In 2009, he sold the hotel and used all the proceeds to fund a fleet of cars ferrying rural patients to hospital – as part of his charity, Daft As A Brush.

Announcing they needed somewhere more ‘modern and easy to look after’, he shocked friends and former employees by moving his family to a tiny rented terraced house opposite a council estate in nearby Morpeth, insisting: ‘I’ve no interest in bricks and mortar.’

But there were signs his outwardly loyal wife was unhappy with the drastic change in lifestyle when he was persuaded to move them to a pretty stone house backing on to farmland.

Mrs Burnie hoped her husband’s retirement would allow them to spend more time together, but she said the ‘madness’ of devoting his life to helping others meant he was working 12 hours a day and barely seeing his family.

‘It took over his life, becoming more important than anything else to him,’ she added yesterday.

‘I said to him often that we had other things to consider, but his top three priorities were the charity, the charity and the charity.’ In 2011, she learned from someone at a hairdresser’s that her husband had bought a home in Gosforth, Newcastle, without telling her.

‘I felt he’d made his preparations for the end of the marriage and waited for me to find out,’ she said.

Shortly afterwards, according to Mrs Burnie, he told her the marriage was over, moving into a flat above the charity’s offices. The couple divorced in 2017.

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