A STEEL worker who threatened to kill his ex-wife has been spared jail.

Harold Keith Brown was given a 12-month community rehabilitation order after a court heard he had no intention of carrying out his warning to stab his estranged partner.

Brown, 49, was told by a judge that he had come close to custody but had led a blameless life until the incident in March and had since got his life back on track.

Mr Recorder Bryan Cox said: "I'm sure it doesn't take me to tell you that the courts always regard conduct of this sort as serious behaviour, particularly when it involves the use of knives.

"But you have managed now to put these difficult times behind you and I am not going to do anything to disrupt that."

Brown had been married for 19 years before the separation in the weeks leading up the incident.

His wife, Beverley, had moved into a flat in Guisborough, east Cleveland.

Greg Purcell, prosecuting, said on March 12 Mrs Brown received a telephone call at 11.30pm in which she was told: "You have had it, you are dead."

Half an hour later, Brown turned up at her flat armed with a brick and the victim let him in to prevent him throwing it through a window.

Mr Purcell said Brown then pulled out a large kitchen knife and forced his wife into a bedroom where he warned: "I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill us both."

Mrs Brown managed to calm the situation and told her husband to go to the kitchen for a cigarette, and escaped in her car.

When he was arrested, Brown, of Dunston Close, Guisborough, told police his intention was to harm himself in front of his wife and not hurt her.

The father-of-two had admitted making a threat to kill when he made appeared at Guisborough Magistrates' Court in March.

He was at Teesside Crown Court yesterday to be sentenced.