Anthony Harvard Baker was born at North Walsham, Norfolk, the eldest son of the Reverend Anthony Charles Baker a Methodist minister; his second name recalled a distant relationship to John Harvard who had bequeathed his library to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century and had given his name to Harvard University. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath, from 1914 to 1922 where he became senior prefect and acquired a school leaving scholarship before entering Manchester Medical School. He qualified in 1927 having obtained a distinction in anatomy and the prize in pathology and was appointed house surgeon at Manchester Royal Infirmary, resident surgical officer at Stockport Infirmary and later surgical registrar at Manchester under ED Telford and Sir Geoffrey Jefferson. He then joined a general practice in Stroud and passed the FRCS in 1933. When the new hospital was opened in Scarborough in 1936 he moved there, joined a general practice and was appointed honorary surgeon to the hospital. Shortly after the outbreak of war he joined the RAMC serving as Lieutenant-Colonel in command of a surgical division with the 1st Army in North Africa and later in Italy where he was mentioned in despatches. After the introduction of the National Health Service he left general practice to become consultant surgeon at Scarborough and introduced the technique of open prostatectomy without the use of a catheter, publishing his results in the *Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine* in 1964. He retired from surgical practice in 1968 and was shortly afterwards elected Councillor to Scalby District Council, later becoming Chairman and Mayor of Scarborough in 1974. He married Gwen Image in 1930, and they had one son and one daughter. He died on 6 December 1989, aged 86.