Valentine Baker

Captain Valentine Henry Baker MC AFC (24 August 1888 – 12 September 1942), nicknamed "Bake", served in all three of the British Armed Forces during the First World War. After the war he became a civilian flight instructor, and co-founder of the Martin-Baker Aircraft Company. He was the father of novelist Denys Val Baker. Military career Born in Llanfairfechan, Wales, Baker joined the Royal Navy ("for land service") on 27 October 1914, and was immediately rated petty officer mechanic, and assigned to the Royal Naval Air Service Armoured Car Section as a despatch rider. At the time he joined up he was described as being five feet eight and four-fifths inches tall, with a thirty-eight inch chest, "medium brown" hair, blue eyes and a "medium" complexion. Five months later, in the Gallipoli campaign, he was wounded by a bullet in his neck which lodged near his spinal column. Doctors informed him that any operation to remove it might be fatal, so Baker told them to "leave it alone then", and he lived the remainder of his life with it in his neck. He was discharged from the RNAS on 31 August 1915, but he returned to military service with the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a temporary second lieutenant in November 1915. The following spring, after his marriage to Dilys Eames, he was posted to the School of Aero Flying and graduated as a pilot in September 1916; he was appointed a flying officer in the Military Wing of the Royal Flying Corps and transferred to the General List on 25 September. Baker was assigned to 41 Squadron, with which he spent his entire nine-month combat flying career, during which time he was reputed to have shot down several German aircraft. He also earned the Military Cross, awarded on 26 July 1917, the citation read: