John Wiles, who has died aged 88, was a film cameraman on many black-and-white crime "shorts" that became a staple of British cinema in the 1950s.
6:41PM BST 02 May 2013 London Telegraph
As a young camera operator after the war, he shot a wide variety of documentaries as well as short cinema films, notably some of those in the Scotland Yard crime series presented by the popular criminologist Edgar Lustgarten, with titles such as The Candlelight Murder (1953), that became a cult genre. They were shot in black and white on 35mm stock, and when Channel Four showed some of them a few years ago, Wiles was pleased to note that the Time Out television critic referred to "the beautiful film noir camerawork".
He also filmed several other B-features, among them the horror comedy The Headless Ghost (1959) and the crime drama Urge to Kill (1960), featuring a pre-Steptoe Wilfrid Brambell.
John Randolph Wiles was born in Streatham on January 11 1925. His father, Charles, was a director of Harrods for 25 years, responsible for their sales advertising. One of his most notable stunts was to get George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and Arnold Bennett to endorse Harrods in newspaper advertisements.
John always wanted to go into the film business. When war broke out he left Charterhouse School in order to get some experience in the film industry before being conscripted. In 1942, at the age of 17, he joined Merton Park Studios as a clapper/loader and then assistant cameraman.
Wiles worked on a wide variety of films including Out of Chaos (1944) about the war artists Stanley Spencer and Henry Moore (directed by Jill Craigie), and Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (also 1944).
Called up by the Royal Navy in 1943, Wiles underwent an officer training course at HMS King Alfred in Brighton, before being posted to Australia as a sub-lieutenant, "liberating Sydney harbour", as he put it, and to fight the Japanese. He sailed in Golden Hind and Gould, but the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war before he saw any serious action, and he was demobbed in 1946.
Returning to Merton Park, Wiles worked as a cameraman on documentaries and feature films. But in 1951 he broke his spine and sustained other serious injuries while filming from the back of a lorry which went out of control at Aldershot and overturned. Fortunate not to be killed or permanently disabled, Wiles made a remarkable recovery but endured back pain for the rest of his life. Ironically the film he was shooting was called Road Sense, a driving training film for the Army.
His first cinema short featuring the lugubrious lawyer Edgar Lustgarten was The Drayton Case in 1953, starring a young John le Mesurier as Supt Henley of Scotland Yard, and which (like the 37 others in the series that followed) was shot in a week, with as many as 14 set-ups a day. His other work at Merton Park included a couple of Edgar Wallace B-features, such as The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1960). Wiles also shot several films for the Children's Film Foundation, such as John of the Fair (1951).
In 1960 Wiles set up his own production company, Films of Today, with his business partner Geoff Busby, based at 62 Dean Street, making documentary films for clients like Mobil, British Steel, Tarmac, Dunlop, the Bank of England and Shell. He produced the award-winning series History of the Motor Car for BP in 1973, still available on DVD. The company also specialised in training and recruitment films for the Ministry of Defence.
In his later years Wiles worked with John Beckwith Smith at British Films, and played a significant role in both the British Industrial and Scientific Film Association and Bafta. He finally retired in 1994, at the age of 69, and in 2002 was interviewed for the BECTU History Project, which collects oral accounts of working life in the film and television industries.
John Wiles is survived by his wife, Betty, and their four sons.
John Wiles, born January 11 1925, died January 13 2013
R.I.P. John Wiles
Whether they are behind the camera or in front of it, this is the place to discuss all filmmakers regardless of their role in the filmmaking process.
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