Stephen Peet

Stephen Peet ( born February 16, 1920 in Penge, † 22 December 2005) was a British documentary filmmaker.

Stephen Peet came from a Quaker family. His father was a journalist. He grew up with the ideals of the Quaker community, including pacifism. In the late 1930s he began working as a camera assistant in the documentary Marian Grierson, sister of John Grierson. During the Second World War, he served as a medic, first in London, then in North Africa and Greece, where he was taken prisoner, he spent partly in Germany. After the war he worked as a cameraman and director in the Central African Film Unit, where he helped the natives to make films for the native African population.

Since the early 1960s, he worked for television. First, for ITV, where he was responsible for the editorial updates. In 1967 he went to the second program of the BBC, where he worked in the Department of documentaries. He developed there the concept of oral history. He led the interviewing of witnesses in documentaries. Between 1969 and 1981 he created in this style more than 80 films and made so for the popularization of the British television documentaries. So he inquired of British soldiers from the Boer War, eyewitnesses of disasters of the first quarter of the 20th century, and many more.

After he had finished his work at the BBC at the beginning of the 1980s, he held all over the world talks about the documentary and oral history.

Much later came out that Peet was on a blacklist both the BBC and MI5 because his brother, who sympathized with communism, lived in the GDR. He never even belonged to a party and his life was a liberal.