He was encouraged by his father to go into commerce but studied music privately and composed his first published work, Romance for violin and piano, when aged sixteen.
There followed a series of war documentaries, including Battle Is Our Business (1942), Towards the Offensive (1944) and Western Approaches (1944), through which his name finally began to attract attention.
However, in 1963 he was one of three composers, the others being William Alwyn and Franz Reizenstein, who abandoned scoring film music in protest of the exorbitant percentage of royalties taken by the publishers.
The Clifton Parker Bursary at Dartington International Summer School was founded to encourage the study of film music.
Although most of his scores are missing, presumed destroyed, several have been reconstructed by Philip Lane and have been released on a Chandos Records CD, performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
A few orchestral pieces have been recorded, including the overture Thieves Carnival (1959) and the Two Choreographic Studies of 1940, written for his ballet dancer wife Yoma Sasburg to star in.