Lt Spencer Baker - Died at Passchendaele 1917

Red Lion Hotel 1927
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Spencer Baker was my grandfather's cousin. He grew up at Forest Farm, Chelwood Gate, son of Spencer snr and Susan Baker (née Lindfield). Spencer was a building contractor and at the age of 29, in 1909, he left Chelwood Gate to work in Saskatoon, Saskatchawan, Canada. Although this 1927 photograph of the Red Lion was taken 10 years after his death on 26th October 1917 in the mud of Passchendaele, he would have recognised it.
Spencer enjoyed cricket and in Canada he joined the Saskatoon Cricket Club. In 1914 he enlisted in the Canadian army as a reservist in the Saskatoon 29th Light Horse and in 1917 he applied to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force, the CEF, to the western front. He was then 37, but to appear younger he falsified his age as 34 on his attestation papers. He went to France as a Lieutenant in the Canadian Infantry, 46th Battalion. Along with his company commander, Capt Kennedy, Spencer led the men of C Company in the advance on the Passchendaele ridge on 26th October 1917. C Company took the high ground on the Ypres-Passchendaele road in appalling conditions of rain and mud but in the advance Spencer was killed.

Spencer Baker is buried in the Passchendaele New British Cemetery and he is commemorated on the War Memorial in Danehill. His grave in Belgium simply shows that Lt Baker was a member of the Canadian forces and makes no mention of his English origin. In Danehill, there is nothing on the war memorial to show that Spencer was in the Canadian Army and not the British Army or that his home was Danehill's sister village of Chelwood Gate. Tragically, Spencer's father, Spencer snr, also died in the autumn of 1917.