THE ANNUAL LUNCH PARTY OF THE NOTTING HILL SCHOOL GIRLS.
In the autumn of 1867 Mrs. Gladstone brought down about a dozen of her orphans from Clapton and lodged them in another small house, which her brother had lent to her. These she put under the care of a widow with a little boy of her own. There they dwelt happily, going every day up to the village to attend the infant school. When the Lancashire distress was quite over, and all need of the old dower house at an end for the mill girls, Mrs. Gladstone transferred her Clapton orphans there, and added to their number other children whose fathers and mothers had died in the London Hospital. When the orphanage was properly established in the larger house, it accommodated comfortably about thirty children. Experience taught Mrs. Gladstone that poor parents found it more difficult to provide for and manage their boys than their girls. So the Hawarden orphanage has come to be filled by boys. They attend the parish schools till they are old enough to be apprenticed to trades. There is now a whole army of well-doing young men who have been brought up in the Hawarden Castle orphanage. It is still in full tide of the 241 work it has carried on for over twenty-five years.
About 1880 a home for training young women for service was opened at Notting Hill, London, under the management of a committee of ladies. The object of the home was to take girls under its protection who had bad homes, and were therefore likely to be totally neglected and to drift into a life of uselessness and vice. Mrs. Gladstone was asked to become the president, and consented. It is organized on a small scale, a fact much in favor of its purpose. Not more than fifteen girls are there at one time, and a few lady boarders are taken in, as this works well for training the girls in the various branches of domestic service. The proud characteristic of the school is its determination never to despair of any pupil, however discouraging she may be in her first trial of service. The reward seems great when a girl, who has failed in several places, at last finds a mistress who understands her and draws out the best in her, when she receives praise as a good servant instead of the fault-finding hitherto her portion. There are now numbers of respectable, well-doing servants who have been trained here, and the institution has proved a boon to employers as well as the employed.
A CROWN OF HONOR.
MRS. GLADSTONE TO-DAY.
Mrs. Gladstone gives the girls who are in service an annual treat every summer down at the Convalescent Home at Woodsford. About a year ago a party of them enjoyed luncheon and tea on the lawn there, under the shadow of a rare kind of sycamore which their hostess had brought in a flower-pot, as a little seedling, from an old tree which spreads its ample branches close to her orphanage at Hawarden. Mrs. Gladstone told the girls that, when she planted it, she never thought to live so long as to see it large enough to shelter a party of forty in the shadow of its foliage. Such works of beneficence as have just been sketched are only a few of those forming a crown of honor and glory for the head of the great Premier’s wife. She was in that early band who began penitentiary work at Clewer before it took shape under Mrs. Monsel’s management. That must have been soon after her marriage. To that early time, too, belong the beginnings of the House of Charity for distressed persons in London, which is carried on at Soho, and rejoices in its forty-sixth annual report. This is to help persons a little higher than the working-class, who have fallen into temporary distress from sickness or other vicissitudes.
As for the deeds of private kindness, it can truly be said that Mrs. Gladstone has sown them on all sides, and it is characteristic of that noble woman’s nature that she is loyal to the last to those who need her help, even if it be for a lifetime.