Hawking daughter: Abuse claims drove me to drink

Stephen Hawking's daughter has revealed how she was driven to drink and depression following allegations that the mathematics genius had been the victim of a series of assaults.

Speaking for the first time, Lucy Hawking expressed her surprise and disappointment at the failed police investigation into claims he was subjected to physical and mental abuse by his second wife, Elaine.

Describing last month's decision by Cambridgeshire Police to drop the inquiry as "a huge blow for us all", the 33-year-old mother of one said it led her on a "downward spiral" which culminated in a four-week stay at an American rehab clinic.

"The pressure of everything got too much and I just collapsed," she said. "Dad was in intensive care and there was a time when it felt very touch and go. I was very stressed, very confused as to how he ended up being so ill.

"I started drinking too much and I just couldn't handle it. I knew that if I carried on drinking, things were going to get worse in an unimaginably nightmarish way."

Police said they could find no evidence to support allegations that Professor Hawking, who has suffered from motor neurone disease for the last 40 years, had been mistreated.

Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cambridge University and author of A Brief History Of Time, was said to have been beaten and left alone in his garden on the hottest day of last year, resulting in heatstroke and sunburn.

In January, at the height of the police investigation, he issued a statement dismissing allegations made by former nurses that he had been assaulted by his wife, expressing his "profound disappointment" at the "circulation of such personal and inaccurate information".

But family members, including his first wife Jane, fear he is in denial. She and Professor Hawking, 62, who speaks through a computerised voicebox because of his paralysis, had three children before their 26-year marriage collapsed. In 1995 he married Elaine, 53, one of his former nurses.

Ms Hawking believes her father, who needs round-the-clock medical care, has been suffering unexplained injuries for more than a decade. She says she is torn between loyalty and concern for her father. "But there's a form of loyalty which is not necessarily through doing exactly what someone wants," she told the Daily Telegraph. "There's all of us - and we are all important."

She claims that over time she and her siblings have struggled to maintain a relationship with their father who was recently treated at Papworth Hospital for pneumonia.

"It's been made quite difficult for us to see him," she said. "This has led to people claiming that we are estranged from him. We are not. Whatever we do, we can't get it right and we are resigned to that. I find it really sad."

Ms Hawking, whose six-year-old son William is autistic, added: "At the moment, my father would maintain he has no privacy at all because of the police investigation. He sees it as a gross invasion."