The son of Herbert Oakley White, a general practitioner-anaesthetist, Humphrey was born in Southampton on 2 September 1932. His mother was Alice F S Tait, the daughter of a general practitioner in Highbury, London. Humphrey was educated at Marlborough and St John's College, Cambridge, from which he went to St Bartholomew's. He was house surgeon to John Hosford and, after a series of junior surgical posts, went to Roy (Sir Roy) Calne's department at Cambridge during the early days of transplantation and specialised in transplant surgery. He spent two years with David Hume at the Medical College of Virginia and was appointed consultant and senior lecturer in surgery at the University of Bristol and Southmead Hospital, where he set up a renal transplant service. In 1957, he married Ann Rigby Russell, a nurse from New Zealand and they had two daughters, Carol and Diana. There are four grandchildren - James, Thomas, Emily and Georgina. He took early retirement and died on 4 February 1997.