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A GRIEVING daughter has criticised a landlord for not mending a broken gas pipe outside her father’s Bournemouth flat last Christmas Eve.
Ex-soldier and scaffolder Ernest Begbie was found dead inside his first floor flat in Windham Road, Boscombe, the next day after using a borrowed patio heater indoors to try and keep warm.
At an inquest in Bournemouth, district coroner Sheriff Payne recorded the verdict that the 64-year-old’s death from carbon monoxide poisoning had been an accident.
Friend and neighbour Mary O’Gormley said Mr Begbie had borrowed the tabletop heater a few weeks earlier.
“He had been having problems with the boiler for a while,” she told the hearing.
He was aware of the warnings attached to the heater, but told her he would just use it for five minutes to take the chill off the room.
She became concerned when she could not contact Mr Begbie on Christmas Day. A friend broke in and found him lying dead upstairs with the door and window shut.
There was only a trace of alcohol in his system, but he had taken cocaine and heroin.
The inquest heard a fire officer and police officers had been called to the house in the early hours of Christmas Eve because Mr Begbie reported that a gas pipe had been pulled off the wall while he was out. The gas was switched off.
Landlord Steven Wells said Mr Begbie visited his offices to report the damaged pipe to his manager.
“There wasn’t a lot we could do on Christmas Eve,” he said.
Mr Begbie’s daughter Georgina, herself a property manager, told the coroner: “It’s a legal requirement for them to carry out that repair. It would have taken 45 minutes. They didn’t even attempt it.
“When I visited the office, they couldn’t even look me in the eye. He chose to have that heater in there, but he didn’t have any choice. He was cold.”
After the hearing, Mr Wells offered his condolences to the Begbie family.
