Harry Barker was born about 1872 in Dudley, England.

He moved to Canada in 1907. He served at McGill University for thirty years as a janitor in the Arts Building and at the Faculty of Law. Known as McGill's "poet laureate," much of his verse, written between 1908 and 1945, was published in the McGill Daily and the Literary Supplement. Barker was a student of Shakespeare who knew more about the Bard of Avon than most of the Honour English students who took rigorous courses in Elizabethan drama. He would stand for an hour leaning on his broom and reciting some of the more flown passages from Hamlet or The Merchant of Venice, while open-mouthed undergraduates stood and stared wondering that one head could hold all he knew. He was a kind of McGillian Homer who wrote poems with enthusiasm and love. In the 1930s, he published “Simple Rhymes for Simple Folk: Second Series.”

McGill University Department of English awards the Harry Barker Memorial Prize in English to the student with the highest standing in English in the initial year.