The main purpose of this short introduction to the diaries is to explain their provenance, J A Baker’s method – in so far as it is known – the editorial decisions I have taken, and some reflections on the names, landscapes, and landscape change that has occurred in the last fifty years.
The diaries came to light when the film-maker, David Cobham, was gifted them by Baker’s widow, Doreen, in 2005; a year before her death. The diaries are written in a stitched school notebook in blue ink, but are also extensively underlined, annotated, and modified. Baker did not appear to take notes in the field; preferring to return home, and retreat to his study to write up a day’s observations.
One of the strangest anomalies is that most of the pages that contained peregrine sightings are lost, although Doreen Baker’s explanation of her husband’s working method throws light on this critical absence – since it seems he destroyed them while drafting The Peregrine. Even so the remaining diaries are wonderfully rich, and I have selected almost a third to illustrate the formation of Baker’s ideas and reflections in a raw state, and the clear links between his field-watching, and the re-appearance of those observations in the final text of either The Peregrine or The Hill of Summer.
All the diaries combined cover the period 1954–1963, but Baker’s fine handwriting deteriorates in the latter years – possibly as a result of his arthritis – and many words are indecipherable. I have focused on the period from the first entry on 21 March, 1954, until his one sighting of Buzzard – then a rare bird in Essex – on 5 October, 1961. Most observations fall into the period 1957–1960. In selecting the 60,000 words, I have remained true to Baker’s original text throughout, retaining his punctuation, spellings, capitals, underlining, and repetition. Obvious edits have been included, and I have sought to show significant crossings out, and bracketed additions wherever they occur. Most words have been deciphered, but I have used [?] to show where a word remains unknown. I have not footnoted the text because of book length constraints, but also because Baker’s prose reads so well. Where he had cut out diary entries himself, they are marked with *** in the page centre. Such excisions range from a single day, to many weeks, as from early September 1959 to late April 1960, and mid-February to early June 1961.
In some instances, Baker marked diary entries with a red or black line at page side, apparently noting sections he liked, or used as the basis for particular passages in The Peregrine or The Hill of Summer. Others are also struck through in black pen, and I have sought to follow these directions while selecting text to include. Typically, Baker starts each diary entry with a summary of places visited, notes on timing (the 12-hour system with AM/PM), temperature (in Fahrenheit), and weather (including wind strength and direction). Baker, who never learned to drive, visited sites again and again; all within a day’s bicycle range of his various homes in Chelmsford.
In the extant diary, he mentions over 500 place names, and his focus was consistently the Chelmer valley, including Danbury Hill, and Grace’s Walk, east of Chelmsford, and the woods, especially Edney and Baker’s, to the south-west. He also made regular visits to the Blackwater Estuary, east from Goldhanger, along the seawall to Joyce’s Farm, and Gore Saltings, as well as the reservoir and its environs at Hanningfield to the south. There are many variations on names as well as abbreviations, but they are usually interpretable with reference to Baker’s introductory note on any day. Examples include GW, or GWlk, for Grace’s Walk, and WW, for Woodham Walter, RF for Roll’s Farm, and Gallywood and/or Galleywood. E.T.C. appears to be the English Timber Company, which had orchards at Clark’s and Brock’s Farms to the east of Danbury.
By and large, Baker was a solitary birdwatcher; cycling and then walking the lanes, woods, seawalls and shores alone. A handful of companions are mentioned in the diaries, however, including Sid [Harman] who may well have introduced Baker to birdwatching, and G. known only by that initial. Two well-known mid-century Essex birdwatchers, Geoff Hyman and Stan Hudgell also feature. Pyman co-authored a county avifauna with Robert Hudson – A Guide to the Birds of Essex – in 1968, and Hudgell was also a regular contributor to county recording, including a paper on Hanningfield Reservoir, a site created in 1957, which Baker visited regularly. Sadly, we have been unable to locate anyone who watched birds alongside Baker, but he was clearly familiar with the birdwatching ‘establishment’.
Other people appear only sporadically, often as a source of mild irritation: walkers, fishermen, motorcyclists, horse riders, and so on. Baker also occasionally refers to his own state of mind, reflecting the delight of birdwatching and particular birds, or the perils of biting insects, and foul weather. Mammals are also mentioned – badger, fox, stoat, and others, as are occasional invertebrates, such as dragonflies and demoiselles.
However, it is the birds that are the constant feature of every day, and Baker records more than 150 species. He uses familiar common names, such as Blackbird, Robin, Redstart, Goldcrest, Greenshank, and Garganey, although his use of capitals varies, and names are often abbreviated, for example, S’Hawk, for Sparrowhawk, or LR Plover, for Little Ringed Plover. Again, these variations are usually easily understood, and I have chosen to follow all his names. Transliterated calls and songs have been reproduced as he wrote them, with Baker’s hyphens, and other punctuation. Throughout, Baker has double-underlined the names of most birds. These are later additions in blue-black ink, perhaps the first stages of analysing the diaries for the books. Many of his additional annotations and corrections are in the same ink.
In retracing Baker’s walks, we have encountered most of the species he watched in the 1950s, but some, including Lapwing, Turtle Dove, and Tree Sparrow, have declined dramatically, while others, such as Collared Dove, have flourished. Mark Cocker dwells on the veracity of the observations and while Baker records birds with uncertainty on occasions, his honest grappling with his own field abilities inspires confidence. The vast majority of the species he recorded, their behaviours, calls and songs, all ring true.
Perhaps the most striking change is the sheer fall in numbers of many of these birds. Although the winter landscape still throngs with woodpigeons, rooks, and starlings; Baker’s flocks of the once commonplace yellowhammers, corn buntings, and house sparrows, are gone. It is a familiar picture all over the United Kingdom, and constant agricultural intensification, the loss of rough and wet meadows, hedgerows, as well as the havoc wrought by Dutch Elm disease – and the growth of Chelmsford and Maldon alongside a web of new roads – have all contributed to radically altering the landscape through which Baker cycled and walked in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Baker’s work is highly concentrated and we know that he compressed his ten years of observations into two books which he presented as if they documented the birds and other wildlife he saw over a single winter (in The Peregrine), and then over a single summer’s span (in The Hill of Summer). This working method afforded him much liberty in the process of composition. Nevertheless, there are moments when one can clearly see very precise connections between the raw sightings as described, and the finished passages in the books.
For example, on 16 June, 1954, Baker visited Edney Wood with Sid Harman, and their dusk encounter with Wood Lark appears in The Hill of Summer chapter: May Downland (although Baker writes as if he is alone). Five days later, Sid Harman finds a Red-backed Shrike foraging over the allotments at the end of Fourth Ave. Thin Chelmsford. This may well have been Baker’s sole sighting of this species. It stimulated a long section in July: The Heath. On 22 July, 1959, he watched a stoat at Hanningfield in late afternoon, recreating the encounter in August: Estuary, perhaps with elements of another stoat sighting on 13 August.
On 3 December, 1959, Baker observes Snipe at Hanningfield, and describes their Colorado beetle-coloured heads, and gentle brown eyes in the diary, descriptions that re-appear on the 10 December account in The Peregrine. On an unknown date in 1956, Baker found two peregrine kills in Ramsey, south of the Blackwater; ‘one gull on the wall, and another in the middle of an immaculate green lawn in front of one of the bungalows. A great insult to respectability. A really messy oval of bloody bones, and scattered feathers’. In The Peregrine, the second kill appears on 25 March: ‘A black-headed gull had been plucked and eaten on the smooth green lawn of a summer bungalow. It lay at the exact centre, reclining in a mass of white feathers, like a dead flower among spilt petals.’ Or ‘listening to the last rich dungeon notes of a crow’ on 13 November in his final version; reworked from an encounter in Baker’s Wood on 4 May, 1959, ‘where two Carrion Crows were calling at each other – reaching down to a most excitingly rich, villainous tone – really black and chilly in timbre, a dungeon note for dusk’.
So, though Baker excised his ‘peregrine pages’ from the diaries, many other examples bridge his close watching, his quiet writing at home each evening, and his perfect distillation of those same moments into The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer.