E. C. Baker

Newspapers identified the author of A Cushy Job as Captain E. C. Baker who had fought with Kitchener in the Sudan. The Liverpool Echo, 18 January 1918, also noted that ‘Captain Baker, an old cavalryman, ... early in the war did good work in getting recruits, speaking daily from the Gladstone statue in the Strand and at the Law Courts. With his general he was badly injured while examining shells in the G.P.O., London, about a year ago. He is a huge man, over 6ft. in height’. Newspapers also mentioned that he was well known in variety and theatrical circles, although A Cushy Job is the only piece by him listed in Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama 1900-1930. The explosion at a London post office was reported in the Western Times, 7 September 1915 (and many other newspapers similarly), which recorded that ‘General Sir Desmond O’Callaghan (formerly Colonel-Commandant of the Royal Artillery) and Captain E. C. Baker, explosives experts, who were examining … shells and other materials sent home from the Front [as souvenirs], were seriously injured, and conveyed to hospital’ when a shell contained in a parcel exploded at Mount Pleasant Post Office. It was later reported that Baker, of 67 Southbrook Road, Lee, S.E., had lost the thumb and three fingers of his left hand; and in a newspaper in 1916 he is described as General O’Callaghan’s staff officer. (In ‘A Bit Of A Lad’ by A. Neil Lyons (1917) a lad home from the trenches is delivering trophies, in the form of shells, sent to a girl by various boys to whom she is more or less engaged.) Posts at Captain BAKER (The Common Room) Page 1 RootsChat.Com by the wife of a grandson of Captain Edward Charles Baker state that he was not really a Captain, that he fought with Kitchener in the Sudan and that he founded the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in 1907. The website of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Princess Royal’s Volunteer Corps) records that ‘The Corps’ founder was Edward Baker, a Warrant Officer in the 21st Lancers, who was wounded during his period of service with Lord Kitchener’s army in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898’. The posts at RootsChat.com identify that E. C. Baker with Levi Edward Baker whose birth was registered in 1865 at Maidstone (the home of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, for which several newspapers in March and April 1916 reported a Captain E. C. Baker trying to recruit a company of music hall artists); who in 1901 was a butcher living in Islington (where a Captain E. C. Baker, President of the Health and Strength League, had formed a Drill Brigade according to the Islington Gazette, 16 September 1907); and who in 1911 was a representative of the dressed meat company Armour and living in Lee, a sub-registration district of Lewisham (where the Captain E. C. Baker who was injured in the explosion at Mount Pleasant Post Office lived in 1915). Did this Levi Edward Baker at some stage (re)join the army as E. C. Baker with the rank of Captain? Edward Charles / Levi Edward Baker is said to have disappeared, abandoning his family, in 1917. Despite the parallels, or coincidences, it is uncertain how much of the above information actually relates to the same person and to the author of A Cushy Job in particular.

Performances associated with E. C. Baker