Major John Prendergast Gouriet (1 June 1935 – 4 September 2010) was a British Army officer, company director and political activist.

[1][2] Gouriet was educated at Charterhouse (as a Girdlestoneite), an independent school in Godalming, Surrey,[1] from where he won a place at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1954.

[5] He was promoted to captain on 16 December 1961,[6] became Adjutant of the Trucial Oman Scouts from 1961 to 1963, and then served as General Staff Officer Grade III Intelligence 1965–66 to the Director of Operations in Borneo.

[5] Leaving the Army with the rank of Major on 8 January 1973,[1][8] Gouriet went to work as an assistant to Sir Walter Salomon at Rea Brothers merchant bank in the City of London.

[5] He later described how, shortly afterwards, on a grouse-shooting trip to Speyside with family and friends, he was discussing the political and economic state of Britain in 1973–1974, he told the assembled party over lunch in the heather that "It's no use complaining and then doing nothing!"

After a hearing reportedly lasting eight minutes,[9] Nundy was granted an injunction by the High Court against both P & O and the leader of the strike, requiring the release of his car.

Less than a week after, on 2 December 1975, the National Association for Freedom – described by Harold Walker, the Minister of State for Employment between 1976 and 1979, as an "ultra right wing political organisation" which "sought to interfere in industrial disputes, with harmful consequences"[11] — was launched at the Savoy Hotel,[12] with Gouriet as Campaign Director.

[1] In early 1977 the Union of Post Office Workers decided to boycott all telephone calls, mail and telegrams to and from South Africa, in order to protest against apartheid.

Gouriet, for the National Association For Freedom, applied for an injunction to prevent the boycott under the Post Office Act 1953 which made it illegal to impede the mail.

In the middle of 1977, Gouriet began considering whether to intervene in the Grunwick dispute in which a branch of the Post Office Workers Union had "blacked" mail to a photographic laboratory at which there was a strike.

At 1am on Saturday 9 July, Gouriet organised 25 volunteers who loaded about 100,000 processed films from Grunwick on to two articulated lorries, and drove them to a depot north of London.

[23] Later that month Gouriet's campaign was dealt a blow when the House of Lords reversed the decision on the South African mail boycott, landing the association with costs then estimated at £30,000.

Gouriet remained chairman of the group[34] until his death and was appealing for funds to mount a legal challenge to British membership by means of judicial review.