A CORONER’S report is being prepared by police after an elderly West Somerset man died while having his hair cut.

The tragedy happened in a barber’s named Something for the weekend … Sir?, in Friday Street, Minehead, on Thursday morning, April 17.

Hairdresser Stuart Newsham was alone in the shop shortly after 10am when the elderly customer was taken ill and the emergency services were called.

Devon Air Ambulance despatched a helicopter from its Eaglescott Airfield, near Barnstaple, in North Devon, and a critical care doctor provided treatment for the man but was unable to save him.

The South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWAST) sent a road ambulance with paramedics, and Avon and Somerset Police officers also attended.

The man, whom the Free Press is not naming, lived in Minehead and was in his 80s.

He was declared dead at the scene.

Mr Newsham was still too upset to talk to the Free Press about the incident, but one eyewitness to the scene said: “The police were fantastic and everybody who helped was really good.”

A police spokesperson said the ambulance service had alerted the constabulary at about 10.25am to a medical incident to which paramedics were responding in a business premises in Minehead.

The spokesperson said: “Sadly, the man, in his 80s, died at the scene a short time later.

“His next of kin were updated and our thoughts are with them.

“The circumstances of the death are non-suspicious and a file will be prepared for the coroner.”

Mr Newsham, who worked for several years for the Free Press, trained as a hairdresser in the mid-1980s and started his career as a barber in 1988 when he worked self-employed with Bales Gentlemen’s Hairdressers, in Minehead, before joining Steve Winter in The Barber Shop 10 years later.