self-published under the banner of ‘Yardstick Publishing’.
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* Or, as the pedants would have it, ‘The Grammar School of Elizabeth, Queen of England, in Tamworth – founded 1588’.