Derrick Knight’s best-known film, Travelling for a Living (1966), was a vivid, insightful documentary about the folk group the Watersons, which both observed and spread the burgeoning English folk revival.
But his film-making had wider significance, including importing freshly emerging international documentary styles, often using lightweight mobile cameras, into Britain’s somewhat conservative short-films industry. Above all, Derrick, who has died aged 93, encouraged into or through film a remarkably diverse group of creatives, technicians and activists, including Lionel Ngakane, Bernice Rubens, David Gladwell and Roger Graef (all now better known than him).
