DAVID KELLY’S early life was as lonely as his death, but Lord Hutton never learnt about the childhood anguish that contributed to the scientist’s unhappiness.

As a coroner looks into Dr Kelly’s background to decide whether to carry out a full inquest into his apparent suicide, The Times has uncovered the early life of a man who went on to become one of Britain’s foremost experts on weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Kelly grew up in a broken home: his father abandoned him when he was seven and his mother committed suicide on the eve of his twentieth birthday.

Described by family and friends as an introspective figure, a man who frequently “bottled things up”, he gloomily predicted to one colleague that if Iraq was invaded he would “probably be found dead in the woods”.

Parts of Dr Kelly’s life remained a mystery even to close associates. Still unexplained is his late religious conversion to the Baha’i faith and his friendship with his spiritual mentor, an American linguist, Mai Pederson, who was questioned by Thames Valley Police after his death, but refused to allow her statement to be passed on to Lord Hutton.

Ms Pederson was mentioned only briefly at the Hutton inquiry when Mrs Kelly testified that she was “quite influential” in bringing Dr Kelly to the new religion and “later became a family friend”.

Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire Coroner, told The Times last night that he will study all relevant material, including Dr Kelly’s childhood and his friendship with Ms Pederson, before deciding whether to hold a full inquest.

Dr Kelly was probably conceived while his father, a coal- miner’s son, was on a brief stretch of home leave from the RAF in September 1943.

His mother, Margaret, the daughter of a gravestone sculptor, married Thomas Kelly in Pontypridd three days after Christmas in 1940. Days after David was born, the family left the Rhondda Valley and moved to Tunbridge Wells. Two months later his father joined the RAF as a flying officer.

The marriage collapsed and a two-year-old David was taken back to Pontypridd to live with his mother and his maternal grandmother, Ceinwen Williams. As an adult he rarely referred to his mother, but often spoke fondly of Mrs Williams.

Alan Elkan, 59, an architect, was in the same year at school as Dr Kelly. He said: “He was a nice lad with ginger hair but he was always very quiet. I think his grandparents played a big part in his life. He came home from school to them. I think his mother was working as a teacher. They were nice but strict Welsh.”

Dr Kelly was an only child. His father married a woman ten years younger than his mother just two weeks after their divorce came through. His father, by now a teacher in a secondary modern school, married Flora Dunn, a 23-year-old farmer’s daughter, and started a new family in Kettering when David was seven. The couple had three children and adopted a fourth, but never called for David to live with them.

It appears that this caused a lifelong rift between son and father, who died of lung cancer, aged 66.

Dr Kelly left nothing from his own £183,324 estate to his stepfamily. However, he was on friendly terms with his stepsister, Sarah Pape, a plastic surgeon. She told Lord Hutton: “We would talk on the telephone at least once a month.”

As an adolescent, David Kelly emulated his absent father by joining the Air Training Corps at Pontypridd Grammar School for Boys, where he excelled at athletics and became head boy.

Dr Kelly’s mother died while he was a student at Leeds University. Margaret Kelly was found dead at her cottage in Pontypridd, aged 47, on May 13, 1964, after an overdose of sleeping pills.

The Hutton inquiry was told how Dr Kelly withdrew into himself after his mother’s death.

Dr Kelly met his wife, Janice, at Leeds and the couple married at St Mark’s Church near her family home in Crewe when he was 23 and she was 22. They had three children, the twins Rachel and Ellen, and Elizabeth.

The Oxfordshire Coroner will announce his decision 28 days after the publication of Lord Hutton’s report, but Mrs Kelly is unlikely to welcome a full inquest and has indicated through her lawyer that she wants to make a fresh start.

She has put the Oxfordshire house she shared with Dr Kelly on the market. Sources close to the family say she is not likely to mount a legal battle for compensation.

It is also highly unlikely that Mrs Kelly will speak in public after the report. She is expected to issue a brief written statement through her lawyer instead.

“People do not commit suicide for just one reason,” said Dr Pittu Laungani, a senior research Fellow at Manchester University who specialises in the study of death.

“To say that any one factor led to the suicide of Dr Kelly is an over-simplification. Dr Kelly was humiliated and he felt betrayed and that is an important factor.

“But you could argue that it was his mother’s death that shattered him completely or that his father betrayed him by going off to live with someone else. Who is to say who is right?”

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