LOCAL LEGENDS (6)
Dr. RICHARD St. BARBE BAKER, OBE

Richard St. Barbe Baker was born in West End at "The Firs" in Beacon Road in 1889, one of six children of local evangelist John St. Barbe Baker and his wife Charlotte. The family was an old established one locally with many of the members prominent in the Church. Richard's father John founded and built the Free Church Mission Hall on his property in the shape of a corrugated iron church, which is still functioning today as a Baptist Church. His father set up Baker's Westend Nursery growing trees of all kinds on the site of previous gravel extraction (the Telegraph Woods area has always been a site for gravel and sand extraction especially during the Victorian period) at "The Firs".

Richard helped his father at the Nursery and after serving in the Great War, being wounded and invalided out in 1918 returned to civilian life and gained a Forestry Diploma at Cambridge. He had various jobs including being a lumberjack in Canada, then a spell in Kenya in the Colonial Service during which he founded "The Men of the Trees" organisation in 1922. This flourished over the years to become "The International Tree Foundation" today.
Continued on page 2