The Peregrine: 50th Anniversary Edition

Notes on J. A. Baker

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 play cricket. A school magazine report describes him as ‘an erratic bowler, whose chief fault is an inability to maintain length. He is lacking in confidence, but shows great promise.’ Still, his friends all remembered him being keenly anti-establishment, and rather obsessive. No-one could remember an interest in birds at school – which accords with Baker’s own admission that ‘I came late to a love of birds’.

Bright enough to be allowed to stay on into the Sixth Form, given to bouts of ill-health, with a passion for reading, and a little rebellious, Baker is remembered very warmly by his friends. At the end of his time at grammar school, John Thurmer recalls, the Sixth Form master said that Baker had ‘enjoyed some general reading, but had not exerted himself’. Don Samuel goes as far as to describe him as talented, though bone idle, but notes that he was an avid reader, and literally, to quote Samuel, ‘sated himself in books’. He also recalls that Baker loved Dickens, and liked to genuflect light-heartedly before his novels in the Sixth Form library.

In 1943, his contemporaries left school to join up, a fate which Baker’s short sight ruled out. It appears that this might have been the period when, as the original biographic sketch suggested, Baker undertook the earliest of his unsuccessful ‘fifteen assorted jobs’. Information is scant, but Samuel says that Baker liked to work outside – the best environment for his health – and recalls him apple picking in the orchards around Danbury Hill, east of Chelmsford.

All three friends remember that Baker was a keen correspondent while they were overseas in the Forces, regularly sending them letters full of news, and examples of his writing – including early poems. With great prescience, Don Samuel had kept some letters, and these, largely written between 1944 and 1946, provide new insights into Baker’s development. They also confirm that he did, indeed, work behind the scenes at the British Museum (although he left after just three months). Most are written from his parental home in Chelmsford, but they include letters written from North Wales, Cornwall and Oxfordshire, revealing a first-hand knowledge of land and seascapes that appears in both The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer. In August 1946, for example, he writes to Samuel: ‘On Monday, I took trains from Paddington for Stow-in-the-Wold, and I have started enquiries concerning farm-work. I have arrived a little too early for the harvesting, but I have persevered, and obtained several half-promises from the landed-gentry’.

Critically, these letters reveal the extent to which Baker was determined to write. In one penned from Chelmsford on 25 April 1946, Baker declares: ‘I must confess that I occasionally despair of my capacity as a poet, solely because I have so few people whose opinion I can obtain. I am however, confident of ultimate success and that, as you [Don] say, is very important.’ And in his next on 5 May: ‘In the Observer this morning, I came across an extract, in a book review, from a poem by the ultra-modern poet, Dylan Thomas. Thomas is a very original writer – some of his poetry I like very much.’ He goes on to describe how the poem in question, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘epitomises the happy summer days of our childhood – the love of the woods and the rivers and hills’.

The young man revealed in these letters accords well with the boy recalled by his school friends. Indeed, in the first letter that survives, written from Llandudno, North Wales, in August 1944, Baker writes: ‘I have a book with me on my holiday, the only book I ever take with me everywhere I go; yes, you’ve guessed it – Pickwick – yet again do I marvel at the great Dickens’ mastery of the art.’

A year later Baker expounds at length his admiration for another author, the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, who, renowned for The Playboy of the Western World, drew his inspiration from visits between 1898 and 1901 to the remote group of three Aran Islands that lie west of Galway Bay, open to the full fetch of the Atlantic. Synge’s The Aran Islands notebooks were published in 1907. As Baker explains, they ‘give a faithful and vivid account of the people and their ways’. Baker argues that ‘it was Aran, that cradled his lovely, cadenced phraseology’, and that ‘for me they [the islands] will be a point of pilgrimage in my journeying through the countries of the mind’. All this was perhaps an influence on Baker’s acute and vivid style, and on his sustained interest in the wilderness and potential for solitude within his own home country.

On the last page of the same letter, Baker’s love of the Essex landscape is already clear, and, long before he is following peregrines, he is rehearsing some of the writing that appears in his later work: ‘The loveliest country of all lies between Gt. Baddow and West Hanningfield. Green undulating fields, rugged, furrowed earth, luscious orchards, pine clumps, rows of stately elms – all these combine and resolve into a delicately balanced landscape that can never become tedious to the eye. One cannot get far from people – from the little rustic cottages that huddle in the winding lanes. Yet the very proximity of these dwellings seems to give an impression of remoteness. / As you walk across these fields – Danbury stands all green and misty blue in the late afternoon of declining summer. Everchanging – sometimes assuming truly mountainous grandeur – it fascinates the eyes and brings an exaltation and a faith. / These last days of summer are delicate poems in green and gold – the clouds unfurl in unsurpassed magnificence and move me to tears for their passing. / This country with its little fields and murmuring streams that basks in its waning summer gold will still be there when you return – it is for you and all men, for it is beauty.’

Along with these letters, another recent revelation has given us some insight into Baker’s personal library. Following David Cobham’s interest in making a film of The Peregrine, Baker’s brother-in-law, Bernard Coe, took a series of photographs of the bookshelves in Doreen Baker’s house. Given that this was twenty years after Baker’s death, some books may have been lost, but the spines reveal titles on birds and nature, geography, geology, travel, aerial photography, atlases, cookery, cricket, opera and, of course, many volumes of literature, both prose and poetry. Poetry collections include Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Hardy, Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Roy Campbell, Richard Murphy, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Charles Causley and Ted Hughes.

In May 2009, when the author, Adam Foulds, reviewed The Peregrine in the Independent, he argued that Baker’s writing most resembled Ted Hughes’: ‘the harsh vitality of the living world is perceptible at every point.’ In 2005, the environmentalist Ken Worpole wrote that Baker was, ‘if anything … more ferocious in his identification with the animal world.’ Baker owned several collections of Hughes’ poetry, including Crow, Lupercal, Wodwo, Moortown Diary, Season Songs and his 1979 collaboration with the photographer Fay Goodwin, The Remains of Elmet.

Introducing The Peregrine, in his Beginnings section, Baker talks of writing honestly about killing. ‘I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word “predator” is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that spring carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.’ And consider too Hughes’ poem ‘Thrushes’, from the collection Lupercal, published in 1960, just when Baker was preparing to write The Peregrine: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, / More coiled steel than living – a poised / Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs / Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce, a stab / Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing. / No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares. / No sighs or head scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab / And a ravening second.’ And, in The Peregrine, on 20 December, Baker writes: ‘Song thrushes bounced and sprang to spear out the surfacing worms. There is something very cold about a thrush, endlessly listening and stabbing through the arras of grass, the fixed eye blind to what it does.’

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.