YE OLDE NURSERIE RHYMES
Rev H Drury Baker
Boosey & Co 1907

The Rev Harry Drury Baker was my maternal grandfather. He was born in 1867 and died in 1913.

In 1901, he married my grandmother Mabel who was then 17; by the age of 23, she’d had four children – my mother Dorothy, born in at the end of 1901, was the oldest.

Harry Drury Baker was ordained in the early 1900s and spent the latter part of his life as a prison chaplain. He was musical and published several works of including the beautifully illustrated Nurserie Rhymes. I have also a song in ¾ time, La Belle Nicotine, inspired by his rather racy young flame-haired wife who smoked, not proper behaviour for an Edwardian cleric’s wife! Dedicated to “Dollie”, this was published by Boosey in 1913 under the name of “Horace Barker” presumably to avoid any association with a respectable (?...) man of the cloth. In going through my music stash I’ve just come across another longer piece in ¾ time, “A Russian Love Song”, published under his own name and dedicated “to my friend E. B. Charles”; undated, the publishers were Patey and Willis of 44 Great Marlborough Street.

I don’t know how many copies of Ye Olde Nurserie Rhymes exist; looking online, there appears to be a copy in the library of the University of Toronto and my uncle Guy Drury Baker, Harry’s son, was convinced that the British royal family had a copy but I suspect that this was more snobbery than fact. My uncle also asserted that the saintly Rev Drury Baker enjoyed exercising his droit de seigneur with young servant girls and that led to his contracting syphilis; I cannot vouch for the truth of this claim.

Harry Drury Baker died suddenly in Norwich, far from his then home in Liverpool, after having been taken ill on a train. My uncle claimed that his young wife, who remarried quite soon afterwards, did not attend the funeral – if true, this was a sad, lonely end for a colourful and gifted man.

Nicholas Drury Hope Wilson, Somerset, July 2011.