Captain Baker - Tasburgh's Spy

Both William Moore's memories of life in Tasburgh between 1939 and 1970, entitled Hard Times and Humour, and the History of Tasburgh booklet published in 1994 record an incident in 1941 when lorry loads of soldiers and Military Police arrived in the village one morning with an armoured vehicle escort to arrest a "spy" who was living in a cottage at the bottom of Church Hill, where Halloween now stands. William Moore, who was a schoolboy at the time, watched events unfold from the playground of the old school, and names the "spy" as a former British army Captain called Baker. A patrolling member of the Home Guard had apparently seen a light flashing from the cottage as enemy planes were flying overhead, and accounts mention messages being dropped and a radio transmitter being found hidden in the chimney. However such details may owe more to childhood imagination and growth in the retelling rather than to reality.

Captain Baker, whose full names were Thomas Guillaume St. Barbe Baker, was born in 1895 into a well-off Hampshire family, the son of John St.Barbe Baker and his French wife, Charlotte Purrott. He had an elder brother, Richard St. Barbe Baker, who became an early and leading international ecologist, concerned about deforestation in Africa, and an advocate for the planting of more trees. Thomas Baker had served in WW1 as a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery but after being buried alive by an explosion, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps where he rose to the rank of Captain.

During the 1930s, as a member of the British National Socialist party, he came to the attention of the authorities for his ardent pro-German and anti-Semitic speeches, and was put on the list of persons to be rounded up and interned as a threat to national security in the event of war. On the outbreak of WW2 he avoided capture, shaving off his distinctive walrus moustache, and perhaps with assistance of contacts in the area, was able to lie low in Tasburgh until his luck ran out. Whether or not he actually passed any information to the enemy, he escaped the death sentence normally passed for spying and wasn't even sent to prison, but spent the rest of the War interned on the Isle of Mann. Because of his unabated extreme views and eccentric behaviour, Captain Baker was one of the last of the internees to be released in April 1945, after which he settled in Jersey and died in 1966.