In 1948, following the break-up of his first marriage, Denys Val Baker moved to Cornwall where he rented a cottage on Trencrom Hill and it was from here that the first Cornish Reviews were published between 1949 and 1952.

The magazine ran for ten issues and offered the very best of Cornish writing on all aspects of the arts, including articles by Bernard Leach, R. Morton Nance, Peter Lanyon and A.K. Hamilton Jenkin as well as poetry by the young Causley, Clemo, W.S. Graham and the irrepressible Arthur Caddick, who penned this first volume’s swan song: ‘Its friends, the artists had no cash to spare, And those who should have helped it did not care’ — thus appraising the fate of many a brave literary venture.

Short Stories
Over the years, Denys Val Baker sustained his trade as a writer by producing hundreds of short stories, many of which were broadcast by the BBC. He was an acknowledged master of the genre, reminiscent in his more literary creations of H.E. Bates and Lawrence — The Woman and the Engine Driver and The Clay Pool being particularly fine examples — and it was a matter of some regret to himself that he had not more time to dedicate to his short story form, his favourite. But life and limb, not to mention a large and flourishing family from his second marriage, demanded a steady output of bread and butter writing in the form of stories, articles and lesser novels.

During the fifties, Val Baker lived in Penzance, Sennen Cove and St Hilary before moving to St Ives, which later inspired the first of his idiosyncratic autobiographies, The Sea’s in the Kitchen and The Door is Always Open.

There was to follow an inevitable sequence of twenty-four more such books by which Val Baker captivated an entirely new public, to whom he brought great pleasure through escapist reading. The books were extrovert and delightfully eccentric and it is by these that many will remember him.

His later adventures at sea in his converted Motor Fishing Vessel Sanu were outrageously chronicled in such books as The Petrified Mariner which, in their turn, were guaranteed to harrow the blood of any professional seaman with those tales of Denys’ and Sanu’s incredible brushes with disaster.

Although one guessed that there was more than enough of Valentine Baker’s pioneering instinct in his son to keep Sanu afloat and on course in the long term. (”…You mean you had the wrong charts Denys, and you headed up channel regardless…?” A quiet chuckle and that self effacing smile, followed by …Well, Sanu knew exactly where she was going…”).

You couldn’t make it up.