J. A. Baker - The Peregrine - 50th Anniversary Edition

With the end of J.A. Baker’s letters to Don Samuel in 1946, we enter another period of silence, although it appears that in 1950 Baker decided to train as a teacher. He would have been 23, and mentions the college in his birdwatching diary four years later on 4 April 1954, but only as background to an observation of a tree creeper: ‘Mousy little bird, with sharp call. First seen at college in 1950 from library window, intent on its own business.’ His contemporaries cannot remember the name of the teachers’ training college he attended, but all recall that it was not a success. Apparently, he loathed teaching practice, and dealing with children.

Soon after this, Baker joined the Automobile Association. His friends connived to get him the job. John Thurmer’s father was Regional Manager, and Don Samuel was already working in the Chelmsford office. Both agree it allowed Baker a chance to settle into some sort of stability.

At about this time, Baker met and fell in love with sixteen-year-old Doreen Coe. Ted Dennis remembers that they met when Baker found her bereft at missing a late bus, and gave her a ride home on his crossbar. Doreen’s father forbade her from marrying Baker before she was 21, so she waited, sticking with him, and they married on 6 October 1956. Baker was 30, and Doreen was 21 years and a month – almost to the day.

By then he was birdwatching regularly, crisscrossing the Chelmsford area on his bicycle. The diaries begin on 21 March 1954 and the last extant page is 22 May 1963. They run to 667 hand-written pages – all in a small stitched school notebook. Doreen told David Cobham that Baker’s habit was to retire to his study each evening, and write up his diaries. It is hard to believe that he took no notes at all in the field, though there is no evidence that he did so.

As is known, Baker became progressively crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, and was, by the early 1970s, seriously incapacitated. Close friends obviously knew of Baker’s growing ill-health, but another contemporary, Jack Baird, who remembers meeting Baker at a rare school reunion in the early 1980s, says he did not complain of it at all. Latterly, Doreen learned to drive, and bought a car, and would take Baker out to favourite haunts, leaving him to walk and sit a little and watch birds before collecting him in the evening. Certainly, John Thurmer says he remembers not a note of self-pity. Baker died on 26 December 1986. He was just 61.

Among fragments of letters to Baker was one from a reader, which praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. This essay formed part of a Birds issue dedicated to fighting against a proposal for a third London airport, and a deep-water port on the Maplin Sands, off Foulness. The article is entitled ‘On the Essex Coast’. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report , this article appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the kind agreement of the RSPB, we reproduce it here in full ( here).

‘On the Essex Coast’ also spawned an RSPB film, Wilderness Is Not a Place , produced by Anthony Clay, and filmed by Alan McGregor. The film did the rounds of the popular RSPB film circuit alongside three others, entitled High Life of the Rook , Avocets Return and Adventure Has Wings . The title and spare commentary are drawn directly from Baker’s text, which also begins with an editor’s note: ‘The Essex coastline is threatened by development. J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer , shows that it has aesthetic as well as scientific value.’

‘On the Essex Coast’ appeared a year after Collins published The Hill of Summer , and is full of the passion Baker feels for his county, and the frustration that lay behind his anger at peregrines killed by the ‘filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. The essay describes the Dengie, a fist-like wedge of coast that stretches north from Foulness to Mersea. An outcry ensued over the plans for development, and they were finally shelved, in part because of the oil crisis in 1973. It was an early conservation campaign, and Baker’s article clearly contributed positively. Indeed, in his use of what is now a potentially offensive phrase, a ‘Belsen of floating oil’, perhaps we get a sense of his despair. The infamous 1967 Torrey Canyon super-tanker disaster was still fresh in the memory. When the ship broke up on the Seven Sisters, flooding oil into the sea, and onto the Cornish coast, the government decided to bomb and napalm the oil, creating a hellish scene that would have seared itself into the minds of many people, including Baker. It was a less politically sensitive time, and perhaps, in using the image, he intended to shock.

The Birds article reveals a man who was willing to harness his powerful writing to support the emerging environmental movement. Had Baker remained well, surely he would have written much more. Indeed, were he alive now, like so many of his octogenerian contemporaries, he would still be fighting for Essex and for many other wild places, and urging us not to be ‘soothed by the lullaby language of indifferent politicians’.

John Fanshawe, February 2011

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