John Wiles - Telegraph 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