Personal Life
In 1846 Hugh Mason married Sarah Buckley, the daughter of Abel Buckley Snr who was also the father of Abel Buckley Businessman and MP, another cotton mill owner who went on to be a millionaire businessman and landowner. They had one child, Arnold, who was born in 1851. Sarah died in 1852 at the age of 29. Mason next married Sarah's sister, Betsy, though it was illegal to marry one's sister-in-law in England at the time. To overcome this problem they married in Denmark on 7 June 1854. Their marriage was by special licence from the King of Denmark and was held at the Evangellic Reform Church, Altona in the Duchy of Holstein. They had four children: Bertha, born in 1855, Edith in 1857, Rupert in 1859 and Sydney in 1861. Betsy died after the birth of Sydney and Mason then married Anne Ashworth in 1864.
Hugh Mason died three days after his 69th birthday on 2 February 1886 at his home, Groby Hall. At his death, he had amassed a fortune worth £290,933 (now worth about £17M). He was the first person to have a statue (now protected as a Grade II listed building) erected in his honour in Tameside; it was financed by public subscription immediately after Mason's death.
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Famous quotes related to personal life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)