16 Chronicle, Thursday, November 16, 2017 ECS-EO1-S2 Chronicle, Thursday, November 16, 2017 17ECS-EO1-S2

MARK Hanson has been a fan of JABaker for years and believes thatthe writer should be more widelyknown and acknowledged in hishome town.

Mark 61, who lives in Boreham,has his own archive of Baker books,documents and clippings as well asan enduring interest in wildlife andthe Essex countryside.

He owns various editions of ThePeregrine and regularly tracesBaker’s favourite haunts along theChelmer and BlackwaterNavigation, looking out for bird lifehimself.

“It became an obsession for him,”said Mr Hanson. “And this was hislocal stomping ground. Like thebirds he was tracking, he used theChelmer and BlackwaterNavigation as a conduit for visitingDanbury, Little Baddow, Ulting andHeybridge. It was his fly-way, hischannel for getting him to theplaces he wanted to go.”

Mark, a biologist by training andformer president of the Essex FieldClub, wrote a piece on JA Baker forthe Chelmer Canal Trust’snewsletter in July 2010 in which herevealed biographical details abouthim as well looking at sites alongthe canal which Baker regularlyvisited.

WorthyMark said the main section for

the peregrine observations was theChelmer Valley betweenChelmsford and Maldon, “inparticular the middle sectionbetween Little Baddow and Ulting.”

On the 50th anniversary of thepublication of The Peregrine andwith Baker now being recognised asan important literary figure, Markthinks it’s time to let locals knowmore about him.

“I think what he did is worthy ofcommemorating. He was a naturalwordsmith and channelled itthrough his love of nature andbirds. He made us look differentlyat the world around us.”

Mark believes there should be ablue plaque somewhere inChelmsford, at one of the propertiesBaker lived at, or along thenavigation to mark the writer’sachievements and influence.

He also thinks there should be anexhibition dedicated to Baker too,ideally at Chelmsford Museumwhich is just around the cornerfrom the writer’s childhood homein Finchley Avenue.

“He made a great contribution tonature writing and the county, andthat should be acknowledged.”

JA Baker, born and bred inChelmsford, is recognised as one ofour greatest writers on the natural worldbut he’s remained an enigmatic and largelyunknown figure until now. On the 50thanniversary of the publication of his acclaimedbook, The Peregrine, and with a newbiography about him just released, DarrylWebber discovered more about him

On the trail of theNATURE AUTHOR: Enigmatic figure who wrote an acclaimed book about the wilderness just miles from his home in Chelmsford

T O the untrained eye, JABaker might haveseemed like anunremarkable

individual. He lived all his life inChelmsford and spent most ofhis working life in his hometown too. He didn’t stray beyondthe boundaries of Essex too oftenand never went abroad.

A former pupil of KingEdward VI Grammar School, heled a quiet suburban life with hiswife Doreen in their homes inthe Old Moulsham area ofChelmsford.

He may have seemed like anordinary Chelmsfordian butthere was another side to Baker.He was obsessed with thelandscape and wildlife aroundChelmsford, particularly east ofthe (then) market town, alongthe course of the Chelmer andBlackwater Navigation to theestuary at Maldon and beyondonto the bleak but beautifulsaltmarshes and mudflats of theDengie Peninsula. It was herewhere he really came alive.

Whenever he could, after workand at weekends, he would geton his bike (he didn’t drivedespite working for theAutomobile Association in NewLondon Road) and head east tosee what he could find. And notjust to observe it, but to writeabout it in his unique, rapturousstyle. Writing was Baker’s otherobsession. He was inspired byliterature as a school child and

aspired to be a great writerhimself. After 10 years ofobservations in the wild, hesuccessfully married his twoobsessions.

The power of Baker’sdescriptions of the natural worldhe encountered were recognisedwhen he published his first bookin 1967, The Peregrine, anaccount of his hunt for birds ofprey in Essex which wasdistilled from the diaries,records and journals he kept ofhis wild adventures over adecade.

It was published to criticalacclaim for its vivid,unsentimental and almosthallucinatory evocations of theEssex landscape and its wildlife.One reviewer, Kenneth Allsop,wrote: “It is a masterpiece andinstantly takes its place amongstthe great triumphal affirmationsof man’s search for his lost placein the universe.” It wasrecognised as a landmark innatural history writing andawarded the prestigious DuffCooper Prize for non-fictionwriting in 1968, though thejudges made clear the award wasunder the category for ‘poetry’rather than ‘natural history’.That’s what set it apart fromother wildlife tomes. It was alivewith striking images andbrilliant, inventive prose.

But despite the acclaim andattention, Baker himselfremained as elusive andenigmatic as the falcons hetracked down. The Times offeredup the only snippet ofbiographical information onBaker after the release of ThePeregrine:

“John Baker is 40 and lives ina council flat in Essex. Hedoesn’t want it known whichtown. He doesn’t want hisneighbours to know what hedoes. He hasn’t got a phone or aTV. He never goes anywhere

socially and the last time hewent out to be entertained was12 years ago when he went to thepictures to see Shane…”

The mystery of JA Baker, thebirdman of Essex, has started tounravel now, 50 years after thepublication of his seminal work.Thanks to the release ofdocuments, maps and notebooksafter the death of his wifeDoreen in 2006, and with the helpof her brother Bernard Coe, anarchive has been assembled atthe Albert Sloman Library at theUniversity of Essex.

Cambridge post-graduatestudent Hetty Saunders becametaken with Baker’s writing afterstudying it for her MPhil inEnglish Literature and visitedthe archive at the University ofEssex. When the course finished,she was still interested in JABaker. She offered to cataloguethe archive and when doing sorealised much of Baker’s life,methods and habits wererevealed there. A biography ofBaker seemed the next naturalstep and with theencouragement of hersupervisor, Robert Macfarlane,the acclaimed writer onlandscape and nature, she setabout putting together a bookabout him.

“There was just so much of itand the more I found the moreand more interesting it was,” shesaid. “He had seemed somysterious before but thisopened up his world. Therehadn’t been a lot written abouthim beforehand because therewasn’t a lot of information.

“I think he wasn’t exactly shy,but was very private. He wantedto be a great writer but he didn’twant to be a celebrity. He was onTV and radio [when ThePeregrine came out], so he didput himself out there.

“E veryone seems tothink he was astrange hermitbut he wasn’t

really. He was wary though [ofcriticism]. He was very strong inhis convictions that all he’dwritten in The Peregrine wastrue and that all he had donewas embellish what he’d seen abit. But when it came out therehad been some snobbery andsome naysaying about hisobservations. He was onlyconsidered very mysteriousbecause no one had any personalinformation about him.”

John Alec Baker was born inChelmsford in 1926, the onlychild of Wilfred and Pansy Bakerwho had married the yearbefore. Wilfred, who worked as a

draughtsman at localmanufacturer CromptonParkinson, was a towncouncillor for many years andserved as Chelmsford mayor in1964.

Baker went to Trinity RoadPrimary School then attendedKing Edward VI Grammar(KEGS). He was a bright childbut got bored easily and wasprone to day-dreaming. Hestruggled in subjects that didn’tinterest him leading someteachers to think he was lazy butwhat he really wanted was tobreak free of the confines androutines of school life.

Already a sensitive child, hebecame increasingly introvertedas an adolescent and craved thefreedom that nature representedfor him.

This yearning for theoutdoors, allied with his talentfor writing, would come tofruition in The Peregrine butonly after many years offrustration and disappointment.After school, he went throughvarious jobs but found it difficultto settle and often rubbed upagainst his fellow workers. Evenhis wife Doreen had to admit hewas a bit of a loner.

“He wasn’t hateful aboutpeople but he wasn’t at hishappiest around them,” saidHetty. “His escape from everyday

life was through huntingperegrines.”

And those hunts, thosephysical and psychologicaljourneys into the wild,eventually produced aremarkable book.

“He had an amazing ability tosee all the nature around him ina very different way tocontemporary writers,” Hettysaid. “He didn’t fit into anycategory very easily. He didn’thave much truck with thebirding fraternity and theydidn’t have much with him. Hehad a very independent vision ofthe world. It was revolutionaryat the time.”

“The fixed image of thecountryside of that time wasinfluenced by books like TarkaThe Otter and Wind In TheWillows. It was very cosy. Bakerbroke down the boundariesabout the way we think about thewild.”

“In terms of writing aboutnature, there’s no doubt he’sbeen very influential. You find

his style of writing everywherenow, he’s inspired a lot of people.His lyricism is very striking. Noteveryone likes it, it’s a difficultbook. There’s no happy endingbut it sticks with you in a waythat other writing doesn’t it. He’sreally having a renaissancenow.”

Hetty’s tutor, RobertMacfarlane, is one of those who’schampioned Baker for sometime, hailing both hisobservations and his writingstyle as well as pointing out hiscontribution to awareness aboutthe environmental threats to theperegrine.

“I n the half centurysince its publication,this fierce little bookhas only tightened its

grip on us,” wrote Macfarlaneabout The Peregrine in TheGuardian earlier this year.Macfarlane marvels at Baker’s“ecstatic, violent, enrapturedprose” and how this “myopicoffice worker” produced such aprofound and vivid account ofthe wilderness just a few miles

from his home in Chelmsford:

“His Essex is landscape onacid: super-saturations of colour,wheeling phantasmagoria,dimensions blown out andfalling away, nature ashypernature.”

Baker suffered ill health andpsychological problems for muchof his life which made his wildtrips and writing more and moredifficult.

When he died of cancer in1987, it seemed like he might slipinto obscurity as many writersdo after their death, his momentin the spotlight gone. But theresurgence of interest in him inrecent years, through the effortsof people like Hetty Saundersand Robert Macfarlane remindsus what a remarkable talent thisseemingly unremarkableChelmsford man was.

My House Of Sky: The LifeAnd Work Of JA Baker by HettySaunders is out now, publishedby Little Toller Books. A special50th anniversary edition of ThePeregrine is also out now.

“Everyone seems to think he was a strange hermit but hewasn’t really...He was only considered very mysteriousbecause no one had any personal information about him.”

Biographer Hetty Saunders

‘Thereshould be ablue plaquefor Baker’

JA Baker. “His escape from everyday life was through hunting perigrines”

Baker’s stomping ground. Paper Mill Lock, above, and the Chelmer andBlackwater Navigation Photos: DARRYL WEBBER

Ulting Church. The main area for Baker’s peregrine sightingswas between Little Baddow and Ulting Photo: DARRYL WEBBER

The power of Baker’s descriptions of the natural world wererecognised when he published his first book, The Peregrine

Biographer Hetty Saunders

mysterious birdman of Essex

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