About us
Birchward - a family business since 1866
About us
1866 founding
The Birchward story begins long before ecommerce and next-day delivery. In 1866, our great-great grandfather founded Ward & Son, Coal and Corn Merchants, trading from Stanley Road in Tunbridge Wells next to St Barnabas Church. Their telephone number was simply “18”, a sign of how early and deeply rooted the business was in the town’s commercial life.
One surviving advert urged customers to “Ward off the cold with Ward’s Coal”, promoting their Special Nuts for Kitcheners as producing the hottest fires without choking the flues. Into this coal-merchant household our grandfather, Geoffrey Henry Scott Ward, was born. He had little interest in the coal trade and instead followed his passion for engineering, a choice that would reshape the family’s business journey for the next century.
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From apprentice to garage owner
In 1922, aged 15, Geoffrey began an engineering course at the Technical Institute on Monson Road, Tunbridge Wells, learning technical drawing, hand-tool work, lathe operation, brazing, soldering and welding. Through the course he heard of an apprenticeship at Chas Baker & Company in Tonbridge, then the main Morris dealers, later taken over by Caffyns.
He started on 5 shillings a week, sweeping floors and assisting in the workshop, while attending evening classes at Tunbridge Wells Technical College three nights a week. He went on to sit the Institute of Motor Industry exam, finishing in the top six out of more than thirty candidates. By 21, Geoffrey was completing engine work faster than senior mechanics and had begun buying, repairing and reselling cars at a profit, realising that the real opportunity in the motor trade lay in sales and ownership, not just repairs.
About us
1934 Ward’s Service Garage
In 1927, after his employer refused to pay the full mechanic’s rate, Geoffrey moved to work for a wheelwright and blacksmith in Hildenborough, gradually taking charge of the motor side of the business and selling cars, serving petrol and repairing agricultural machinery. In 1934 he heard that Lloyds Garage in Southborough was for sale. Despite his solicitor warning that Southborough was “not the best place for a business”, Geoffrey sold his own car to raise capital and, on 26 September 1934, renamed the site Ward’s Service Garage Ltd.
Within 15 months, Ward’s had already sold around 65 cars, and a 1936 Southborough Town and Trade Paper article described the garage as “always humming with activity”, with most work coming from personal recommendation. The Standard Motor Company offered Geoffrey a retail agency and, by 1939, he had built a new showroom and workshop at the corner of St John’s Road and Speldhurst Road in Tunbridge Wells.
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Ward’s Service Garage expansion
War broke out just three months after moving into the new premises. Petrol was rationed, car sales collapsed and values dropped overnight, but Ward’s was designated a Selected Site for petrol and a Protected Establishment under the Essential Works Order. Maintenance work flooded in from larger garages now focused on munitions. Geoffrey worked long hours with a small team, joined the Home Guard as a Lieutenant and Battalion Transport Officer, and was elected to the Southborough Urban District Council
After the war, the business expanded rapidly. A new showroom extension, three-bedroom flat, office space and room for seven new cars were completed in 1947, and staff numbers rose to around 70. In 1954, Jaguar appointed Ward’s as their main dealer for the Tunbridge Wells area, and by 1956 a 10,000-square-foot workshop on an adjoining site had been built, underlining the scale and ambition of the business.
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Birchwood Garage
When the Tonbridge bypass was constructed, Geoffrey spotted the potential of a prominent site on London Road in Southborough. In 1966 a new purpose-built garage opened there, named Birchwood Garage after the birch wood opposite. Geoffrey’s son David Ward became manager, joined by son-in-law Brian Hester, and by 1968 the Speldhurst Road site had been sold and operations consolidated at Birchwood.
About us
Ward's Mobility Services
The former brewery at Bells Yew Green was purchased and converted to house both the bodyshop and a specialist mobility division. What began as invalid carriage contracts in the 1940s grew into Wards Mobility Services Ltd, offering wheelchairs, scooters, stairlifts, walking aids, hoists, nursing requisites and specialist car adaptations, with full showroom, sales and service departments on site.
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Birchwood expansion
On the new-car side, after parting with the Morris/Wolseley franchise, the family took on the Datsun agency in 1972, later Subaru and Hyundai in 1986, with Isuzu joining in 1987. By Birchwood’s 25th anniversary in the early 1990s, the site had become a substantial modern dealership operation.
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Sale of the Birchwood Garage site
Geoffrey Ward died in 1985, but the business continued under David Ward and Brian Hester. In time, the Birchwood site was leased and later sold, and a Bupa care home now stands where the garage once operated.
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Birchward today
The proceeds from the sale helped several family members into property ownership and also provided the basis for a new chapter: Birchward Ltd, a combination of the Ward and Birchwood names, and founded by some of Geoffrey’s grandchildren. Today, Birchward represents the fourth major chapter in more than 160 years of Ward family enterprise: from coal, to motor trade, to mobility, and now to online retail.
We now run niche ecommerce businesses from Royal Tunbridge Wells, serving customers across the UK. The industries and technologies have changed, but the underlying principles have not: family ownership, strong local roots, hard work and a determination to build something lasting.
By choosing Birchward, customers support an independent business shaped by more than a century and a half of enterprise, service and resilience. We are grateful for every order and work hard to offer the kind of thoughtful, dependable service that keeps family businesses like ours moving forward.
