In Loving Memory of Gurpreet Singh Dhaliwal

Gurpreet Singh Dhaliwal was born on 14 February 1970 in Wolverhampton, the third of five children of Mohan Singh and Surjit Kaur Dhaliwal, who had come from Jalandhar in 1965. He grew up in a household anchored by the Gurdwara: Sikh prayer before school, kirtan on weekends, the Gurdwara kitchen as the place where the family was always known to be found on a Sunday morning. He never lost that orientation. It became his own.

He qualified as a civil engineer and spent most of his career at the West Midlands Combined Authority, managing infrastructure projects with steady competence and an unwillingness to cut corners that made him well-regarded and occasionally inconvenient. He was not interested in advancement for its own sake. He did his work and he came home to his family. He married Harpreet Kaur in 1997 and they built a life in Walsall together — three daughters, a house full of noise, and a standing invitation to Sunday langar that most of their extended family accepted weekly.

At the Gurdwara, Gurpreet served on the management committee for eight years and led the langar kitchen for five, overseeing the move to a new kitchen facility that was completed in 2023. He cooked dal on a scale that was frankly impressive. He had a good voice for kirtan — not trained, but clear and sincere — and a capacity for laughter that made difficult meetings shorter.

Gurpreet passed away on 22 April 2025 following a heart attack. He was 55 years old. He is survived by Harpreet, their daughters Navneet, Ravinder and Amrit, his parents, and his four siblings. Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.