A CORONER has decided that retired Devizes salesman Richard Ryan, who went into a hospital for a routine operation but died a week later, suffered a complication and did not survive because of heart disease.

Mr Ryan, 65, of Downlands Road died on September 20 in the Royal United Hospital, Bath left his wife a love letter only to be opened if he died when he went into hospital for bowel surgery.

On Tuesday an inquest at Flax Bourton in Somerset returned a narrative verdict. Assistant coroner Dr Peter Harrowing said that after the operation Mr Ryan had suffered peritonitis and a small bowel obstruction which he did not survive because of underlying cardiac disease.

Last year his widow Anne said she believed Mr Ryan had a premonition about his death as he left her a love letter only to be opened if he did not return from hospital.

She said at the time: “He must have felt something was going to go wrong. I found the letter on the keyboard of his computer the day after the operation when he was in intensive care. The envelope said it should only be opened if he died, so I left it.

“Later in hospital a nurse said to me that he kept mentioning a letter.

"Later when I read it I cried as I thought how hard it must have been for him to write it. He wasn’t really a romantic man, especially in public, but we really loved each other and had so many plans.

"We met on the internet in 2004 and we decided to meet up a couple of weeks later at the Lamb on the Strand at Seend. We clicked straightaway and he moved in just a few months later and then we got married in 2005. I just wish we had had more time together.”

Mr Ryan, a classic car lover, who owned two Bentleys and was a leading member of Devizes and District Club, also known as the Gentlemen’s Club, first became ill in May 2015 when he went into hospital for a colonoscopy but suffered a heart attack during the procedure. He recovered but had to go back into hospital on September 13 for another operation and this is when the complications set in.