Worked as a diamond driller at Copper Cliff,ON.

From Boyle Bulletin #16: He drilled for coal in the US, base metals in Sudbury, Quebec, Peru, and Tonopah, Nevada. Hugh had passed on a story that he had to leave a pump at Casapalca just off the road from Lima to La Oroya in Peru due to an uprising. They came back to Lima and took a ship back to San Francisco, arriving the day after the great quake of 1906, and he helped the clean-up crews the next day. He also drilled in Panama.

After he got married, the family moved to South Porcupine in 1912, with their first home that first winter being a tent with a board floor and four foot walls. Hugh built a home in South Porcupine and worked Canadian Longyear operating out of Halleybury,ON. Hugh was instrumental in the mid-1930’s in getting the drilling industry to change from using expensive black diamond to using bort diamond chips, becoming the general manager for the company that created the technique, which became the worldwide standard. They moved to Toronto, then Cooksville (where he raised 20,000 gladioli (an old world Iris family flower)), and, after he retired from CastSet Bits, Grimsby.