He never married
[1] Conventional obituaries concluded with a summary of the members of the immediate family of the deceased, typically the spouse, if surviving, and children.[7] However, Rose Wild of The Times observed that even where it was used in an apparently non-coded form in historic obituaries, the phrase could still be revealing of the subject; Wild gave the example of a school master's obituary from 1923 that stated "he never married", but continued that he "usually spent his holidays in a little inn frequented by seafaring men at Falmouth".[8][9] In 2016, Christian Barker of The Rake observed, "Until quite recently, obituary writers had a habit of concluding with the euphemism 'He never married' to subtly indicate that the subject was gay", but continued by connecting the phrase to misogamy rather than homosexuality, and asserted that there were plenty of examples of "'confirmed bachelors' simply shrugging off the shackles of matrimony and choosing to remain single throughout their lives—experiencing no less success because of it".[10] A similar phrase, "confirmed bachelor", was used in the second half of the 20th century by the satirical magazine Private Eye, as one of its many euphemisms and in-jokes.Rose Wild reported in May 2016, however, that she could only find around a dozen examples of "confirmed bachelor" in The Times obituaries, some of which were of a non-coded form, causing her to wonder whether the phrase existed much outside the imagination of the writers of Private Eye.