Personal Life
Humphrys married Edna Wilding (August 1942 - September 1997) in 1964 and they soon had two children, a son and daughter, Christopher and Catherine. This marriage broke down in the late 1980s. Wilding died of cancer in Glamorgan, South Wales; Humphrys described her last days in a hospice in his book Devil's Advocate. Humphry's son Christopher is now a professional cellist.
On 2 June 2000, when he was 56 years old, Humphrys and his then partner, Valerie Sanderson, had a son, Owen James. Sanderson was a newsreader with Spotlight then BBC News 24 and is now a radio producer. Humphrys had a reverse vasectomy. He referred to these facts on 31 October 2006 on BBC Radio 4 in the programme Humphrys in Search of God. He is now in a relationship with the Observer journalist Catherine Bennett.
In 2005 he founded the Kitchen Table Charities Trust, a charity that funds projects to help some of the poorest people on the planet.
Humphrys was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs on 6 January 2008. His favourite record of the eight he selected for the show was Elgar’s Cello Concerto; he chose the biggest poetry anthology possible as his book and a cello as a luxury on the desert island.
Humphrys' brother, Bob Humphrys, was a sports television presenter on BBC Wales Today. He died of lung cancer in Cardiff on 19 August 2008, aged 56.
Read more about this topic: John Humphrys
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