A FORMER senior Royal Navy officer from Hampshire died at the wheel of his treasured camper van moments before it crashed into a truck heading in the opposite direction, an inquest heard.

Emergency services were scrambled to the A31 near Wimborne on Thursday, July 24 last year, following a head-on crash involving a Fiat camper van and an 18-tonne Dorset County Council lorry.

The driver of the camper van, 67-year-old Richard Cooke, a former lieutenant commander, was pronounced dead at the scene.

An inquest into his death, held at Bournemouth Coroner’s Court, heard Mr Cooke and his wife Joyce had spent more than ten years travelling across Western Europe in camper vans after he retired in 2002.

On the morning of his death, the couple, who lived in Fareham, had been staying in Weymouth and were travelling home to go to a ball that weekend.

Witnesses told the court they saw the camper van, which was only three weeks old, veer on to the opposite side of the busy road without warning.

The driver of the council truck, Steve Roper, who suffered a fractured wrist and cuts and bruises in the crash, said he saw the camper van coming towards him but there was nothing he could do.

He said: “I knew there was going to be an impact. I braced myself, held on to the steering wheel and closed my eyes.

“I had no time to swerve. All I could do was brake as hard as I could.”

After conducting a postmortem, Dr David Parham, consultant histopathologist at Royal Bournemouth Hospital, concluded Mr Cooke had died before he sustained injuries inflicted by the crash.

He recorded the primary cause of death as aortic dissection, severance of the aorta artery, caused by atheroma.

Mrs Cooke, who was transferred to Southampton General Hospital via air ambulance following the crash, has since made a full recovery.

Describing Mr Cooke’s death as a very sad matter, Sheriff Payne, coroner for Dorset, concluded the pensioner died from natural causes.

He said: “This was a natural event, which was totally unpredictable.”