A BUILDING worker seeking £900,000 damages from a Tadley company has come away without a penny from London's High Court.

Lawyers for 52-year-old Norman Breeze had blamed two accidents - which happened six months apart - for a "serious personality change", including the onset of depression and "suicidal tendencies".

But Mr Justice Garland yesterday dealt him a bitter blow when he dismissed Mr Breeze's case against long-established haulage, demolition and plant-hire firm, John Stacey and Sons Ltd.

Mr Breeze, of Pinelands, Welshman's Road, Reading, suffered his first accident in November 1991 on a demolition site in Didcot when a heavy chain slipped off an excavator bucket, striking him on the head.

The second accident happened in June 1992 when a crowbar - caught in the jaws of a concrete crusher - sprang back and hit Mr Breeze beside the right ear.

Mr Justice Garland ruled that John Stacey and Sons, based in Silchester Road, were 50 per cent liable for the first accident, but ruled the accident had, in any event, made "no contribution to Mr Breeze's present condition".

He rejected the company's claims that the second accident never happened, but ruled that "whatever occurred was, in physical terms, minor".

The court heard Mr Breeze had undergone bouts of surgery after suffering a brain haemorrhage in 1990 - before either accident - and the judge accepted expert evidence that his current symptoms were primarily related to that.

He said that although the first accident had made "a very small contribution" to the recurrence of Mr Breeze's epilepsy, this had "resolved by March 1992" and was "not causative of his present condition".