He was born July 18, 1844, in Harbour Grace to John Hayward and Flora Currie.
However, and almost without exception, they were the province of one man, John William Hayward (1843-1913), a self-taught artist and son of a wealthy merchant family of the city.
Along with landscape paintings and engraved vignettes of contemporary St. John’s life, Hayward produced many signal flag charts, many in watercolour, and some as mass-produced lithographed broadsheets complete with advertisements of prominent city businesses.
Families such as the Ayres, Bowrings, Bairds, and Harveys of St. John’s were perhaps more important to the commercial and social life of the city then than were the Eatons, Simpsons, or Gooderhams to Toronto, or the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts to New York.
Hayward’s charts bustle with the life of a busy day along the docks in the harbour.