Mary Perkins 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 Cardiff, she met Doug Perkins, whom she would later marry. The couple established their first business in Bristol in the 1960s. This was a chain of opticians around Bristol, which they
Henry Farnham Perkins found Plymouth Colony. She was also the great great granddaughter of Thomas Hurst Hughes, the founder and owner of the Congress Hall Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, and a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from New Jersey. Henry and Mary were the parents of two children, Anna Keyser Perkins-Middlebrook, who married as her second husband, Stanwood Wollaston and Harriet Perkins. In 1903, he was appointed associate professor of Zoology at University of Vermont, Burlington. He taught biology, entomology, anatomy and physiology, and embryology during the first half of his career. In 1911 was promoted to