Lived throughout his life in Yorkshire and took a keen interest in local history and literature in the county, of which he possessed a fine library. From 1920 he was a member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society.
Bayford started by collecting Lepidoptera, but B.P. Uvarov notes that 'the chance finding of a longhorn beetle in 1883 turned his attention to the Coleoptera’ (Proc.RESL, 24(C), 1959-60, 52). Bayford's first entomological article, on the Hessian fly, was published in the Ent., 1887, and his first Coleoptera note, on Monochammus sartor F. in Ent.mon.Mag., 29, 1893, 43. Subsequently he published many notes in the Naturalist (Hull) and in the Ent.mon.Mag., until 1926. Latterly these included accounts of the meetings of the Entomological Section of the Yorkshire Naturalists Union, of which he was Secretary and later Chairman, and at the meetings of which he frequently showed beetles. He was also a member of the South West Yorkshire Entomological Society. Bayford's friends included Dr Corbett. He owned the Rev. Tylden's copy of Stevens's Manual (Ent.mon.Mag., 49, 1913,111).
Bayford's collection passed to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (Accession number Z.199.56) where it has been incorporated with the general collection. The collection and what it contained is mentioned by Bayford himself in Quarterly Transactions of the Barnsley Naturalist’s Society, V, 1885-6, 1-3. A collection of correspondence including 466 letters mostly to him from amongst others G.T. Porritt, W.D. Roebuck., T. Sheppard and M.L. Thompson, as well as members of his family, is in the NHM together with a typed index. Some of the letters relate to the Yorkshire Coleoptera survey and others to the compilation of the insect section of the VCH. (MD 9/01)