British bomb-disposal expert who served for 40 years, first in the army (until 1973) and then in the Metropolitan Police. He died on September 19th 2025, aged 93.
Gurney grew up as an army brat in a camp in Wiltshire, where he developed a boyhood fascination with discarded explosives, hoarding spent .303 cartridges and cordite.
In postwar Berlin, Gurney cleared or detonated unexploded munitions across the city for the British army of occupation. He later made safe live ammunition strewn across the deserts of Egypt and Libya. In 1955, at Abu Sultan near Suez, he checked the fuses in hundreds of thousands of mines to confirm they were not in the armed position.
He served a six-month tour in Belfast in 1972, during which he dealt with 123 bombings. There he was stoned, splashed with battery acid, and concussed by a freak electrical accident involving a ruptured 440-volt cable in a wrecked snack bar.
After leaving the army in 1973, Gurney joined the Metropolitan Police, where he tackled bombs set by Palestinian and Irish terrorists across London throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His working kit consisted principally of medical scalpels, a ball of string, fish-hooks and garden secateurs; later he acquired a portable x-ray machine and "Wheelbarrow", a primitive robot that could trundle out to engage with car bombs.
In October 1981, after a bombing in Oxford Street, Gurney descended into a ruined basement and found the mutilated body of his closest friend and colleague, Ken Howorth, who had reached the scene first. He identified Howorth from a scrap of cardigan. His actions that day earned him a second George Medal.
In February 1991, three mortars were fired from a white van in Whitehall at 10 Downing Street while John Major's cabinet was meeting to discuss the Gulf war. Gurney defused one of the unexploded mortars in the garden, sitting astride it with only a twig to steady the fuse. He later presented Major with the firing pin from the device.
Gurney was awarded the George Medal twice: first for his service in Belfast, and again for the Oxford Street bombing of 1981.
Jealousy is all the fun you think they have.