Donald Alexander was a British documentary film-maker who worked as producer, director, writer and editor of films documenting social and industrial conditions, most notably in the coal-mining industry, between the 1930s and 1970s. The movement of which he was part is now regarded as the golden age of British documentary. Its leading figures also included Paul Rotha, John Grierson, Edgar Anstey, Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright and Arthur Elton.
Biography
Alexander’s family came from Wick, in north-east Scotland, though he was educated in England, first at Shrewsbury School and then Cambridge University. In 1939 he married Slade-trained artist and illustrator Isabel Alexander and then, after their divorce in 1945, fellow film-maker Budge Cooper, with whom he collaborated over many years. In 1936, on the strength of an amateur film of miners in the Rhondda Valley, he was taken on by Paul Rotha at Strand films. He made films for Strand, Films of Fact and the Ministry of Information before leading a group of younger documentarists away from the big names in documentary and setting up the independent co-operative film unit DATA, which he chaired for several years. Many of DATA’s commissions came from the National Coal Board, which was established in 1947 to run the newly-nationalised mining industry. Film was by then so useful to industries such as this for technical training and information exchange as well as entertainment, that in 1953 the NCB agreed to the establishment of an in-house film unit, which Alexander was invited to set up and which he led until 1963. Patrick Russell, head of documentary film at the British Film Institute, rates the NCB Film Unit as one of the world’s biggest and best industrial film units. It produced a remarkable body of work - some 900 films in all, including the fabled cine-magazine Mining Review - before closing in 1984, the year of the bitter but unsuccessful campaign to prevent Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from closing down large numbers of collieries as a prelude to the demise of the entire UK mining industry. Technically polished and visually arresting, especially in black and white, the films of Alexander and his colleagues provide not just technical support but also a remarkably detailed visual history of the rise and decline of the post-war mining industry, and of the communities from which the miners came. Taken together with Alexander’s films in other fields they both meet the informational and technical needs for which they were commissioned and provide a powerful, reformist and sometimes polemical commentary on social and economic conditions in Britain before, during and after the Second World War.
