Mr W. Baker and wife on the barge HIBERNIA (?) off Mersea Stone July 1889. Used in the 2001 West Mersea Town Regatta Programme where the caption was 'Mr and Mrs Baker pose by the windlass on their barge 'Pandora'. They ran a ferry service from East Mersea to Brightlingsea during the time the Rev. S. Baring-Gould wrote 'Mehalah'. He based his D'Wit characters on them and Mehalah herself on their daughter.

In Mainsheet magazine Autumn 2019, Janet Beyer found a cutting form Manchester Courier 30 August 1904:
"The Essex Chronicle reports the death at Brightlingsea at the age of eighty years of Mr William Baker, a man with an interesting history, whose late wife is supposed, with every good reason, to have been the original Mrs Witt in Baring Gould's Mehalah while the character which gives to the book its title had its original in one of Baker's two daughters, who was afterwards known as 'Mehalah' Gardner she having married a soldier of that surname in Colchester. Mr Baker lived on a barge at East Mersea Stone from 1884 to 1902 and in the latter year moved the vessel to St. Osyth Stone, where he ferried from East Mersea to Brightingsea. Baker died on his barge and himself was ferried at the last from barge to shore for internment in St. Osyth cemetery, where there was a large attendance. Mrs Baker died on the barge about four years ago.

Date: July 1889