Slessor counted Norman Lindsay, Hugh McCrae and Jack Lindsay among his friends.
At the age of 21, Slessor married 28-year-old Noëla Beatrice Myer Ewart Glasson (born 25 December 1893) in Ashfield, Sydney, on 18 August 1922. Noëla was the daughter of Australian soprano and music composer Annie May Colette Summerbelle (1867–1949) and Herbert Edward Glasson (1867–1893). She never knew her father who was executed at the Bathurst Gaol on 29 November 1893, a month before her birth, after he was found guilty of a double—almost quadruple—murder of 24 September 1893.[17][18] Noëla died of cancer on 22 October 1945.[2][19]
He married Pauline Wallace in 1951; and a year later celebrated the birth of his only child, Paul Slessor,[7] before the marriage dissolved in 1961.
He died suddenly of a heart attack on 30 June 1971 at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, North Sydney. His ashes are interred in Rookwood Cemetery.[20]
