Peter Pickering obituary

Film-maker who spent three decades documenting the lives of miners for the National Coal Board

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.