Fr. Ted is called fully "The Honourable and Reverend Doctor Edward Baty." However "The Honourable" is a title for him
only in certain foreign countries, and academic circles, and he doesn't use it! Indeed according to some experts
it should really be "The Right Honourable"! Probably this would mean even more reasons for not using it!
He was born in Darlington, Co Durham, on 26th February (n.s.) 1930 of a mother from Tyneside, and a father from the Anglo-Scottish
Border country. Proudly he bears ancestry (that he knows of) from England, Ireland, and Scotland in alphabetical order. The forebears
discovered most recently include a shoemaker and gents outfitter from the Isle of Man. Heretics please note that
Fr. Ted's birth saint is the redoubtable repeller of unorthodox teaching, St. Alexander of Alexandria. Take heed! In good
order he has two grand-children with this name, Alexander.
Fr. Ted spent his childhood, from nearly 6 y.o. through adolescence, military service, and early manhood until the age
of 25 in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. He claims it was a great place in which to grow up. His home there was in "Bennetthorpe",
a place name with some resonance today when he ministers in a parish where the "Bennets" were Lords of the Manor at Thorpe
in Surrey, and the lately retired incumbent follows that tradition as Lord of the Manor.
His wife is that rarity a true "Danziger" which later counted as German before she was naturalised as British.
Fr. Ted never knew his in-laws. His mother-in-law, an ardent socialist belonging to a group later represented in
England by the Fabian Society, was a political refugee from the time the Nazis came to power. She settled in France and
sought French citizenship being partly of French descent. In the end her activities led to her becoming one of the martyrs
of resistance to Nazism and all it stood for, being killed in an air raid on the labour camp to which she had been sent from
Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp.. Ted's father-in-law moved from Prussia to West Germany in the nineteen thirties, it
seems, perishing from pneumonia caught through not bothering to dress properly when going to the air raid shelters in one
of the worst winters of the twentieth century, Of his other movements and ancestry we know very little.
Fr Ted's life's work has gone through several phases - a chartered quantity surveyor working also as a church organist
and choirmaster, two curacies, a cathedral chaplaincy, and as parish priest to about two dozen parishes grouped variously
in four places over some thirty years. He spent most of the years since retiring from full-time service as honorary assistant
priest at
St. Mary's Church, Thorpe, Egham, in Surrey, England.
Fr. Ted and his wife have three children and have been rewarded with six grand-children, believing family life is to
be enjoyed to the full!
Hannelore, Fr. Ted's wife for almost fifty years and his friend for several years before their marriage, died on December
14th 2006 after a difficult but largely pain-free eight weeks in hospital. Fr Ted believes that she is still functioning as his
"mutual help, society and comfort" as the Anglican marriage service said at the time of their wedding, albeit now in heaven
and certainly with a clearer vision of his reality than he has! May she rest in peace!
