AN Okehampton College teacher took his own life while seriously ill with bipolar disorder after stopping his medication, an inquest has heard.

Tavistock resident Ed Davis, 51, fell to his death from a viaduct in Tavistock on the morning of April 27 last year.

His wife Harriet said in a statement at an inquest at Exeter County Hall last Thursday (January 10): ‘Ed will be missed every day, because of his warmth, his kindness and his compassion.’

Mr Davis was found dead below the viaduct on Bannawell Street. His coat was later found hanging over the railings on the viaduct above.

Martin Base, a builder and a retired police officer, was walking under the viaduct when he saw people clustered around a man lying on the ground.

‘I ran over to help because I thought that someone had collapsed. When I got there I realised that the person on the ground was Ed and I took over doing CPR,’ said Mr Base.

‘While I was doing this, I heard a lady saying she had heard the noise of the fall.

‘I was in shock and couldn’t believe it was Ed but I recognised him from his habitually worn tan desert boots.’

Mr Base said that he had noticed a change in his friend, who lived in the same Tavistock road as him, in the weeks before his death.

‘I saw him walking late at night and very early in the morning. He would walk down to the town to buy a coffee at 6am. During this time he never approached me and requested help and was a bit more distant than usual.’

He added that his friend was open about his history of mental illness.

‘I knew he took medication because he would avoid alcohol at social events,’ he said. ‘Generally he was outgoing, articulate and good company.’

Harriet Davies, also a teacher, said in her statement that her husband had been open about his mental health problems when she first met him in 1998 when they were both teaching at John Kitto Community College in Plymouth.

They began a relationship the following year and moved into a family home in Tavistock in 2000 with Mrs Davis’s two children from her first marriage, then aged five and ten.

Their first daughter was born that year and their second two years later and Mr Davis stopped work to become a house husband.

When their daughters were three and four, he started teaching at Okehampton College, where he was a popular member of staff. He taught drama and special needs classes.

In 2012 the family went to France for a year and Mr Davis learned building skills doing up their house there.

Mr Davis had taken medication to control his condition after suffering a psychotic episode in 1995 and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

This generally kept him stable, but Mrs Davis told the inquest that since they’d been together he had eight months of severe depression, when he’d been housebound and needed care. He also suffered a relapse after the couple married in 2004.

Then in the spring of 2018, unbeknown to Mrs Davis or his GP, her husband stopped taking some of his regular medication.

Mrs Davis said her husband had ‘come back in a strange mood’ after returning from a trip to their house in France over the Easter holidays in 2018.

One night he woke her at 5am in a distressed state.

His condition deteriorated, and on Thursday, April 26, she went with her husband to see Dr Graham Johnson at Tavyside Health Centre, seeking an urgent referral to the mental health crisis team.

Dr Johnson said in a statement that Mr Davis was so depressed he was ‘catatonic’ and was not responding at all. The doctor made contact with the mental health crisis team at 6pm who said they could not see him that evening but would call to arrange to see him the next morning.

When two calls were made by the team the next morning, though, Mr Davis had left the family home in a state of agitation. His wife did not know where he had gone.

‘She was concerned that he expressed some suicidal thoughts and was agitated,’ said senior mental health practitioner Ann Wheeler in a statement to the inquest.

A post-mortem conducted by Dr McCormick revealed that Mr Davis died from multiple injuries ‘consistent with injuries sustained from a fall from height’. She added that he was suffering from ‘acute mental health symptoms’ at the time of his death.

Coroner Philip Spinney recorded a narrative verdict that Mr Davis had died ‘as a consequence of injuries following a fall from height’.

He added: ‘It was plain that Edwin was suffering from mental health issues and this must have been a factor in his death. It appears everything was done to get him the care he needed through the mental health team.’

Mrs Davis had told the inquest that she’d later found unopened medication in the house which her husband had been being prescribed in the months before his death.

She said he had lived with his illness for 30 years, but nonetheless had ‘a life well-lived’.

‘The impact of this has devastated me and his family completely,’ she said. ‘Ed didn’t make a conscious decision that he wanted to die. He suffered an illness which has resulted in him losing his life and our family losing him from our lives.’

‘Ed will be missed every day, because of his warmth, his kindness and his compassion.

‘He was an excellent father and stepfather and a friend to many. On an emotional level, he was the love of my life and my best friend and there is no way of explaining that loss.’