Baker was also related to clergyman Neville Arthur Blachley Borton.Other family connections include John Browne, a renowned English landscape engraver.
Following his WWI service, he worked in accountancy[16] negotiating the purchase[17] of Gainsborough Pictures' Islington site[note 3] from Famous Players–Lasky on behalf of Michael Balcon.
When theatre producer Basil Dean and actor Gerald du Maurier founded Associated Talking Pictures (ATP) in 1929,[20] Baker was first to join the management team, quickly followed by textiles heir Stephen Courtauld.
All together about 60 pictures were made there over the seven years from 1931 to 1938 such as Perfect Understanding starring Gloria Swanson and Laurence Olivier, other coming stars started their careers there like Madeline Carroll, Margaret Lockwood or director Carol Reed In 1938, with ATP struggling, he invited[note 6] his former Gainsborough employer Michael Balcon (at that time, head of MGM-British) to take over the studio from Dean; Balcon subsequently hailed their 20-year partnership as the most successful of his career.
An early collaboration was The Ware Case, which helped move Ealing beyond the Gracie Fields and George Formby vehicles that the studio had previously produced.
Ealing had its roster of personnel, directors, writers, and technicians on permanent salary, its pool of actors, its recurrent thematic preoccupations, and from all these there was derived a very recognizable house of style of film making.
Baker was, like Balcon, a vocal critic of what he saw as the monopolisation of British film exhibition by the Rank Organisation, and in 1944 he negotiated a more favourable co-production and distribution deal for Ealing.