Camping on the Wye — S.K. Baker

During their university holidays in the late 1880s, S.K. Baker and three of his University College friends clad in stripy blazers and boaters spent time sailing and camping on the River Wye. Baker, a keen artist and diarist, recorded their travels in watercolour in two small leather bound books.



The result is an entirely charming, funny account along the lines of the legendary Three Men in a Boat with which the notebooks are entirely contemporaneous although the protagonists are younger and possibly naughtier. Baker records their evenings in the pub, their encounters with girls, (both ashore and afloat), nude swimming and culinary disasters, while recording lovingly the landscape and the boats on which they sailed.



The notebook is published as a facsimile with an introduction by Michael Goffe, the son of one of Baker's fellow students (GG in the text), to whom it was gifted.