George Hudson payment of 12 shillings and 6 pence recorded in the Howsham poor book as being “received of George Hudson for bastardry”. Hudson was apprenticed to Bell and Nicholson, a firm of drapers in College Street, York. He finished his apprenticeship in 1820, was taken on as a tradesman, and given a share in the business early in 1821. On 17 July that year he married Nicholson's daughter Elizabeth. When Bell retired, the firm became Nicholson and Hudson. By 1827 the company was the largest drapery, indeed the largest business, in York. In 1827, his great-uncle Matthew Botrill fell ill and
George Hudson its Georgian south front. The mansion, its interior reconstructed after a fire in 1902, is now home to Queen Mary's School, a girls' independent school. When Hudson became an MP he bought a property in Albert Gate in Knightsbridge, London which became the centre of the Hudsons' social life in London. Today (2018) it is the French embassy. Octon Grange was bought as a strategic investment in August 1844. Hudson hoped his sons would both inherit a country house and this was also close to the then proposed Bridlington branch line. This estate, bought within a year, effectively ended George