Nathaniel Baker

Founded in 1841 to educate the sons of gentlemen, Cheltenham College became one of the great public schools of the Victorian era. Its Rifle Corps was enrolled in 1862 but it was not until the following year that Cheltenham made their first appearance at the annual national rifle meeting held in Wimbledon ‘for the promotion of marksmanship in the interests of Defence of the Realm.’

This portrait of Nathaniel Baker (1844-1907) comes from an album of carte-de-visite portraits all showing members of the school’s Rifle XI during the mid-1860s. The album was compiled by John Reid (1844-1889), afterwards John James Reid, son of Sir James John Reid, Chief Justice of Corfu. Reid was Captain of the Rifle Corps from November 1863 to June 1864. After finishing his education at Cambridge’s Trinity College and at Edinburgh University, he was called to the Scottish bar; he died in Edinburgh on 10 November 1889, age 45.

Nathaniel Baker was born on 21 May 1844, a son of solicitor Anthony Kington Baker of Longford House, Leckhampton (a district of Cheltenham). He was Captain of the school’s Rifle XI from February 1863 to June 1863. He was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1867. In 1874 he married Cecil Jane Sclater, sister of his school friend and fellow rifleman James Robert Charles Sclater. The couple appear on the 1881 census living at 42 Tregunter Road, a particularly fine street in Kensington, with their five-year-old son called Kington. Nathaniel described himself as a ‘Barrister at Law in Practice.’ In 1901 he and his wife were living at Butts Hill, a house at Kingswear near Dartmouth in Devon. He died there on 27 November 1907, aged 63. He left an estate valued at £37,483.

Photographer unidentified.