The National Youth Agency: Comment - A captain's innings

In the latter role he was the champion of that fine city from 1975 to 1997 and hence during the years of devastation caused by unemployment and by corrupt or misguided council and national politics. One of his great strengths was the ability to use the particular to illuminate the general. He was, in consequence, a notable spokesman for "Faith in the City", the Anglican Church's powerful study of urban disadvantage in 1985 and an expression of his personal commitment to "the communities of the left behind".

But, like Bishop Roger Sainsbury, The National Youth Agency's current chair, David Sheppard had also been a youth worker. He would later describe his youth work in the Mayflower centre in London's Canning Town as among the hardest challenges of his life: this from a young man who resisted pressure to play in apartheid South Africa and who worked so hard with Archbishop Worlock to encourage reconciliation between Protestant and Catholic traditions in Liverpool and to prevent Ulster's sectarian fires spreading to Merseyside.