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
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“He hadn’t known me fifteen minutes, and yet he was ... ready to talk ... I was still to learn that Munshin, like many people from the capital, could talk openly about his personal life while remaining a dream of espionage in his business operations.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)