He was the second child of Edmund Sheppard, an Englishman who had gone to Australia in 1859, and his wife Mary Grace Murray; the couple had married in 1860.
After some years preparing to become a barrister and doing legal work, Sheppard joined the Education Department as a Junior Examiner in 1896.
Sheppard could not afford to retire and so he took on work as an examiner for the Cambridge School Certificate and the University of London.
His proposers were Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker, George James Lidstone, Alexander Aitken and William Ogilvy Kermack.
In his memorial piece Aitken placed Sheppard with Edgeworth, Pearson and Yule as a contributor to the development of statistics at the turn of the 20th.
The assessment was based on the series of papers on correlation and the calculation of moments that Sheppard produced between 1897 and 1907.
After 1907 the focus of Sheppard's work moved from statistics to interpolation and graduation and he published in mathematical and actuarial journals.
At the fifth International Congress of Mathematicians held in 1912 in Cambridge, Sampson presented a paper entitled Reduction of errors by means of negligible differences.
However, it is clear from Fisher's article and from the notes he added to Aitken's that Sheppard's main virtue was that he was not Karl Pearson.