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Welcome to this service for Nick. What a crowd, what a gathering from all corners of the world to mourn Nick’s passing, but mainly, as Nick would hate us to be miserable, to celebrate and praise his life and achievements. Shortening his name to Nick crept in at Oxford. He is more familiar to his parents and many local friends as Nicholas. I shall probably carry on with Nick. Nick is disappointed not to be here in person and he sent his apologies. I am sure he is here in spirit as there was nothing he liked more than a gathering of his friends and this is quite a gathering. Indeed when the Baker family were organising the social event of the year last summer– Arabian nights -, Nick said that he would much prefer to spend money on a party than a wake, so unless Mrs Baker has been especially generous, don’t expect too much after the service. Your presence is a testament to everything Nick meant to us all: a warm friend, a husband to Karen, father to Rosanna, Francesca and Charlie, son to Jane and Christopher and brother to Lucinda and Nigel.

We are here to mourn but particularly to celebrate the life of a great man. We mourn a life tragically cut short by an illness out of the blue with no known precipitating factors and which seemed so unfair. Nick with characteristic stoicism said ‘Stuff happens’ and on being told his diagnosis said ‘Well I suppose someone has got to have cancer’. That is not to say he accepted his illness. Nick fought it very successfully for a long time with great courage and he never let it obviously get him down. In fact it inspired him to do some remarkable things. As Nick was usually late for most things, it seems particularly ironic that he has departed early for the celestial feast halls.

His fiftieth birthday is tomorrow. Almost half a century ago, the baby Nicholas, bundled up, was brought to his mother by a nurse in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. Seeing Mrs Baker’s look of dismay the nurse said ‘Never mind, he’ll look better in the morning’. Nick did not look back from that moment and seemed to have charmed everyone he met since. He was brought up in Broad Oak by his parents Jane and Christopher and with his siblings, Lucinda and Nigel. Hearing their stories it sounds as though he had the wilfulness then to be mischievous and the charm to get away with it. I know a younger Baker with similar characteristics. By the late 70’s, he was about the most eligible man in Hampshire. Dashing, good looking, entertaining – shame about the car- a clapped out Datsun – but he was the man all the mothers wanted to drive their daughters home, a safe pair of hands. Nick himself wasn’t too keen on that label. He had a hidden hankering to be outrageously wild, but somehow the goodness of his character always shone through.

Nick was great. Great men in history books usually have a lot of personality flaws. Nick was great because he had none. Now, I know that no man is a hero to his valet. I am not suggesting for a moment, Karen, that you were Nick’s valet, and I am sure he was a hero to you, but Nick really had almost no faults even to those who were close to him. I never saw him lose his temper or be deeply unpleasant about anyone. He has been said to slam a telephone down after difficult calls with clients. He kicked cars when they broke down and threw things at Gordon the horse when he couldn’t catch him. The extent of his expletives when things weren’t going to plan usually consisted of ‘Good Grief!’

He was an endlessly engaging person to be with: warm, entertaining, generous. Ladies, you know how sitting next to many men at dinner parties can be a pretty dull experience – they talk about themselves, don’t ask about you and are generally pretty self-centred. Well, Nick was none of those. He was somebody we all wanted to sit next to. A few years ago I was having supper in a restaurant by the sea in Porto Fino. Being a sad person I was alone and reading a book. A conversation started up between me and a man sitting by himself at the next door table. He was an Argentinian yacht broker who had just been at the Genoa boat show. I asked him if he knew Nick Baker. ‘Yes Nick Baker, what a great guy. If he was here we would not be sitting alone, we would be having a party!’ Nick had a way of drawing all sorts of people into his circle and making them welcome.

Nick was a hugely positive person; always full of energy and activity. In his London days when asked what he was doing that evening he would say ‘I’m out on the razz’. He loved to be around people and people loved to be around him. He hated missing out on a party. A telly supper was to him, a sign of failure. But don’t let me give the impression he was a vacuous social butterfly. Far from it, he enjoyed events because of the people. He was a great engager of people. He took interest in what they did. He had a sparkling wit and the intelligence to make best use of it. He enjoyed the company of a wealth of humanity whatever their background and drew what was best out of them. This was a striking quality in someone who was often personally private and modest and appeared to have a very conventional British outlook.

Our Golden days at Oxford passed in a warm haze of adolescent chaos and general indiscretion. We were probably often boorish but it was boorishness in a splendid environment of intellectual delights and curiosities; a very stimulating place. Many of Nick’s friends from those student days are here today. Nick lived with Stephen Ellis in a fine farmhouse in Pumney and then Winchester Rd. They were most hospitable. After one of many parties at which a lot of spaghetti was decorating the walls and ceiling, Nick was asked, in relation to the mess, if his woman was thorough. Nick replied ‘I would have nothing to do with a woman who was not thorough!’ It was remarkable for someone as fastidious as Nick that until he married Karen he could live with people who were so untidy – to mention no names, of course - both in Oxford and in London. He liked everything just so, but could put up with chaos in others. After one of the many burglaries in Ingelow Rd in London, Nick thought it best not to try and explain to the police that his housemate’s room had in fact not been ransacked but was always like that.

At Oxford, Nick was unconstrained by the rigours of academia. Most of his friends thought he was reading geography. They probably still do. In fact he read Russian and French but as little as possible. His association with the Geography Schools was probably because he was frequently seen waiting outside for a young lady to emerge after lectures. His friends occasionally teased him for never opening Anna Karenina but while some of us should probably not have been at Oxford, Nick certainly made the grade intellectually, although he refused to follow educational dogma. Nick was very sharp, wise, witty, brilliant with language and very quick in repartee. On being asked by a journalist after Robert Maxwell’s disappearance what he thought had happened, he quickly answered ‘There must have been a big splash.’

He loved a sense of occasion and ritual and he celebrated the Englishness of those things: school, his college, the Air squadron, Eights week, Henley, Ascot, Cheltenham, harvest festivals, cricket, Pimms, this ancient cathedral. But he was never pompous and could and did talk to anyone. Nick did have a serious side. He was a very private person; never given to outbursts of emotion; somewhat secretive. Some people thought he must have been a spy. Perhaps he was! But what comes through time and time again talking to many of you was his sense of friendship, his integrity, his loyalty, and his ever present sense of humour. There was never a dull moment with Nick.

The early days in London were pretty much an extension of life in Oxford, not much work and lots of parties. Nick was keen to get on to the property ladder early on and decided on a house in Ingelow Road. It was a pretty sordid place and Nick was attracted to it not by any architectural merit but by the size of the bath. This was another thing Nick liked – baths and the bigger the better! It was here that he met Karen, not in the bath, but in Ingelow Road. The postman delivered a letter in error to Nick’s house at No. 53. Nick delivered the letter to the correct address at no 44 and Karen answered the door and the rest was history. So younger Bakers, you really do have the postman to thank for your existence. He was jolly lucky to find a beautiful wife who was so compatible, supportive and shared his sense of order.

He decided not long after his diagnosis that he was going to do something positive about it. He founded the Aqualung Trust to support medical charities especially those associated with cancer but others as well. To launch the appeal he decided that something noteworthy needed to be done. He received a lot of help in this from many sources, but it appeared to those of us watching from the sidelines that Nick planned and executed this achievement with his usual quiet understated efficiency. Not previously having been much of sailor, he hatched a plan to sail the Atlantic, not as you or I might do it on the deck of a P&O liner, but in a 48’ sailing boat, the Aqualung, single handed and while coping with his illness. For someone who thrived on the company of others to sail alone must have been an especial challenge. It was a Herculean and courageous feat and it was one which, with the aid of satellite communication, many of us were able to enjoy with Nick as we read the usually hilarious web diary from the comfort of our armchairs. I must read you a brief excerpt because it communicates the essence of Nick.

Aqualung raised a lot of money. It also spent it wisely as well and the success of this must largely be credited to Nick’s wise stewardship. The Trust has provided great support to the Magpie cancer appeal in Winchester, the human genome project at the Institute of cancer research, Encompass which brought together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, and aided Merlin by setting up a clinic in Dafur of which Nick was particularly proud. It is essential that the AquaLung Trust continues to help support the causes about which Nick and the family feel so strongly.

Diary excerpt

Thursday 3rd February 2005

19 degrees North
29 degrees West

A Mr. E from Gloucestershire wants his money back (note to Mission Control: has he actually sent any yet?). He says I am clearly not doing this trip singlehanded, as my earlier diary entry records having a Yankee wrapped round the forestay. Not a nautical sort of chap obviously. Anyway, he knows nothing about the two beautiful Danish stowaways I found in the master cabin. No, just kidding. But it is true that when I returned to the UK for 24 hours last week, leaving brother-in-law Johnny in charge in Las Palmas, he was visited by assorted beauties seeking a free ride to Antigua. The sonorous sounding Natalie from Italy was first, followed by two Danish girls describing themselves as "easy-going". Whatever can they mean?

Other loose ends: the Baked Beans. Yesterday's diary entry has produced many suggestions today about what one can do with a surplus supply of Heinz Baked Beans. First prize must go to an anonymous lady from Surrey (do I know you?) for a truly unusual idea. However, I do not have a bathtub on the boat, so it will have to wait.

Read the rest of the diary on www.aqualungtrust.org

(Matthew hands over to Toby Walker)

(Toby hands back to Matthew)

Slowing Nick down was only possible at the very end of his illness, and although heartbreaking for Karen and the children this was a short period of great and intense family warmth spent together in Nick’s room talking, reading poetry and being together. It gave Nick time to reflect and be at peace with the world.

Nick was immensely proud of his family and rightly so. He and Karen are blessed with three beautiful children who are all very talented in their different ways, having been lucky to inherit good looks, intelligence and sharp wit from their parents. I still have a bone to pick with Charlie Baker when on our way home from skiing in March he announced to a security person at Geneva airport that he had been kidnapped and wanted to be returned to his family on the ski slopes.

Can I just say to Karen, and especially to Rosanna, Francesca and Charlie, now is a time to be sad. It is right to cry and to grieve, but there will be light at the end of that sadness and what will be there will be a clear memory which will last with you always of Nicholas as a great man; a brave, kind, witty man. Be proud and happy that he was your husband and your father. He is one of God’s noblemen. We will all miss him hugely.

He has achieved success, who has lived well, laughed often and loved much;  who has earned the respect of  intelligent men, and the love of little children;  who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;  who has left the world better than he found it.   Anon.