Peter Pickering, who has died aged 96, was once one of Britain’s busiest film-makers. Directing hundreds of shorts between 1942 and 1983, he made more films than perhaps any other director for the National Coal Board (NCB), which was central to the postwar industrial documentary boom. Most of his output epitomises the tradition: humane contributions, unobtrusively finely crafted, to public service and postwar consensus. Hovering elsewhere in his filmography, however, are quirkier films connecting his career to his personal perspectives. His masterpiece, the deceptively simple Miners (1976), a quietly elegiac statement of respect for the working world and social culture of the coalfields in which he and his peers had by then been filming for three decades, happily aligns his corporate commitments to his own.
From 1947 onwards, Peter was a member of Data Film Productions, Britain’s first film co-operative, made up of leftwing idealists whose bread and butter was producing Mining Review, a cine-magazine for the NCB (a cornerstone of Labour’s postwar nationalisation programme). Released monthly into cinemas, Mining Review would become the world’s longest-running industrial newsreel. Peter directed innumerable items for it, many technical and filmed underground, others covering community and cultural stories. Memorable examples include his spellbinding record of Paul Robeson’s 1949 visit to a Midlothian colliery, and his 1959 piece on the Ashington Group of miner-artists, a film later praised by Lee Hall, author of The Pitmen Painters.
There were directing jobs, too, for other Data sponsors including the Co-Operative Wholesale Society, British Productivity Council and Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. For the last of these, Peter (with his friend John Ingram) made his most ambitious early film, The Island (1952), which depicted an oil refinery’s incoming presence on the Isle of Grain, Kent, and is a lyrical, even ambivalent, interpretation of the client’s brief.
Following a short period away from film working as a schoolteacher, in 1964 Peter re-entered the industry as an employee of the NCB Film Unit. Data having closed, Mining Review was now made by this internal department. Peter directed many more issues until 1982 but the unit’s new head Francis Gysin also provided him with opportunities to stretch out.
These included Two Worlds (1965), a peculiar essay film exploring parallels between mining and education, and, more successfully, a sequence of darkly comic internal training films sporadically released over 10 years, starting with Nobody’s Face (1966). Arguably the director’s most distinctive contribution to the annals of industrial film-making, this film cycle was prompted by the coal industry’s productivity challenges but flirted with a sardonic, alienated view of work itself.
Peter pursued two filmic side interests. In the early 1960s, he moonlighted as a scriptwriter for early schools TV programmes made at ATV, and from 1964 he and a close NCB colleague, Robert Kruger, ran ie Films, producing ultra-low-budget, somewhat experimental shorts (sometimes made for NGOs) exploring themes of childhood and disability (an example of their left-field output is Day 359, 1971, filmed at South Ockenden psychiatric hospital in Essex).
At heart, Peter was a frustrated writer. Some poems and stories, and a children’s book, Uncle Norman (1968), were published. Later, under the pen name Alan Hubbard, he self-published numerous books: a heady brew of the quasi-autobiographical, the satirical, surreal, existentialist and occasionally erotic. Peter’s remark that “the human race is more lovable when seen as clumsily incapable than as ‘lazily’ inefficient” may be a clue as to what connects such self-expression to his official creative output. His politics leaned firmly left but were unorthodox: his hero was the social philosopher André Gorz, who articulated prescient theories on ecology and the future of work. This fascination was intriguing in view of Peter’s own past as a film-maker-for-hire embedded in the fossil-fuelled industrial economy.
The son of John Pickering, a customs officer, and Frances (nee Hale), Peter was born in Manchester and raised in Bristol and London, attending Beckenham and Penge grammar school for boys. In 1941, a drink with the film-maker Donald Alexander of Paul Rotha Productions led to Peter, still a teenager, joining the company headed by the documentary pioneer Rotha (he would live to be Rotha’s last surviving employee). In 1942, he got his first chance to direct: a fun public information film photographed by Wolfgang Suschitzky, who became a frequent collaborator and friend. Following wartime army service in Africa and Italy, Peter joined Data (Documentary and Technicians Alliance) Film Productions, a breakaway from Rotha led by Alexander.
Peter was twice married and divorced. He is survived by two daughters, Joanna and Rebecca, from his first marriage, to Sheila (nee Jones); and two sons, Tony and Dave, from his second, to June (nee Osmaston); by June’s daughter, Rosie, and by four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
I met Peter in connection with his work, preserved in the BFI National Archive, but we forged a friendship that went far beyond film. He was, as so many friends found, a thought-provoking conversationalist, humorous, gentle and wonderful with children. He retained a youthful outlook until very late in his long life, when he developed dementia. Dave Pickering’s podcast series Down to a Sunless Sea is a tribute to his father, containing nuanced reflections on experiencing a loved one’s collapsing memories.
• Peter Pickering, film-maker, born 23 January 1924; died 20 November 2020
