Douglas Fisher
Cameraman, film-maker, and the man whose collection this archive preserves.
Douglas Fisher's passion had always been films and film-making, first sparked by a childhood neighbour who owned a Pathé 9.5 mm home movie camera and projector. Still at school, Douglas managed to buy a 9.5 mm sound projector (thanks to his Mum), rented films and arranged shows in his local village halls — always well attended; there was no television in the 1930s, and Colchester, the nearest large town, was nine miles away.
After leaving school he was apprenticed and tried various jobs — first farming (his father had a farm, a village shop and a post office), then retail. Eventually he answered a newspaper advertisement for a trainee photographic technician with the Ministry of Defence. He was told to wait; a few months later he was sent to Worth Matravers near Swanage in Dorset, where he joined AMRE/TRE (the Air Ministry / Telecommunications Research Establishment). Meanwhile, war had broken out.
Malvern, TRE and the training films
In the Swanage area he befriended the portrait photographers Joan and Helen Muspratt, learning much of their technique. TRE was soon hurriedly moved to Malvern in Worcestershire to make it less vulnerable to attack. There Douglas became close to Waldo and Muriel Lanchester, who ran a marionette theatre in the town (Waldo's sister was the actress Elsa Lanchester); Douglas wrote an illustrated book and made a film about Waldo making marionettes — a friendship that lasted their lifetimes.
He progressed quickly to shooting much of the unit's 16 mm output, mostly training films. It was at TRE that he met and married his wife, Joanna, who had joined as an animation artist.
After the war — medicine, the Zoo and the wild
With the war over, Douglas was employed by the Wellcome Trust to set up the Wellcome Film Unit, making medical films. He filmed “across the road” at London Zoo, and made an updated William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood that became the standard work for medical students.
In 1956 the newly founded Granada TV started a weekly programme, Zoo Time, with Dr Desmond Morris, and Douglas joined. Television was live in those days; inserts were filmed by Douglas within the Zoo. Sidney Bernstein of Granada then offered him the chance to make complete natural-history programmes in the wild — a relatively new idea — for a series called Another World. Douglas always said, “The animals should be the stars of the show, not the people filming them.”
Among his work were three six-part series with producer Jeffery Boswall for the BBC Natural History Unit — Wildlife Safari to Ethiopia, …to Argentina and …to Mexico — each taking six months to shoot, with Douglas as the only cameraman.
The radar archive
In later years he concentrated on local-interest filming and on building his archive of stills and film of the early development of radar, duplicating friends' and colleagues' private collections and providing images for books and television. He was a great friend of the East Anglian Film Archive, where many of his films now reside. The very early days of radar were his home patch — Orfordness, Bawdsey Manor (Chain Home) and Martlesham Heath.
Douglas Fisher died in 2007, aged 85, in Ipswich Hospital after a short illness. This archive continues his work.