A dentist involved in two road crashes only hours before he was found hanging in a police cell was a "slave" to drink, an inquest jury was told.

Graham Cocking had been travelling in a Land Rover Discovery when he knocked down a lamp-post before colliding with a car at a junction.

Following the incidents in Queensbury one early evening in March last year, the father-of-two was said to be so drunk he would have fallen over if he had not been helped into a police car.

PC Christopher Lawson told Bradford Coroner's Court: "I formed the impression he was drunk. His eyes were glazed. His speech was slurred."

Mr Cocking, who admitted to the officer that he was an alcoholic, said he was "that drunk" he could not remember an accident. The 42-year-old from Park Lane, Queensbury, was arrested on suspicion of drink-driving and taken to the city's central police station where tests showed he was more than three times the limit.

The jury was told how he was then placed in a cell and checked every half an hour.

But less than three and a half hours after his arrest, a police officer found him hanging from the cell bars.

Home Office pathologist Dr Naomi Carter said that it appeared Mr Cocking had stepped off a bench inside the cell after taking off his trousers to form a noose.

His heart stopped five times as efforts were made to resuscitate him but he died from hypoxic brain damage due to hanging the following evening at Airedale General Hospital.

Mr Cocking had been a partner at the Avondale Dental Practice in Bradford Road, Shipley but he lost his job in 1998 after a row with his partners over long leaves of absence.

Later that year, he admitted himself to Harrogate Clinic to receive treatment for his alcohol problems.

Dr Sasi Bhusan Mahabatra, a consultant psychiatrist and medical director at the clinic, described him as an "extremely conscientious" man who loved his parents, wife and children.

He said that Mr Cocking "felt very guilty that he had become a slave to his habit of drinking".

But Dr Mahabatra added that Mr Cocking had never considered that he should end his life.

In a statement read to the hearing, his wife Rosemary Cocking said she began to realise he had a serious drink-related problem about two years before his death.

She described how on the day her husband was involved in the accidents she was listening to a radio station when a report referred to queuing traffic after a lamppost had fallen down. She said: "I just knew it was Graham."

The inquest continues.

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