DES BAKER

Master craftsman

‘‘Even when I was at sea, you made things. I made model ships . . . You kept yourself busy, otherwise you’d be bored to tears.’’

Words and images: Chris Marshall

For years craftsman and master bone carver Des Baker has been creating intricate artworks whose final form emerges as if by magic from the hint of a shape in raw antler, wood or bone.

Born in Doncaster, northern England, in 1941, the 80-year-old, who emigrated with his late wife Cynthia to New Zealand in 1964, hasn’t lost any of his Yorkshire accent, not even when on one of his regular forays into character to illustrate an anecdote.

While skilful in a range of media, from painting to scrimshaw – when whale bone and teeth were legally available – he mostly now turns his hand to the utilitarian, such as walking sticks, favouring antler and bone.

But half a dozen sticks he lays out demonstrate his versatility in other materials: the head of a pheasant captured in a curve of merino horn, a hammerhead shark in bone atop a stick of shark vertebrae – cause for an enlivening departure from straight narrative.

‘‘That walking stick were caught off Mayor Island. It took me four hours to land it.’’

A wolf’s head in bone, a clenched fist in hippopotamus ivory. ‘‘Nothing to do with gang members – it’s sailors’ rights . . . often depicted in certain scrimshaw pieces.’’

The scrimshaw stick, using sika leg bones, reminiscent of the ones whalers would have taken ashore to barter for grog. ‘‘For some reason seamen all want to get drunk very quickly.’’

While Baker’s own career in the merchant navy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, straight from school, post-dates the days of sail, that scrimshaw tradition (artwork and toolmaking by sailors and whalers in their downtime) is one he readily researched and absorbed.

‘‘Even when I was at sea, you made things. I made some model ships . . . You kept yourself busy, otherwise you’d be bored to tears. There were very few books on the boat. You always had bits you could make things out of . . . You cut the bottom off your jeans to make shorts, and then you’d sew yourself a hat of that material.’’

At 17, after three months training in London at Gravesend Sea School, he was a greenhorn – ‘‘all very exciting and when you’re young, a very wonderful time in your life’’ – travelling, mostly to the antipodes, though his first trip, in 1958, was on a tanker to the Persian Gulf through the recently reopened Suez Canal, still littered with sunken hulks.

‘‘Kuwait was where we tied up, nothing there, nothing. Only a few oil wells and equipment for pumping oil. Now, you wouldn’t recognise it.’’

Mostly though it was south. ‘‘I come here twice on ships. I were on an old tramp steamer for nine months, to New Zealand and then over to Australia, carrying grain back to Ireland . . .

‘‘There was bloody rats everywhere. I remember them running around on the rails while we were on watch, they was in your accommodation. We lived with them.’’

Better alive than dead, though, recounted one old mate who’d been on a fumigated ship with dead rats in every unreachable crevice.

‘‘You were only earning £13 a month, so you were paid off with very little. After nine months I think I was paid off with 85 quid.’’

Unfortunately ‘‘with that I bought a bloody motorbike and I were knocked off it the day before I was going to join another ship. I finished up in hospital for three months . . . tied into a bed with a bloody big weight on the other end to pull everything into place.’’

Then, with a wry smile: ‘‘and that’s why I like sticks, because I had to get about with one for quite a while’’.

In hospital, he met Cynthia, a cadet nurse, and in 1964, a week after getting married, they were on the Northern Star headed to New Zealand, Des paying £500 for the berth. ‘‘You had a cabin, six weeks at sea, dress for dinner every night, choice of two menus, all the wonderful things you could be offered, very exciting.’’

New Zealand was attractive because he had already seen the amount of work here. He remembers pulling into Bluff in his merchant navy days and getting sidetracked from a trip to the pub. ‘‘ ‘Listen, if you could spend two hours here, quid an hour.’ Quid an hour!

‘‘’All them are going on your ship, all them bales of wool have to be put on that train there and go down to the dock and into the hold . . .

‘‘You got in one night half the wages you had to work a month for. You realised the population wasn’t here. When you came here in the ’60s you would get the paper and there’d be five pages of jobs.’’

Work, after arrival, was on projects in Auckland, building, fitting, painting.

‘‘One job was on Queen St, a big insurance building, around six storeys high, and I always remember one day – ‘where’s everybody going? what’s happening?’ They all got out the windows and climbed down to the overhang over the pavement and down the road came the Beatles in a big convertible.’’

The couple, with son Mitchell, then moved to Taupo¯ , where Cynthia eventually became the charge nurse at the maternity hospital, the couple living on the grounds for 20 years.

Des worked at a range of jobs, surveying, eventually groundsman at the hospital, but he was always ‘‘fiddling about with something’’ – painting, which he had enjoyed since school, restoring things and then carving in bone, stone, wood.

He puts his interest in creating things down to his father – whom Des didn’t really meet until he was 5. A World War II prisoner of war swept up in the Fall of Tobruk, his father worked as a jointer in the railway workshops in Doncaster where the big locomotives were built – the likes of the Flying Scotsman, the Golden Arrow and the Mallard.

‘‘The old man worked in the boiler shop, he were as deaf as a post. He went to work with a collar and tie on and flat cap and swung a big hammer all day, knocking rivets in.

‘‘He did all kinds of work in the carriages when they made the royal coach, all beautiful mahogany seats and benches and tables.’’

His parents followed Des and Cynthia to New Zealand in 1965. ‘‘Dad made some beautiful things for people at the back end of his life . . . you do a lot of stuff at the back end of your life when you should have been doing it all your life because that’s what you enjoy.

‘‘But life, it doesn’t deal to you, you’ve got to have that wage coming in . . . you can’t be making things and hoping they will sell.’’

Baker’s passion, encouraged by his beloved Cynthia, who died seven years ago of pancreatic cancer, has seen his pieces in the hands of the discerning, all over the world.

‘‘She would say ‘you don’t know how good you are’.’’

For Baker, antler is a renewable resource – easy to work provided you stay within its limits. ‘‘Americans are calling deer antler the new ivory,’’ he says.

Sambar deer is a favourite. ‘‘It’s quite solid because he doesn’t cast his antlers every year like red, sika and fallow deer.’’

But his passion for carving is now a hobby. ‘‘I don’t need the work any more . . . I’ve got a few jobs I want to do for meself, so when I pop off, Mitch has got a few bits and pieces.’’

In Des falsetto: ‘‘ ‘Keep going, Dad, no, you’re not working hard enough.’

‘‘When an older person needs a stick, I would rather create something nice for them to have. I don’t like taking money off them – I prefer to sit down and talk and get the story before crafting a one-off piece of art.’’

A bit like Des’ life story.