He was part of my childhood and one of life's original gentlemen. An excerpt from the Times' obit...
"A broadcaster of gentlemanly calm and courtesy, he was unsympathetic to the more confrontational style that became increasingly the norm. In a reply to a newspaper questionnaire in 1997 he singled out Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight as the sort of television that made him switch off.
Raymond Frederic Baxter was born in Ilford, Essex, in 1922, the son of a school teacher. He attended Ilford County High School, and then worked briefly for the Metropolitan Water Board. In August 1940 he joined the Royal Air Force, volnteered as aircrew and trained as a fighter pilot.
During the war he flew countless sorties as a Spitfire pilot throughout the North African campaign, over the beleaguered island of Malta, and during the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. On September 11, 1943, while flying with a forward support squadron operating from Sicily to cover the Allied landings at Salerno, he was shot down by “friendly” groundfire from American forces.
He had only seconds to choose a site for his crash landing, and opted to try to put down in an orchard. As he made his approach at 120mph he was advised forcefully over the radio by a Canadian pilot flying near by to jettison the 90-gallon reserve tank that was slung underneath his aeroplane. Without that shouted warning he would certainly have been cremated on impact, and the world would have been robbed of those well-modulated tones. Baxter was subsequently mentioned in dispatches.
After recovering from the shaking up that he had received, he spent a period back in the UK as a fighter instructor, after which he was posted to Cairo, ferrying aircraft throughout the Middle East and to India. A squadron leader when the war ended, he considered making the RAF his peacetime career but decided to try radio and in 1945, while still a serving officer, he joined Forces Broadcasting in Cairo.
After the war he was deputy director of the British Forces Network in Hamburg. He had been fascinated by motor sport since reading magazines at school, and he founded the British Automobile Club Hamburg for competition-starved Service personnel.
He also ran a weekly poetry programme, and persuaded Sybil Thorndike and Peggy Ashcroft to give readings. Joining the staff of the BBC he found his niche in the Outside Broadcast Department. He made his name as a commentator on motor racing, the Farnborough Air Show and the Royal Tournament, while more formal assignments included the 1953 Coronation and, for more than 30 years, the Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall.
A regular participant in the Monte Carlo Rally — he competed in no fewer than 14 of them — he showed his professionalism in the 1954 event when the car in which was travelling skidded into a ditch in central France. Although shaken by the incident and sustaining a cut over his eye, Baxter immediately recorded a description of what had happened. On three occasions he was a member of a winning rally team. He was also an accomplished Formula 1 commentator. "