ROMANCE OF HEIRESS

Southland Times, Issue 18964, 11 June 1923, Page 6

ROMANCE OF HEIRESS

WEDS RIDING MASTER. QUIET CEREMONY IN LONDON. The news leaked out in London, on April 14, that Miss Mathilde McCormick, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Harold Fowler McCormick, the American millionaire, and grand-daughter of John D. Rockefeller, had been secretly married to Mr Max Oser, a Swiss riding-master, at the Lewisham Registry Office. The romance is one that, has long occupied the attention of the two Continents; The necessary consent to the marriage from her father was produced. The bride and bridegroom arrived at the registry office in High Street, Lewisham, at 10.30 a.m., accompanied by two witnesses. The bridegroom, a small, dapper man of military appearance, wore a light suit and overcoat and grey felt hat. The bride wore a travelling costume. In the register the bridegroom’s full name was given as Guillaume Max Oser, aged 45, bachelor, major in the Swiss army, son of the late Johan Jakob Rudolf Oser, ridingmaster. Miss McCormick was described as a spinster, of independent means, of Old Court Mansions, Kensington, and her father as an agricultural machinery manufacturer. Mr Oser’s residence at the time of the marriage was in Ardgowan Road, Hither Green, a private house, where he stayed in order to get the necessary fifteen days’ residence qualification for marriage at Lewisham. Early last year Mr McCormick gave his consent to his daughter’s marriage to her riding-master, but her mother strongly opposed the engagement, and, in fact, tried to remove Miss McCormick from her father’s guardianship, but without success. Eventually Miss McCormick agreed to put off her marriage until she was eighteen, and she reached that age a few days before the wedding. Mr Oser first met his bride nine or ten jT-ars ago, when as a child she took riding lessons from him at Zurich, where the family were then staying. .She is a great lover of horses, and has declared herself to be a “country girl” and not fond of social life. When her father dies, she is expected to become one of the world’s richest women. After the wedding the couple left for Scotland for their honeymoon. When the engagement was announced, it was said to be a stipulation that they should eventually settle down in the United States.