John Elston Taylor (5 October 1914 – 15 September 1992) was a British documentary filmmaker.
[1] Born in Kentish Town, London, on 5 October 1914,[1] John Taylor had originally set his sights on a career in carpentry; however, shortly after finishing school he was offered a job by his sister's husband, documentary filmmaker John Grierson.
[2] In the 1940s, Taylor began producing films which helped to expose and improve social issues: Margaret Thomson's Clean Milk (1943) helped improve the Scottish dairy industry; Alex Strasser's Your Children's Eyes (1945) showed how a child's squint could easily be corrected with a minor operation; Daybreak in Udi (d. Terry Bishop, 1949) followed the construction of a maternity hospital in a village in Eastern Nigeria.
[2] In 1952, Taylor and Leon Clore set up Countryman Films, a company which made natural history documentaries.
He continued working up to the 1980s, producing quality documentaries on themes of social welfare and conservation.