In the death of Professor Ida Ward in the Guildford Hospital on 10th October 1949, just after her sixty-ninth birthday, African studies lost one of their greatest exponents, and Africa one of its best friends.

Ida Caroline Ward was born in Bradford on the 4th October 1880, the eighth child of a Yorkshire wool merchant. Prom a school in Bradford she went to the Darlington Training College and later to Durham University, where she graduated B.Litt. with distinction. The North Country background of her early years remained with her always and gave a delightful “ common-sense ” colour to her character.

After sixteen years of teaching in secondary schools, she joined the Phonetics Department under Professor Daniel Jones in University College, London, in 1919, and soon established herself as an authority in the phonetics of the main European languages and in the study of speech defects. Noteworthy works of this period are A Handbook of English Intonation (written in collaboration with the late Lilian E. Armstrong), The Phonetics of English, and Speech Defects, Their Nature and Cure. Her interest in her mother tongue persisted, and she was actually working on another edition of the book on English Intonation when she died.

It was while lecturing at University College to missionaries that her interests turned towards West African languages—Kanuri, Igbo and Efik were her first fields of African research—and her first major work, The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Efik (for which the University of London awarded her the D.Lit. in 1933), threw a new light on the study of these languages, and showed that intonation, that element hitherto so elusive, was one that could and should be studied if justice was to be done to African languages.