J.A. Baker

Born on August 6, 1926, in Chelmsford, Essex, the only son of Wilfred Baker, an engineering draughtsman, and his wife Pansy, John Alec Baker lived his whole life in that town. He was short-sighted, and rheumatic fever and other illnesses kept him away from King Edward VI Grammar School for long stretches of his childhood. After a run of jobs he became manager of the Chelmsford branch of the Automobile Association, and later of a Britvic soft-drinks depot. In 1956 he married Doreen Coe, a wages clerk at the AA; they had no children. From 1954 to 1963 he kept diaries of the birds he found in the fields, woods, estuaries and sea walls between Chelmsford and the Essex coast, and above all of the peregrine falcons that came there for the winter. Out of ten years of watching he made The Peregrine (1967), a single season from October to April told in prose so concentrated that the watcher seems to pass over into the hunter. It won the Duff Cooper Prize. A second book, The Hill of Summer (1969), followed the summer across the wilder country of southern England, and after it he published no more books. Little else about his life is on record, and most of what is known comes from the diaries and papers now held at the University of Essex and from the first biography, Hetty Saunders's My House of Sky (2017). From about 1970 ankylosing spondylitis, a severe form of arthritis, crippled him by degrees. He died of cancer in Chelmsford on December 26, 1987, at sixty-one. A blue plaque now marks the block of flats where he wrote The Peregrine.

Baker managed the Chelmsford office of the Automobile Association and never learned to drive. He went after the peregrines by bicycle, out along the lanes and sea walls towards the Essex coast, with his binoculars and telescope. In the 1980s, when arthritis had crippled him, his wife Doreen drove him to the places he could no longer reach alone.