Mary Perkins an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year UK Lifetime Achievement Award for her continued contribution to entrepreneurship and the economy. Perkins is a founding patron of the not-for-profit social enterprise, Modern Muse. Mary Perkins Dame Mary Lesley Perkins, (born 14 February 1944) is co-founder of Specsavers, the British retail opticians chain. Together with her husband, co-founder and chairman Doug Perkins, Dame Mary has three children, all of whom work for Specsavers, and are eventually expected to take over the privately owned company. She attended Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol. She then went to Cardiff University to train as an optometrist. At
Dame Mary Cook Dame Mary Cook Dame Mary Cook (née Turner; – 24 September 1950) was the wife of Australian Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Cook. Mary Turner was 22 years old and had been a schoolteacher for eight years when she married Joseph Cook in 1885. Beginning as a pupil teacher at Chesterton Girls' School, by 1885 she was an assistant mistress. Like Cook, she came from a Staffordshire mining family. She appears to have had a role in helping both her brothers and her husband to overcome their lack of education. At their Lithgow home, Cook studied in the evenings, moving from