Cable's first wife was Olympia Rebelo, a Goan Roman Catholic, whom he met "in the unromantic setting of a York mental hospital where we happened to be working as nurses during a summer holiday." They had three children together and she completed her PhD in History at Glasgow University in 1976. Olympia was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the 1987 general election. After apparently successful treatment, the disease returned in the mid-1990s and before the 1997 general election. She died shortly after the 2001 general election.