Richard Felix Raine Barker (7 May 1917 – 11 July 1997) was an English journalist, drama critic and historian.
Two well-received pieces, one on school life and the other on the 1936 Crystal Palace fire,[1] earned him a weekly column as the paper's amateur drama critic at the age of 19, making him the youngest dramatic critic working on Fleet Street.
[4] During World War II he served as private and later a sergeant in the Gordon Highlanders where he helped run the theatrical entertainment group, the Balmorals.
[2] A posthumous publication was issued by the London Topographical Society, numbered 167, which represented another important collaboration with artist Peter Jackson, entitled The Pleasures of London (2008), and edited by Ann Saunders and Denise Silvester-Carr.
In retirement he lived in Benenden in Kent where he landscaped the grounds of the 15th century Wealden Hall house his father Anthony Raine Barker had extensively restored from the 1930s.