[1] Its leading figures also included Paul Rotha, John Grierson, Edgar Anstey, Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright and Arthur Elton.
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.
[2][7] 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.
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.