Gordon Ramsay’s mum has spoken about the violence she suffered at the hands of the celebrity chef’s dad.

For over 20 years Gordon senior would lash out at Helen Cosgrove, leaving her black and blue.

Hiding from him, afraid of what he might to do her, she revealed the smallest thing would set him off.

She said: “If his shirt wasn’t ironed properly, if there was a little crease down the front of his shirt or his food wasn’t put on the plate properly, wasn’t set out properly. “I just think it was an excuse.”

Helen was 17 when she married. She said for the first six months it was okay but then things started to deteriorate.

She said: “It’s just nerves, frightened, going checking everything and seeing if everything’s been done properly before he comes home.

“I had nowhere to go and I would walk up and down the street, round the corner, hide because sometimes he came to look for us and if he found us then I would just get beat up on the street and the children would be there.

“In the morning when they see your lip cut or your eye bruised or a cut under your eye I would say ‘oh mum walked into the door’.

“You get good at making excuses and telling lies to the children but it’s not until they’re older they tell you what they heard and what they’d seen.”

Helen said she finally summoned the courage to leave Gordon senior after one brutal attack.

She said: “The last time he ever hit me the two girls and I were at home in Bridgewater, Somerset, and he came in. He had spent the night with this lady and he didn’t get home with her because she went with her husband and he came home and he beat the two girls and I up.

“The neighbours next door phoned the police and the local police came out and took me and my two daughters to the casualty department and the doctor there thought I had done 10 rounds with Muhammad Ali.

“A month before there was a refuge opened up in Bridgewater and the police officers took my two daughters and I to the refuge where we stayed for nine months.

“We went in our nighties and the police officers’ jackets. That’s all we had on us.”

The more time she spent at the refuge, the more Helen found her strength.

She said: “Over time I had confidence and I thought it’s not my fault, it wasn’t my fault.

“Then the two girls and I were able to go back into our home. After that I worked in the refuge for 15 years.”

While Gordon junior went on to become a successful chef and TV personality, her other son, Ronnie, became a drug addict.

Speaking on TV show GMTV, Helen said of Ronnie: “He was his fathers blue-eyed boy. When his dad did leave he didn’t contact any of the children and I think that was Ronnie’s, could have been, his downfall.”

Gordon senior died in 1997 of alcoholism.

http://www.showbizspy.com/2007/11/29/gordon-ramsays-mum-tells-of-abusive-marriage/