Nick Downie, ex-SAS trooper who won awards for TV films of conflict in the Western Sahara, Rhodesia and Afghanistan – obituary

Nick Downie, who has died of Covid-19 in South Africa aged 74, was a former SAS soldier widely regarded as one of the world’s best combat cameramen.

Downie had been a professional soldier for six years, three-and-a-half of them in the SAS, and also fought as an irregular alongside Bedouins in the Sultanate of Oman against Marxist-led insurgents from 1972 to 1974, and with Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas in Iraqi Kurdistan during the Second Iraqi – Kurdish War (1974-75).

The skills he learnt served him well as a cameraman, whose single-handed missions to world trouble-spots made him the darling of television awards committees and the despair of television unions paranoid about preserving members’ rights to “normal crew back-up”.

Nicolas Jon Downie was born on May 27 1946 and educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College. His father was a doctor and it seemed that Nick would follow him into the medical profession. He trained at Middlesex Hospital medical school, but found hospital life boring, and even began to experience blackouts in which he would fall asleep unpredictably – on one occasion across the bed of a patient he was meant to be examining.

Instead, he developed a keen interest in revolutionary guerrilla warfare, and signed on for the SAS territorial selection course. Dropping out of medical school in his final year, he applied to join the gruelling selection course for 22 SAS. Although he was the only civilian among 120 candidates, he was one of only seven who passed.

From 1971 the SAS were involved in suppressing the Dhofar Rebellion, a clandestine war in Oman against communist-backed insurgents from South Yemen. Downie was sent to Oman as a trooper, but after a while decided to buy himself out to join the Sultan of Oman’s Yemeni exile Bedouin irregulars as a contract mercenary.

Promoted to sergeant, he was put in charge of a unit with orders to penetrate deep into South Yemen to carry out acts of sabotage and foment insurrection among the tribes. On one raid from their base on the edge of the Empty Quarter they captured a large fort, 80 miles across the border. After the garrison surrendered, Downie decided to blow it up “as a demonstration that we had arrived”. His calculations showed the need for 300 lb of gelignite, so he laid 1,000 lb. The fort, he recalled, “literally vanished”.

The demolition of the fort and the subsequent success of “Nick’s Guides”, a camel unit he founded, so impressed the Sultan that he wrote out a cheque for £500,000. However, disillusioned by what he saw as obstructionism by the British officer corps, Downie returned to London, though he felt vindicated when his irregulars mutinied with the aim of having him brought back as their leader.

Downie was not idle for long. In late 1974 he got into his Renault 4 and drove from London to join the Peshmerga guerrillas in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he trained a group of saboteurs for an attack on Baghdad, only to be frustrated by Iran’s agreement to cut off its support for the Kurds, leaving the way free for Saddam Hussein to annihilate the rebels.

On all these adventures, Downie took his 16mm clockwork Pathé camera with him, though it was only from the last operation that he got any marketable footage. As he recalled in a blog post in 2011, the one time he had taken his camera on an SAS op in Oman, “I was also the signaller (carrying a heavy A41 radio) and the medic, with a medic bag. All that, plus my ammo and water, food, etc, plus a 250-round belt of [machine gun] ammo, meant I was carrying 80-90 lb.”

All this nearly got him killed when an enemy machine gun opened fire: “I hit the deck hard and then found, with all this weight on my back, that I couldn’t get up, with bullets lashing into the ground all round me. Finally, naked terror forced me to my feet and I joined my mates.”

Having recovered his composure, he got out his camera and, from a vantage point behind a rock, focused on a machine-gun crew 20 yards away in the open, firing at the enemy: “Just as I was about to press the start button, one of the crew rolled away from the gun, clearly having been hit. I paused, to find everyone looking at me – I was the medic, you see.

“Muttering something very rude under my breath, I grabbed my medic pack, scrambled to my feet, sprinted through a veritable hail of fire, and flung myself down next to the wounded man.

“ ‘Are you OK?’ I gasped. ‘Hello Nick,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I’m fine. It’s only me finger.’ He held up a bloody digit for my inspection. I gave him a dirty look, and then ran the gauntlet of fire once more.

“After that, I was engaged, as the signaller, in bringing down mortar fire, then artillery, then airstrikes, in an attempt to silence the enemy weapon.

“In the end, we sent for [an Arab fighter], gave him binos and asked him to find the bugger. It took him 10 minutes to pinpoint his position, and a long burst from our [machine gun] settled the matter, which I was sad about because he was a very, very brave man.”

Downie’s film of the destruction of the Yemeni fort was lost on its way to a lab in London, but a 40-second film clip of Peshmerga guerrillas in action earned him £60 from the BBC, launching his career as a freelance cameraman.

His first serious attempt at filming behind the lines was in 1975 when he and the reporter Gwynne Roberts walked from the Sudanese border to Asmara to cover the Eritrean War. Their 30-minute documentary was shown on Thames Television.

But being a lone cameraman was a precarious living, owing to hostility from the unions, and at one point Downie was forced to remortgage his house for working capital.

The most notable controversy occurred in 1980 when the ACTT (the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians), which he had recently joined, threatened to “black” a report he made of rebels in action against the Afghan government in the period immediately preceding the Russian intervention.

A strike had been called in London, over a domestic dispute, while Downie was absent, and on his return the ACTT objected to the footage being shown – on the grounds that he had not immediately downed tools.

His union card bore an endorsement that made his membership conditional on “hazard assignment”, allowing him to work without normal union backup in dangerous conditions, but invalid at other times.

As he recalled, during one action in Afghanistan he was holed up behind a ridge, with a group of 25 former members of the Afghan army who had joined the Mujahideen, and subjected to 10 days of attacks by vastly superior government forces: “The infantry assaults were prefaced by mortar barrages. We had no overhead cover: we just crouched in crevices as hundreds of 120mm bombs rained down … I have never been so frightened … I was certain at least half of us were going to die, and I started doing deals with the Almighty … By the end, everyone’s nerves were in shreds, but they clung on grimly, fought like demented wildcats – and won.”

The ACTT finally conceded that the assignment had indeed been hazardous and “Afghanistan: with the rebels”, shown on Thames Television’s TV Eye in 1980, won a special Royal Television Society award for TV journalism. A documentary on the Vietnamese boat people was never shown, however, because the union refused to agree that the conditions had been hazardous enough.

Downie won other RTS awards for programmes about the guerrilla war between the Polisario Front and the Kingdom of Morocco over control of the Western Sahara, and about the Bush War in Rhodesia, where he spent six months on the front line in 1978, to produce a TV Eye documentary in which he predicted, with some prescience, that if there were to be a “white collapse” in Rhodesia, it would be followed by a civil war which would make the 13,000 casualties so far fade into insignificance.

Tragically, Lord Richard Cecil, the freelance journalist who accompanied him on this expedition, lost his life when he encountered one of Robert Mugabe’s Zanla fighters who shot and killed him at close range.

Downie built a reputation for exceptional toughness and composure under fire. In the Western Sahara he was involved in a savage close-quarter firefight in open desert in which 30 out of the 40 combatants died in the space of 10 minutes; his footage recorded the moment when a Polisario guerrilla a few yards away had his head blown off.

Downie was most proud of Survive, a series broadcast on Channel 4 in 1985, in which he demonstrated the art of survival in extreme situations. His first episode, filmed in the frozen wastes of northern Canada, was described by one critic as “absolutely riveting, blood-curdling”. Other episodes dealt with survival techniques in the jungle, at sea, in concentration camps, under torture and interrogation and after a nuclear war.

In 1993 The Daily Telegraph reported that he had been killed in Afghanistan, prompting Downie to write a letter correcting the error: “I have no wish to appear a pedant … [but] for the benefit of my friends, colleagues and erstwhile comrades-in-arms (not to mention the Inland Revenue and my somewhat startled 80-year-old mother) I would like to make it clear that I survived all my visits to that country and am living peaceably in Sussex.”

In a short memoir Downie recalled that he had “tramped from one war to another constantly for 10 years and then sporadically for a further nine. I finally ‘retired’ from war zones in 1991, at age 45, apart from a very brief skirmish in Iraq in 2003 [when he was an embedded cameraman for the US military]. One of the things that drove me was a fascination with the people to be found in the front line. The closer to the killing ground that you get, the more the layers of pretence are peeled away, until all that is left is naked, raw character.

“The wannabees, the poseurs, the bombasts have all found an excuse and left. Those that remain are among the most admirable individuals I’ve ever met – quiet-spoken, friendly, and sometimes fantastically brave.”

Professionally, however, his time in the SAS was the happiest: “We never stopped laughing. Even when we had our faces pressed hard into the dirt as bullets tore through the air overhead or slammed into the ground around us, some joker would somehow see the funny side and we’d crack up. It was worth every second of the pain of the [selection course] endurance march to be greeted as an equal by men like that.”

In 2012, in a blog post replying to enquiries about his whereabouts, Downie wrote: “Until recently I lived for three years in a tent, with my mules, on a mountainside in Andalucia (I was broke – couldn’t afford a solid roof), but for now I’m in South Africa, looking after my extremely stroppy 99-year-old mother.”

Nick Downie married Hilary Payne in 1977. The marriage was dissolved in 1992 and he is survived by their two daughters.

Nick Downie, born May 27 1946, died May 12 2021