The life of Peter Jewell, who has died aged 90, was indelibly entwined with that of the Scottish film director Bill Douglas. They were friends from the age of 19 until Bill’s death from cancer in 1991, aged 57.
Over the course of Bill’s five films, Peter was his “ideas man” when scripts stalled; mediator between Bill’s cinematographers and editors; and script-editor on the “poor man’s epic” Comrades (1986). This charted the union and deportation of the Tolpuddle martyrs, a tale told partly by a character called “the lanternist” using pre-cinema-era artefacts.
