Opinion: Youth work loses another unsung hero

Bert was a one-off - irreplaceable and irrepressible. He was a vitriolic opponent of the Wales Youth Agency's absorption into the Welsh Assembly Government, seeing it as the inevitable dilution of youth work within vacuous "youth support" services. He plundered documentation through the Freedom of Information Act to support this view.

As acting chair of the agency, I saw Bert as a loose cannon and not always helpful, though I was personally relieved because the paperwork he retrieved dispelled notions that I had become a traitor to the youth work cause.

As head of the only dedicated youth and community work course in Wales for many years, Bert forged the youth service in Wales on the anvil of Paolo Freire. He would baulk at my depiction of him as an elder statesman; he was more the perennial teenage delinquent with his passionate and unremitting advocacy of the empowering and liberating capacity of youth work.