While Askwith was getting more and more involved in conciliation work, someone who was to make him very happy came into his life. We do not know exactly how or where they met, but while dining at the house of a lady with whom he had never dined before, and where he never dined again, he first made the acquaintance of Mrs Henry Graham, or Ellen, as she was called. Ellen was a commanding character, and perhaps it was prescient of their future relationship, as Askwith liked to recall, ‘that the dining-room chairs were an uneven set and that he was given a very low one so that, though he was six foot and she was five foot four, he had to look up to his partner’. Ellen was living separately from her husband, Captain Henry Graham, to whom she had been married for some fifteen years, when she first met Askwith.

Ellen, born in August 1863, was the youngest daughter of Mary Ellen, daughter of Sir Roger and Lady Palmer, and Archibald Peel, son of General Jonathan Peel, brother of Sir Robert Peel, but Ellen was never to know her mother, who died in childbirth. In 1868 Archy Peel married Lady Georgina Russell, a daughter of Earl Russell, and had seven more children. As Archy Peel had no profession and little money, his Palmer relations, Sir Roger and Lady Palmer, must have felt bound to provide for him.