On 2nd February 1886, at the age of 38, William’s daughter Mary astounded her friends and family by marrying the Rev. Harry Drew, curate of Hawarden, who was 10 years her junior! The couple initially lived in the home of her parents, Hawarden Castle, where they had only one surviving daughter, Dorothy Mary Catherine Drew, born 11th March 1890 and known as ‘Dossie’.
Wow, the portrait of Miss Dorothy Drew is most emphatically alive, almost alarmingly so ! It has a queer kind of elfin charm, but makes one feel acutely what must be the.responsibi1ities of the mother of this very latest thing in “enfant terrible”. The Nursing Record & Hospital World, The New Gallery, Second Notice, June 1895
Dorothy Drew was Gladstone's grand-daughter. She was still alive in the 1970's but told a researcher she could only remember the mice under the studio floor!
The work list for 1893 includes mention of four portraits in hand - an unusual thing. One of them was that of the little daughter of his friend Mrs. Drew (Miss Gladstone), who was so eager to have it to give to her father that Edward could not refuse her wish. After the mother had brought the little one to be looked at, he writes: "It's a darling baby, that's the truth - and with a little help from her, if she is just short of beinf a whirlwind or a windmill, I may make a shift to get some resemblance. How easy it would be for some men, not to me, but expect little and that will help me. At any rate I will try." Then after the sitting: "What a day!!! What a morning - and you left me to it, and neither came to help nor sympathize. (A drawing here in the letter of a child who is both a whirlwind and a windmill.) And that's all I've done all day: ask the nurse. In the main I must do it from memory - a sort of impressionist work - and you will be horribly disappointed, and I shall suffer exceedingly; but that is the only way"." Memorials p. 235-6