xlvi Annual Report of the Council. 



With the Owens College Mr. Ashton first- became closely 

 associated in 1867, when at the instance of Professor (now Sir 

 Henry) Roscoe, F.R.S. he consented to become Chairman 

 of the Committee then appointed for the extension of the 

 College. The work of his Committee was completed in seven 

 years, during the course of which it achieved the re-building 

 of the College on a new site and scale, the entire reorgan- 

 isation of its constitutional and administrative system, involving 

 protracted Parliamentary proceedings, an extraordinary develop- 

 ment of its instruction in class rooms and laboratories, and 

 something like a trebling of its financial resources. Mr. Ashton, 

 besides being one of the most liberal of the benefactors of the 

 reconstituted College, with which he helped to bring about the 

 incorporation of the Manchester School of Medicine, was one of 

 the most energetic and sagacious members of its governing body, 

 and remained a working member of its Council -during the rest of 

 his life. He had an important share in the transactions which, 

 in 1880, resulted in the foundation of the Victoria University, 

 which, without his advice and encouragement, would have 

 remained an academic dream. In 1895, the University had 

 the satisfaction of conferring upon Mr. Ashton its honorary 

 degree of Doctor of Laws. The College possesses no outward 

 memorial of his long and unwearying labours on its behalf, 

 with the exception of a copy of the First Folio Shakspere placed 

 as a tribute to his services in the Christie Library by Mr. Edward 

 Donner, a member of the Council. But his name is unlikely to 

 be forgotten in the College of which he was the Second Founder, 

 in the University into the conception of which he entered with 

 invaluable readiness, or in the City where he was for many years 

 looked up to as an example, than which this age has known no 

 better, of a true Manchester man. 



Mr. Ashton married, in 185 1, Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. 

 S. S. Gair, of Liverpool, who survives him. His eldest son, 

 Mr. Thomas Gair Ashton, is M.P. for the Luton division of 

 Bedfordshire. His second son, Mr. Mark Ashton, died in 1895, 

 His eldest surviving daughter is the wife of the Right Hon. 

 James Bryce, M.P. A. W. W. 



