From misery to millionaire: the drinker who hauled himself up from the gutter

Dave Crabtree, a successful businessman from Bingley, near Bradford, who owns two care homes and a care service to help elderly people to stay in their own homes, had never gone public with details of how he lost almost everything to the ravages of drink.

But when he heard about the BBC search, something inside him responded. "If I can help one alcoholic to decide to change, it will have been worth doing. I haven't done it for my own ego," says Dave. He sent in a 500-word synopsis of his journey into hell and how he returned to life following a day when he woke up feeling he hadn't a shred of dignity left.

Looking at this prosperous and healthy man today, you would never guess that what motivated him to climb out of his own desperate pit of alcoholism and potentially a lonely, homeless death was the thought that he would lose his son forever. Today that son, Andrew, helps to run the business with Dave and his wife Alison.

"I'd describe my family as dysfunctional," says Dave, who's now 56. "There were five kids. My dad's father had been a drinker, and dad was a butcher who drank the money he made. My mother was incredibly hard working, doing three jobs because otherwise there'd be no food at all as dad's wages went to the pub. There were lots of rows, no holidays, and I had a paper round at 11 years old, otherwise I'd never have had a penny."

When Dave was around 16, his dad succumbed to pressure all around him to dry out, but it didn't last. Now 82, his father gave up for good 12 years ago. As a role model, his terrible example had done its work years ago, although Dave also believes the drinking gene was inherited.

"My sister drank, and six years ago she died of alcohol-related illness at 46. At 16, I was working in a foundry but then switched to a pre-nursing course. I moved into the nurses' home and within a short time was drinking daily. It's genetic, and if you have the gene, you quickly become psychologically and physically dependent.

"I was an alcoholic by the age of 21. Alcoholism isn't about the quantity you drink so much as your need to drink every day. When I wasn't actually drinking I was planning how to get the next one. Despite my need for booze, I was doing really well and passed my exams. Alcoholics are often very hard working and good at their job."

Dave's nursing career really took off, and he moved around the country to increasingly senior jobs, meeting Alison, who was to be his wife, in 1975. Their son was born three years later. "I had a great wife, beautiful son and job I loved, but I was warned at work about the drinking a couple of times.

"We'd move towns and jobs, making a fresh start where no-one knew about my boozing but things repeated themselves. Eventually, after moving to Merseyside as a psychiatric charge nurse, I started actually drinking on the job because by 11am I'd have the shakes and needed booze to steady me. Everyone was aware of what I was up to, and I was increasingly absent.

"As I 'came down' after a bout of boozing, I'd feel terrible shame. I experienced that every day, and the drinking was partly to blot it out. I was arrested for drink driving while six-year-old Andrew was in the car with me. I was reported to the nursing authorities, sacked and struck off the professional register. My boss got me into detox, but I'd tried it before and I knew more than any counsellor. I couldn't stop."

On one occasion, after attempting suicide with booze and pills, he got out of hospital with 2 in his pocket and right away walked two miles to buy cider.

"I was destroying myself through this mental illness I had, and if it had been any other mental illness I'd have been sectioned," says Dave. "But alcoholism isn't properly recognised as the mental illness it is, and there are no state funded treatment centres for alcoholics in this country."

In losing his job in a nursing home, Dave lost the house that had gone with it, so the family were homeless and Alison and Andrew went to live with her parents in Glasgow. Having left hospital in Blackpool, Dave slept on the street or in a bus shelter. He weighed six-and-a-half stone.

The nadir came when Dave woke up in a bus shelter, wondering whose pool of urine he was lying in. A crowded bus was stationary next to him. As he lay in the glare of the gaze of strangers on the bus, he realised the urine was his own, and the reality of the situation struck home.

"I thought 'my son is going to grow up knowing I'm a bum' or I might never see him again if I carry on like this.' That thought was what took me to a doctor and made me ask him to put me into hospital to dry out. Even after going to hospital, I found a tenner in my pocket and spent the day hoping they wouldn't let me out, in case I spent it on vodka."

All this happened 20 years ago. For eight months, Dave lived in a bedsit and committed to daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. After that he moved to Glasgow and, against her family's wishes, Alison and Andrew were reunited with Dave. For two years, they struggled on 63 benefits each fortnight. Dave couldn't get work in a hospital even when he was readmitted to the nursing register after an appeal.

A good soul (and reformed alcoholic) eventually gave him a job, and he became a counsellor in an alcohol and drug unit. Then, out of the blue, Dave was approached by a woman who was struggling to find the right treatment for her alcoholic son. This led to an invitation to join her in the opening of a 15-bed unit for the treatment of alcoholics in space rented in an old nursing home at Gargrave near Skipton.

In 1993, Dave used 20 credit cards to raise the 75,000 he needed to take over the business. Subsequently, the home had to move, and he found a dilapidated building in Bingley. Such was the need, that GPs and health agencies all over the country were referring patients, with social services paying the basic 240 weekly fee. Seventeen years on, 55 per cent of those who go through the unit's programme do not relapse.

The unit closed down due to cuts in social services spending, and Dave now counsels alcoholics on a voluntary basis.

"I don't take prisoners," says Dave. Alison and Andrew also work in the business. (Andrew has not, much to Dave's relief, been affected by "the family illness".) "I have no time for people's denial about addiction or any kind of rose-tinted view of it being easy to give up. Admitting you have a problem is essential but it's just the start."

Dave now has two care homes – Sunningdale, a 40-bed dementia unit in Bradford, whose residents include some suffering from alcohol-related dementia, and the 30-bed Raikes at Silsden, near Keighley, which is a nursing home for the elderly. He employs 140 staff, some of them working for Ladies in Waiting, the Ilkley-based care service he also

owns, which provides help to 70 elderly people at home. Including mortgages, his business is worth around 4.5m.

"I am commercially minded and the business is successful," says Dave. "But I like to think we give back more than we take out. I'm telling my story simply because it might help someone to say they need help and get that help. Alcoholics are all around us, from the young single mother at home to the successful professional who seems to have everything. But we don't talk about it much, and that's part of the problem. As is the fact that there's so little provision to help."

n Dave Crabtree's story is one of three featured in My Story, screened tonight at 10.35pm on BBC1. At the end of the programme, it will be revealed which story the judges feel deserves to be published in a book – and that book will be available from tomorrow, published by HarperCollins. The series continues until October 5.