JEAN STEVENS, 73

JEAN Stevens, 73, went to Gosport for rehabilitation after suffering a stroke in 1999.

She was ‘bright as a button’, her husband Ernest said, yet she was quickly put on a cocktail of painkillers and sedatives. Within two days, she was dead.

Mr Stevens, now 92, added: ‘They had her on a [drugs] pump straight away and she only opened her eyes once after that, just before she died. Dr Jane Barton had never even seen her until she signed the death certificate.’

Mr Stevens, a Second World War veteran, blames the stroke he suffered in 2012 on the stress of fighting for answers about his wife’s death.