Ken Souter, pilot who flew a Lancaster in The Dam Busters film

As a veteran of the Desert War throughout 1941 and 1942 and the Malayan Emergency in the early 1950s, Flight Lieutenant Ken Souter had faced most of the stresses and strains of flying. But few experiences matched the terrifying demands of flying at low level across Windermere and over a mountain as he led a flight of Lancasters during the 1954 shooting of the film The Dam Busters.
It told the story of Operation Chastise, the audacious wartime raid in which 617 Squadron, led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, attacked the great Ruhr dams with the revolutionary “bouncing bombs” invented by Barnes Wallis. The success of the raid depended on the squadron’s ability to fly at an extremely low level. In making the film, the director, Michael Anderson, wanted Souter to fly even lower.
Interviewed years later, Souter, who was regarded by his fellow airmen as “pretty laid-back”, said: “The director wanted two aeroplanes to fly very low over the water and then climb up the fells on the other side. As we flew up the mountain, we were getting nearer and nearer to the ground. There was nothing we could do about it. We were on maximum power and maximum climb and the ground was coming up fast. We couldn’t climb any more and I thought, ‘This is it!’
“How we managed to scrape over the top of the mountain I’ll never know. It was very dodgy but we survived. We were flying lower than we had ever flown before, even during wartime, and I had arguments with the film company about it.”
Souter and the other pilots, who were “on loan” from the RAF, had originally flown at 60ft, just as the wartime dam busters had done in 1943, but Anderson demanded that they fly even lower. According to Jonathan Falconer, the author of Filming the Dam Busters, which was published in 2005, the director had not been happy with the first footage of the flying scenes. His director of photography, Erwin Hillier, then asked Souter to fly at 25ft to create a greater sense of drama.
“I told him straight that it was too bloody dangerous,” said Souter in an interview with Falconer. He nonetheless agreed to fly at 40ft over Derwent Reservoir in Derbyshire and between the dam’s twin towers. Even then, the propeller wash from his Lancaster’s four engines whipped up spray, and one of the other aircraft returned to base with branches hanging from the underside of the fuselage. Although the RAF was thanked for its co-operation in making the film, Souter and his fellow pilots and crew were not mentioned by name in the credits.
The actor Richard Todd, who played the role of Gibson, had no doubts about Souter’s contribution to the success of the film. “Those RAF chaps took a lot of chances and did a wonderful, wonderful job for us,” he said.
A few months earlier Souter had been in Singapore with 83 Squadron, which had flown Lincoln bombers in support of British forces fighting communist insurgents in Malaya. He was then seconded to the Associated British Picture Corporation, which was making The Dam Busters, as the lead pilot on the film.
By then the RAF’s Lancasters had been replaced by the Lincoln, a more powerful aircraft based on the wartime bomber. However, some Lancasters remained in storage and the RAF released four of them, which were modified to look like the earlier versions used in the raid on the dams.
Although the film celebrated the role of the RAF in the Second World War, the air force still exacted a price.
Falconer wrote: “The Air Ministry charged the company £100 per engine hour running time, and as there were usually three Lancasters, the Vickers Varsity camera aircraft and/or the Vickers Wellington involved (3×4 engines and 2×2 engines), £1,600 per hour in the early 1950s was no small sum.”
Indeed, the bill for the use of the aircraft and their crews was more than £1.5 million at today’s prices.
The choice of Souter and the other Lincoln crews to fly the Lancasters for the film company was a natural move as the two aircraft were similar in many respects.
An experienced pilot, Souter was highly regarded by the RAF. After he had finished filming, Wing Commander G Newberry, who was serving at the Air Ministry, described him as an “outstanding” flight commander. “When crews were selected to fly for the filming of The Dam Busters, Flt Lt Souter was an automatic selection as the Flight Leader,” Newberry wrote. “The first-class results that he produced were well seen in the quality of the flying recorded in the film.”
Souter had joined the RAF 15 years earlier, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He trained as a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes, first with 43 Squadron.
In early 1941 his new squadron, No 73, was loaded on to an aircraft carrier, HMS Furious, and sent to the Western Desert via west Africa. Arriving off Takoradi on what was then the Gold Coast, now Ghana, the Hurricanes took off from a carrier for the first time — with no training — and were led across Africa by a twin-engine Blenheim to an airfield by the Suez Canal.
Souter spent a year flying Hurricanes in combat, helping to cover the supply routes to Tobruk. On one occasion he shot down a Junkers 88, which fell into the sea off Bardia. The next day he crashed his Hurricane while trying to take off in a sandstorm to rescue a fellow airman stranded in the desert.
In the spring of 1942 Souter suffered a severe case of tonsilitis and a serious ear condition, which plagued him for the rest of his life. He was taken off flying duties and spent several weeks in hospital in Cairo.
After his recovery, he spent more than six months testing a vast range of aircraft, which extended his flying skills but was also fraught with risk.
Many of the aircraft had been repaired after being damaged in the desert, with Souter putting them through their paces before they were returned to operational squadrons.
He returned to Britain in early 1943 when he briefly towed targets for an air gunnery school in Scotland and was later seconded to the Naval Air Fighting Development Unit. He left the RAF in 1945 but rejoined as a bomber pilot in 1951.
After flying for the film company, Souter converted to jets and later flew Canberras with 61 Squadron. He left the RAF for the second and final time in 1958.
Kenneth Place Souter was born in Sunderland in 1919, the son of Lilibet Souter and her husband Jack, who imported timber from Finland and Norway for use as pit props in the local mines.
The family later moved to Chester-le-Street and Ken was educated locally at a private school. As a boy, he enjoyed boxing. He also showed great promise as a painter and had intended to go to art school.
Souter had a spell working in his father’s timber yard after leaving school and, in 1939, as tensions rose in Europe, he joined the RAF. He undertook basic flying training in Cambridge and went solo in a Hawker Hart in July 1940.
After being demobilised, he joined his brother, Harry, who had served in the army and later established an engineering business in South Africa. Ken returned to Britain after two years.
In South Africa, he had met Vera Wiseman and married her in 1948. Vera had a daughter, Sheila, from a previous marriage, and the couple had a son, Tony, but the relationship ended in divorce.
Tony, who ran a garden design consultancy and dabbled in the film industry before becoming a travel photographer, recalled being bundled into a Lancaster on the set of The Dam Busters when he was about six. He clambered up to the cockpit and spent half an hour in the bomb aimer’s position as his father flew the aircraft. “I’ll never forget it,” he said.
When his son offered to return the favour years later by offering his father a trip in his glider from an airfield in Hampshire, Souter was quick to rebuff the offer. “No you bloody won’t,” he said. “I’m not going in anything without an engine!”
In 1971 Souter married Birgitta Takerhead, a Swedish air hostess whom he met while flying civil aircraft out of Luton. They had two sons, Christian, who runs a business in Spain, and Robin, who built up a successful graphic design business.
Souter is survived by his three sons.
After leaving the RAF, he pursued an itinerant career in civil aviation for nearly ten years, which culminated in flying executive jets for various companies, including Trusthouse Forte.
Later he bought and renovated several houses, before running a chain of fish and chip shops, and then moving to Spain.
Wherever he went, Souter took his brushes and oils, sometimes pastels or watercolours, and continued to pursue his boyhood passion for painting. He also enjoyed producing cartoons and, while in the RAF, often drew caricatures of the men and women on the squadron.
Five years ago Souter was introduced to Queen Elizabeth when she visited the Haig Housing veterans’ retirement home where he lived. He thanked her for the birthday card she had sent him on his 100th birthday — but forgot to mention his place in cinematic history.
Ken Souter, aviator and businessman, was born on June 12, 1919. He died on June 7, 2024, aged 104