(as well as their most devoted author/admirers) that have made the deepest appeal to the modern British imagination: the otter (Henry Williamson, Gavin Maxwell), whales and dolphins (Heathcote Williams and the whole New-Age fixation with cetaceans) and birds, particularly birds of prey (W.H. Hudson, T.H. White and J.A. Baker himself). If we cannot move between the elements like these wonderful animals, then humans can at least imagine what it is like to be an otter or a peregrine. But no writer I know has taken us deeper into the life of another creature and allowed us to experience how that elemental mastery might possibly feel than John Alec Baker.
Mark Cocker, March 2010
by John Fanshawe
When the Penguin paperback edition of J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine appeared in 1970 – with a striking, black-and-white cover design by Brian Price-Thomas – the biographical sketch revealed little: ‘John A. Baker is in his forties and lives with his wife in Essex. He has no telephone and rarely goes out socially. Since leaving school at the age of seventeen he has had some fifteen assorted jobs, which have included chopping down trees, and pushing book trolleys in the British Museum, and none of which was a success. In 1965, he gave up work and lived on the money he had saved, devoting all his time to his obsession of the last ten years – the peregrine. He re-wrote his account of this bird five times before submitting it for publication. Although he had no ornithological training and had never written a book before, when The Peregrine was published in 1967 it was received with enthusiastic reviews and praise for his lyrical prose. Later that year he was awarded the distinguished Duff Cooper Prize. He was also awarded a substantial Arts Council grant. His second book, The Hill of Summer, was published in 1969, and was also received with universal praise by the critics.’
Between the first publication of The Peregrine in 1967 and the spring of 2010, when Collins republished it in a single volume with his other works, The Hill of Summer and Baker’s edited diaries, the man remained an enigma. In 1984 Penguin re-issued The Peregrine in the Country Library series with a new cover from the illustrator Liz Butler, but the introduction remained much the same. After another twenty years, in 2004, The Peregrine reappeared as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series with a fine introduction by the author Robert Macfarlane, who argued that the book was ‘unmistakably, a masterpiece of twentieth-century non-fiction’. Yet the NYRB editors were unable to reveal much more of the man whose style Macfarlane describes as ‘so intense and incantatory that the act of bird-watching becomes one of sacred ritual’. They simply concluded that ‘Baker’s second book [The Hill of Summer] was his last, and [that] he appeared to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life.’ ‘Little else,’ they admitted, ‘including the exact year of his death, is known about this singularly private man.’
Those lucky enough to own an early copy of The Peregrine treasured it. In The Running Sky, Tim Dee writes: ‘the peregrine in my young mind was built by J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. I read it when I was eleven, it stole into my head and stayed there, and then I reread it compulsively.’
What was it about the enigmatic Baker’s writing which so captured the imagination of later writers like Macfarlane and Dee? These were the years following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and, as Baker concluded in his own introduction, ‘Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching inanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.’
Without doubt, Baker would have been amazed and delighted that peregrines have recovered so successfully, returning to many traditional sites, as well as breeding in cities and towns around Britain, including London, not least the celebrated pairs that are nesting on both the Houses of Parliament and Tate Modern. This recent recovery was in no way apparent in Baker’s lifetime or to a generation of writers growing up in the 1960s. Tim Dee writes that he ‘grew up thinking of peregrines as sickly’. ‘The magnificent hunter, the apotheosis of the wild, the falcon on the king’s gloved fist, was becoming as helpless as a spastic battery hen, a bird that broke its own eggs.’
In the nineteenth century, peregrines had suffered from a host of troubles; notably persecution by gamekeepers and pigeon fanciers, but also the depredations of egg collectors. Though numbers had stabilised by the 1930s, the Air Ministry authorised widespread culling to save carrier pigeons at the outbreak of the Second World War, and several hundred birds were exterminated. By the 1950s, numbers had started to recover, but then a new and catastrophic decline began. As Baker lamented, it was the chemical ravages of organochlorine pesticides that killed adults and thinned their egg shells into fracturing. The story is now well known, and related by the late Derek Ratcliffe in his epic monograph on the peregrine, but when Baker was walking the Essex countryside, persistent pesticides were still paramount in the minds of the newly emerging conservation community as a threat to the birds that occupied the land and seascapes he loved and celebrated in all his writing. Peregrines were totems of a wilderness under siege.
In 2009, as Mark Cocker and I prepared a new edition of The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer and the edited diaries, growing interest in J.A. Baker had revealed a little more about his life, and in Mark’s introduction, and in my own introduction to the diaries, we outlined the new material that had come to light when the film maker David Cobham visited Baker’s late widow, Doreen, and was given his diaries. This began a process that has already revealed, and will, we hope, continue to reveal, insights into the author’s life and influences. Chief among these were meetings with his school contemporaries, and the discovery of a small collection of letters. An archive of these papers has since been established at the University of Essex.
John Alec Baker, only son of Wilfred and Pansy Baker, was born on 6 August 1926. His father worked as a draughtsman for the engineering company Crompton Parkinson and, we believe, spent time as a borough councillor, and later mayor of Chelmsford. The family lived at 20 Finchley Road, and Baker attended Trinity Road Primary School nearby from 1932 to 1936.
One of the first signs that Baker was a bright child appeared when he won a Junior Exhibition to the King Edward VI Grammar School. Details of his early days there remain hazy, but three of his close friends from this time, Edward Dennis (who became Baker’s best man), John Thurmer (who went on to become Canon of Exeter Cathedral) and Don Samuel (who became an English teacher), have provided further insights into Baker’s later school life. It has emerged that in 1942, after he had completed his General School Certificate, he stayed on an extra year. It was wartime, so the school was often disrupted, and only four other boys were studying the arts at that time. Baker joined them, and although he did not study for the Higher School Certificate, he enjoyed a year of ‘supervised’ reading under the wing of a charismatic English teacher, the Rev. E.J. Burton.
Exactly why Baker was allowed this apparently unusual extra year is unknown, though Thurmer recalls that he was often absent from school with ill-health, including glandular fever, and early bouts of the arthritis that crippled him in later life. Possibly staff at KEGS – as the school was known – were sympathetic to this, and felt Baker deserved some more time.
Other scraps of information have emerged. Nicknames were commonplace and Baker was known as Doughy. This was a play on his name, of course, but he was stocky, and, it seems, someone with whom you’d be unlikely to pick a fight. Despite his bouts of ill-health, and disarming short-sightedness, Baker did
