Bill Baker's sendoff

publication date: Feb 8, 2008

I know that many of you wanted to be at Wells Cathedral yesterday but couldn't get there, so here's a very brief account.

The Cathedral is of course stunning but even it could not overshadow the great groundswell of affection from a packed house - about 600? - of friends who had come from as far afield as California and Morocco especially to be there. Bill's teenage daughter Polly was the star of the show with an assured reading of Joyce Grenfell's poem urging us not to be sad. Her younger brother George, the most obvious chip off the old block, wrote the most heart-rending poem called 'If I had One More Day'. Bill's old friend Ian Doherty made a great speech.  Kate managed to smile bravely and be nice to everyone (superhuman, surely) and the massed choirs of Wells Cathedral School, not mention glorious trumpets, were quite wonderful.

There was a hiatus at the very beginning of the servce as the organist frantically extemporised, the dean looked worriedly down the nave and we all wondered what was going on. Turned out they had never had to get such a wide coffin - and ten pall bearers - through the door of the cathedral and it just wouldn't fit. Cue search for a trolley etc. Bill would have loved it. The coffin was carried out, not before ten different grimaces as it was hoist aloft, to Elgar's Nimrod.

Apparently limitless magnums of Pol Roger 1998 were served in the choir school afterwards, although Joe Schoendorf, a California-based friend and good customer of Bill's, had taken the precaution of arriving on our doorstep for the drive to the depths of Somerset with a large silver bucket of ice and water and a magnum of Dom Perignon Rosé 1990. Plastic cups in a car park is probably not how winemaker Richard Geoffroy envisaged this wine being drunk but we felt as though we were at least keeping the quintessentially greedy and discerning spirit of Baker alive as we caried them up Wells high street towards the service.