Valentine Baker (Pilot)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Captain Valentine Henry Baker MC AFC (24 August 1888 12 September 1942) 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.Born in Llanfairfechan, Wales, "Bake" 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.... Mehr