A farmer wracked with so much pain he could not work sent his wife to the mobile library and then shot himself.

An inquest at Bradford yesterday heard how in May this year 69-year-old Michael Green had gone to a barn at his Stanbury farmhouse with a shotgun after sending his wife Susan to fetch a book.

She remembered hearing a thud but had thought ‘nothing of it’ until she discovered her husband missing. It was only when she searched the barn at Manor Farm that she found him slumped on the floor with a gun by his side.

The inquest heard how former heavy smoker Mr Green, who had suffered chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and agonising osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis for years, had left a note on a tree trunk. It read: “I’m sorry, I couldn’t go on. I love you.”

Coroner Roger Whittaker heard how Mr Green, who had farmed all his life, had been in and out of hospital and been in so much pain that he could not walk far.

The inquest also heard he had about six guns that he kept in the kitchen, cleaning and oiling them regularly, although he didn’t use them.

He had been a member of a gun club, his son explained in a written statement, but had not been for a while. His son had been unloading a trailer at his house nearby when his mother came and said “father had shot himself”.

“She seemed very calm but I think she was in shock,” he added.

The pair returned together to the barn where he checked his father. “My dad had never said he was going to do something like this and he had never tried before,” he said.

Mr Whittaker said he was satisfied that Mr Green had intended to take his own life.

Mr Green’s wife belongs to a long-established family in the Worth Valley where she and her husband had been farming for 50 years.

Mr Green’s family had been in business as timber merchants in Lawkholme Lane, Keighley.