My husband, Ivor Dunkerton, who has died aged 83, was an award-winning BBC producer and director on the Man Alive and Tuesday Documentary programmes who changed his career in the late 1970s to become a cidermaker.
He was born in Ilford, north-east London, and brought up in Enfield, the son of Ernest Dunkerton, an agent for an insurance company, and his wife, Maria (nee Rutler). He left his secondary modern school at 15 with no qualifications. He joined the clerk’s office at the local Edison Swan factory before doing national service with the RAF in Singapore, where he worked in Air Photographic Intelligence.
On his return to London he got a place at Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of Westminster University) to study film and photography, and then worked as a film editor at Worldwide Pictures. He was offered the opportunity of joining the BBC, working on Tonight first as an editor and later as an assistant director.
Throughout the 60s and 70s he directed a string of documentaries, many award-winning, in a series edited by Desmond Wilcox and Bill Morton. All encapsulated his passionate sense of justice and fair play and his abiding interest in mostly undocumented lives as their titles reflect: Jailhouse Shock, Love Behind Bars, Children of the Revolution (Algeria), Asian Teenagers, Black British White British, Christians at War, From the Cradle to the Grave. Nobody was ordinary to Ivor.
In 1971 he won a Bafta for Vince, Paul, Lawrence and Richard, a documentary set against the derelict wasteland that was the London Docklands years before its makeover.
In the late 70s Ivor worked again with Wilcox on a series called The Americans and a drama about the South African journalist Donald Woods. He also wrote a play about the damage caused by ruthless newspaper reporters, They Made their Excuses and Left, staged at the Croydon Warehouse theatre.
We met while I was working at a Shelter housing aid centre and he was researching the successes and failures of the welfare state. Then in 1980 he upped sticks with his two teenage sons by his previous marriage, Martin and Julian, his 90-year-old mother and me, and moved to a smallholding near Pembridge in Herefordshire.
Having stocked the farm with three goats, two cows, two pigs, 20 sheep and a donkey, he handed in his resignation to the BBC. Realising we needed to create more of an income, we turned our thoughts to cider. Ivor’s persistent research led to the discovery and purchase, for £100, of an abandoned hydraulic apple press, unmoved since 1940.
We set about planting cider apple and perry pear varieties on strictly organic principles. Dunkertons was the first cider company whose total cider and perry production was to Soil Association standards. By the early 2000s Dunkertons was producing an average of 40,000 gallons of cider a year, and Ivor spurred us on to win many Camra awards.
In 2001 he was diagnosed with myeloma but only three years ago did his health start to deteriorate seriously. The company was sold to Julian.
Ivor is survived by Martin, Julian and me, and two granddaughters.
