Early Life
Baker was born into a staunch Methodist family, the youngest son of Birmingham Gas Department's chief accountant, Wilfred Baker and Emily. His early schooling was at King Edwards Grammar School. His elder brothers, Leonard and Norman studied law, and he had a married sister, Edna. In his teens Baker began to question what religion meant to him and decided to become a Quaker, since it was closer to what he believed in. Baker studied architecture at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham and graduated in 1937, aged 20, in a period of political unrest in Europe.
During the Second World War, as a conscientious objector, he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit in China and Burma. in 1943, on a trip back to England to recuperate from ill health, he was waiting for a ship at Bombay when he happened to meet Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi told him that the knowledge he brought from the west was not useful to Indians and that the rural areas needed more thinking and not the cities. Gandhi's idea was that it should be possible to build a home with materials found within five miles of a site. This was to have a great influence in his later life.
His initial commitment to India had him working as an architect for World Leprosy Mission, an international and interdenominational Mission dedicated to the care of those suffering from leprosy in 1945. The organization wanted a builder-architect-engineer. As new medicines for the treatment of the disease were becoming more prevalent, his responsibilities were focused on converting or replacing asylums once used to house the ostracized sufferers of the disease - "lepers" into treatment hospitals.
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