James Callaghan - Personal Life

Personal Life

Callaghan's interests included rugby, tennis and agriculture. He married Audrey Elizabeth Moulton, whom he had met when they both worked as Sunday School teachers at the local Baptist church, in July 1938 and had three children – one son and two daughters.

• Margaret, Baroness Jay of Paddington
• Julia, who married Ian Hamilton Hubbard and settled in Lancashire
• Michael, who married Julia Morris and settled in Essex.

Although there is much doubt about how much belief Callaghan retained into adult life, the Baptist nonconformist ethic was a profound influence throughout all of his public and private life. In the mid-1980s Callaghan told an interviewer that he was an atheist.

One of his final public appearances came on 29 April 2002, when at the age of 90 he sat alongside the then prime minister Tony Blair and the three other surviving former prime ministers at the time at Buckingham Palace for a dinner which formed part of the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations, alongside his daughter Margaret, Baroness Jay, who had served as Leader of the House of Lords from 1998 to 2001.

Lady Callaghan died on 15 March 2005. Callaghan died on 26 March 2005, 11 days after his wife's death and one day before his 93rd birthday, of lobar pneumonia, cardiac failure and kidney failure. He died as the longest-lived British former prime minister, having beaten Harold MacMillan's record 39 days earlier.

Callaghan was cremated and his ashes were scattered in a flower bed next to the Peter Pan statue at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.