“An Appropriate Adult” is the term used by the police to describe the social worker who is called in to support a juvenile witness when she or he is being interviewed and it is a role that Dave Gurman regularly performed in stations all over London, the south east and occasionally further afield, across a period of over twenty years.

After a decidedly unspectacular five years of grammar school education that netted him a grand total of three O levels (which didn’t include English or Maths), Dave entered the world of work aged 16 in the summer of 1971 and did a number of jobs including managing a fashionable menswear shop aged 20; a motorcycle courier in the Metropolis; a Residential Social Worker (mostly with Barnardos); and the editor of a motorcycle magazine that was distributing 32,000 copies a month at its peak.

Between times he was National Chair of Barnardos’ unrecognised trade union, which led him into active involvement in left-wing politics and subsequently the Peace Movement. He was active in the successful ‘Crystal Palace Campaign‘.