Index
Baker Publishing
Both my parents were honest and hard working. They were proud of our family name.
Anybody who claims otherwise had better be prepared to repeat those comments in a court of law...
My mother was the eldest of four sisters, and my father the eldest of two, has a sister, so that I have nine cousins, eight of them married, with eighteen children between them, and a sister, with two children in my immediate family. Although they all benefit from my family owned business, to protect their privacy, that is all I wish to say about them.
My Mother, Mary Baker
Mary was born Ethyl Mary Wedgwood Burgess on October 7th maybe 1919.
She was the eldest of four daughters, and trained as a nurse before qualifying and practising first in the Northland region of New Zealand and then working overseas for the World Health Organisation, in Borneo, and as a secretary in London.
When she met and then married my father, in 1952, she found happiness with the man she loved, and settled down to the life of a farmer's wife in rural New Zealand.
She truly was a nurse, and often neighbours would call for advice whenever a child or a loved one was sick. To me, as a growing child, it was a revelation that someone could be so much in demand on a purely voluntary basis.
Mum died on 11th January 1990, aged 74, of heart failure.
She should have had a pacemaker fitted even before her children were born.
Tim, or Lorenzo Sandilands Baker, as he was christened, was born in about 1917 on the 16th of May. He has one sister, but his father, also Lorenzo Baker, died when (Tiger) was only seven.
When the war broke out, Tim who had been working as a shepherd in the Gisborne district, and saving every penny toward his ambition of owning his own farm one day, enlisted at once. After a period of training, he found himself a Sapper in the Royal Engineers, in the Middle East, without even any rice to eat. He did have the Lee Enfield which his mother's brother, his Uncle Bill had used during World War I, but he never saw active combat and spent all his waking hours surviving sand storms, dysentary, bad food, sentry duty and building structures which would get the troops to the front line in what he called a "game of silly buggers". He said he did enough crawling during the war to last both of us a life time.
When the war ended he returned to the place where he had grown up, living with his mother and uncle, and bought a rehab farm for 3,000 pounds at 3% interest over 30 years. It did not even have a perimeter or boundary fence, because the previous owner had gone broke during the depression of the 1920's. By the time I was born in 1955 he had built it into a business which had a house, cowshed, shearing shed, haysheds reticulated water, power supply and a flock of sheep, cows, dry stock and pigs.
I never went without, and Tim was respected for his hard work and honesty by all who knew him.
He died on 12th of February 1982, aged 64, of renal failure. There was no kidney dialysis machine available, and no possibility of a kidney transplant without the cost of over $250,000, almost more than his entire life savings.