Dallas Bower (25 July 1907 – 18 October 1999) was a British director and producer active during the early development of mass media communication.
[4] Bower was educated at Willington Preparatory School in Putney,[5] and St John's College Hurstpierpoint, where he studied classical literature in addition to contemporary technology.
Bower stated that the lecture made a ‘profound impression on him, directly leading to his collaborations with the British developer and radio physicist Robert Watson-Watt.
In this position Bower recorded audio for a multitude of the company's projects, the most notable inclusions being Harry Lachman’s Under the Greenwood Tree (1929) and Alfred Hitchcock’s first movie filmed with dialogue, Blackmail (1929).
[8] In 1930 Stoll Pictures hired Dallas Bower to continue sound recording for the director and first university professor of film, Thorold Dickinson.
Bower, who worked with Cock at BIP, was tasked with adapting ‘high culture’ to the developing mediums of mass communication, in the form of radio plays, short films and television shows.
He had additionally been working on a screenplay for an adaption of Shakespeare’s Henry V, set in a Fascist state; however, the BBC halted all services before the script’s completion due to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.
Due to the outbreak of World War II, Bower was commissioned into the Royal Corps of Signals, where he was posted to a training brigade located in Whitby.
Bower’s follow-up project was an Anglo-French adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, which he signed-on to after being approached by a French film crew in search of a British director.