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India and Gandhiji
What was supposed to be a temporary job in the remote isolated leper colony in inland china became a four-year stay. Baker finally returned to England thinking of taking up a life as an architect now that the war was over. One day while on a walk through the city he happened to see a board that said ‘Mission to Lepers’. By the time he came out he had decided to go to India!

The Mission was in dire need of an architect. Advances in medicine meant leprosy was no longer an untreatable disease. Instead of the existing asylums and colonies they now needed to build many new hospitals to treat these leprosy patients. Finally, this was his chance to use his architectural skills to help people in need. Laurie had no second thoughts and arrived in India in 1945.

In British India, missionaries led a relatively luxurious lifestyle living in bungalows and attended to by servants and helpers. Laurie felt uncomfortable in these surroundings into which he was pushed into and decided to stay with Dr. P.J Chandy who ran one of the leprosy hospitals in Faizabad and had become one of his closest friends. He also decided to take only the same salary Dr. Chandy received. It was here that he met his future wife Elizabeth, also a doctor when she came to Faizabad to perform an operation on her brother and look after the hospital while he recuperated.



Read the rest of Baker's early experiences in his own words as follows:



I stayed with Quaker friends who were close to Gandhiji and had the thrill and the blessing of talking with him about the lives of people in India and China. It was strange to spend time demonstrating and explaining to him how my Chinese cloth shoes were made and then later to have 'Quit India' shouted after me as I returned through the streets to the house where I was staying. During this period of enforced stay in India, I saw mansions and I saw slums. I met very great people and I mixed with many very poor, lowly people. I talked with Gandhiji about my urge to return to work in India even though the British were being urged to get out and was encouraged by him to return to India. However, I finally returned to war-torn Birmingham. Obviously there was going to be a major requirement of architects once the war came to an end. Even so, the housing needs of many of the millions of people in India seemed to be far greater and their chances of getting people to help them build extensively far lesser than those in Britain.