Peter Gurney MBE, GM and Bar, explosives expert,
Still with the Met eight years later, Gurney was called to a London shopping centre in which a fellow officer had been killed while attempting to defuse an IRA bomb. Hardly had he examined the body to see how the device had exploded, when he was called to a nearby store where a bomb had been found in a lavatory. On examining it he knew that it had the same triggering mechanism that had led to the death of his colleague. Carefully he dismantled the trigger device and then the bomb, discovering that both mechanisms were in working order. His cold courage on this occasion was recognised by the award of a bar to his George Medal.
On the morning of February 7, 1991, Gurney was involved in dealing with one of London’s most high-profile attacks carried out by the IRA. At 10.08am a picture fell from the wall of his Cannon Row police station office and he heard the crump of a nearby explosion. Jumping into his Land Rover, he drove into Whitehall to see a white transit van parked opposite the Cabinet Office building at an angle to the kerb and burning furiously. Three shells had been fired at 10 Downing Street from tubes mounted inside the van. A television camera caught him waving his arms to indicate the 200 by 400 yards area to be cleared in case any further bombs remained.
No sooner had he given these instructions than he was told that one bomb had exploded in the garden of No 10 and two more lay on Treasury Green. They were six inches in diameter and four feet long. Unable to call up his equipment as the buildings blocked his radio signal, he pushed the end of a twig through a small hole in the casing of one to fix the sliding striker in position, then began to unbolt the fuze with a spanner borrowed from the prime minister’s boiler room. While sitting astride one bomb, he was suddenly conscious of an intense heat through fire-resistant trousers. As he delicately put it in his autobiography Braver Men Walk Away, he suddenly realised if he didn’t do something quickly he would never again sing anything other than soprano. He scooped up a handful of snow from a nearby drift into his trousers.
Peter de la Billiere has talked of the different between hot courage and cold. There’s something so damned English about this example of cold – the twig, the smoking trousers, the spanner borrowed from the PM, and yet the massive brass balls, proper ton weight cojones, to do this for the modest living either the military or the police provide.
Top bloke.
Not quite as colourful a bloke but this is a good read. Bomb disposal officers are a different breed.
https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/reviews/bombs-have-no-pity/
There was the bomb disposal chap in the Falklands who used to take his violin in with him.
I am still in awe of Roy “F you I’m Millwall” Larner, the Lion of London Bridge. Maybe more heat of the moment but he stood and fought back, and nearly died from the resultant stabby stabby injuries, while others hid.
It took six years for his bravery to finally be honoured by the Royal Humane Society. Nothing else.
Many people have received gallantry awards, including George Medals, for their bravery during the attack – but Roy has always been passed over.
However, he has been involved in several racist incidents which is likely why he has never received an award.
These include convictions for racially-aggravated common assault and religiously-aggravated harassment for an expletive rant in his local MP Neil Coyle’s office.
“it’s Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy go away”.
Dominic Frisbee on Roy Larner at Unite the Kingdom..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI4HC3DRafQ
Thank you. I’d seen the original YouTube but not this live version.
“No-one likes us,
but you need us,
so beware”
(I’ve always like the line “72 virgins said Fuck you we’re Millwall”).
“…ammunition and explosives had fascinated him as a schoolboy. Through the carelessness of others, adequate quantities for experimentation were available from the ranges alongside Salisbury Plain. His first major experiment involved the rocket-assisted take-off of a bicycle owned by a farmer who had peppered him with buckshot for stealing apples.”
Genius. Any relation to Colin Furze?
I wonder whether I could produce “cold courage”? I once saved a man from drowning but that called only for a cool head and a quick brain, not for courage. Anyway, a couple of other chaps saw what I was up to and ran across to help so then it became a bit of a team effort which does rather appeal to males, doesn’t it?
I was once called on for “hot courage” – that came from instinct not from thought. And, again, once you find yourself part of team it gets even easier.
I once had an elderly colleague who had done bomb disposal in The War. George Cross.
Decades later the first job for his secretary every morning was to remove the empty gin bottle from his waste paper basket. The price, I suppose, of his having shown cold courage again and again and again.
…the massive brass balls, proper ton weight cojones, to do this for the modest living either the military or the police provide.
Not just the cold courage, but the outstanding dedication to duty and selfless public service!
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
In my professional life I have had cause to meet and work with some of the EOD people. The most normal and unassuming young men you could ever wish to meet..