Her mother Elizabeth was a designer in the linen business, and her father George Chalmers, a Scot, was a former army officer and artist specialising in calligraphy and illumination.

[5] In 1945 Maccabe and her husband Max joined the Campbell brothers Arthur and George, the Henry sisters, Olive and Margaret, Colin Middleton, Tom Carr, Maurice Wilks, James McIntyre and others, in the only official exhibition from the Ulster branch of the Artists' International Association sponsored by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (NI) at the Belfast Museum.

[6] The MacGaffin Gallery at Pottinger's Entry in Belfast was the venue for a group exhibition of experimental and modernist works with her husband, Nevill Johnson, Aaron McAfee and Olive Henry in 1946.

[7] Maccabe was one of seventy-three exhibitors when the Cultural Relations Committee took a touring exhibition of Contemporary Irish Painting to Rhode Island, Boston and to Ottawa.

[8] She was represented at the Royal Ulster Academy 's annual show in 1950 by a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen at Balmoral, July 1950.

[2] Maccabe showed a stained glass work with a poem by Anne Ruthven entitled the Crooked Cross at the USWA annual exhibition at the Bell Gallery in 1965.

[12] Much of Gladys' work is concerned with the depiction of gatherings of people, whether at race meetings, a fair or market, on the beach or in a shop.

In October 1969 four of her paintings were included in the annual exhibition of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London[2] with whom she had shown since 1957.

Gladys was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to the arts by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on 21 November 2000.

[21] Gladys Maccabe spent her final years in River House in Newcastle and Wood Lodge in Castlewellan.