A grieving girlfriend today told how she struggled in vain to bring her workaholic partner back to life after he collapsed at work.

Dad-of-one Neville Cawthraw, 37, of Langlands Road, Cottingley, had been clearing a house in Haworth when he collapsed at the top of the stairs.

His distraught family has now been told it could take up to 12 months before they find out what killed him, after a post-mortem examination failed to identify a cause of death.

An inquest was opened and adjourned yesterday.

Mr Cawthraw's partner Michelle Gould, 22, said it would be a long anguished wait but she believed he died from working too hard for her and their four-year-old daughter Courtney, whom he adored.

She said Mr Cawthraw had been perfectly healthy until he had a bang on his head at work last November and passed out.

Miss Gould said he refused to go to hospital but collapsed three more times before his collapse last Friday.

"I kept asking him to get himself checked out properly but he just wanted to keep working to earn money for us," she said. "We wanted for nothing and he didn't want to let us down."

Mr Cawthraw's distraught mum Brenda said the whole family was devastated by the loss - especially her grandaughter Courtney, a pupil at Cottingley Village Primary School, who kept asking for her daddy.

"Courtney is too young to understand properly what's happened," she said. "She was a daddy's girl and loved him to bits. She's taken to snuggling up with his padded shirt. As she gets bigger we'll keep telling her her dad had a heart of gold and that he lived and worked for his family."

Miss Gould had gone to work with Mr Cawthraw, who ran his own waste and house clearance business, the day he died. When he collapsed she frantically tried to revive him for 20 minutes as paramedics gave her instructions over the phone.

She said: "I was sitting in the van outside when the customer came running out of the house saying Neville had collapsed. The man rang for an ambulance while I was screaming at Neville to wake up. The paramedics gave me instructions over the phone - I'd never done anything like that before but I had to do it for him. I gave him mouth-to-mouth and pressed his chest but he wouldn't come round."

Paramedics took over once they arrived and rushed Mr Cawthraw to Airedale Hospital but he died 30 minutes later.

Mr Cawthraw's funeral will be held at Nab Wood Crematorium on Friday.