MACBAIN, (Andrew) Gillies 1943-2024
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 23 May 2024:
E X T R A C T
Gillies Macbain obituary, ‘last footman in Ireland’ and unlikely friend of Mick Jagger
Enigmatic pantryboy, butler, dairy farmer, nipple greaser and author of a colourful autobiography
Barely 20 years old, physically imposing, good-looking, and speaking in the self-assured RP accent of a young English middle-class gentleman, Macbain was, in fact, anything but confident… he needed to find inexpensive or, ideally, free accommodation. In an old travel guide to Ireland, he recalled reading that the Cistercian monks of Mount Melleray Abbey in Co Waterford observed the ancient monastic tradition of never refusing pilgrims a bed for the night.
Macbain hitched a lift from Dublin to Co Waterford in a circuitous journey crammed with amorous incident. He arrived at the abbey late at night. The priestly community’s generosity and refusal to hurry him to another destination were among the principal factors convincing him that he would never return to his native England.
In need of gainful employment, Macbain returned to Dublin, where he recalled seeing a sign for Miss Synnott’s employment agency for domestic servants. Miss Synnott proved to be his salvation and facilitated his obtaining his first permanent employment as a footman in the ever-diminishing milieu of the Anglo-Irish big house.
… he
had met and befriended Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull when he worked as a
tour guide for Desmond Guinness at Castletown House. They were staying with
Guinness after Jagger had narrowly escaped conviction for drug offences.
Macbain’s colourful account of his role as “the last footman” made his book
informative for anyone interested in the last days of the “Celtic Raj”, the Anglo-Irish.
It chronicled a way of life that had become an anachronism even in England.
Not being born into the purple of the aristocracy or to the servant class meant that Macbain was stuck in a no man’s land between upstairs and downstairs. He was born Andrew Gillies Macbain in Manchester in 1943. His parents divorced after the Second World War and he did not meet his father, a doctor, until he was 17. By this time his mother had killed herself.
Macbain chose his Irish employers carefully, working in the houses of two baronets and a baron. The coincidental connecting factor in all three seemed to be that in each of the households, the master of the house or, in one case, a lecherous visiting elderly uncle, was either gay or bisexual.
One of Macbain’s employers declared himself to be “trisexual”: “I love women, I love men, and I love myself,” he admitted to close friends. This was Lord Milo Talbot de Malahide, a bachelor who lived in one of Ireland’s oldest inhabited castles, Malahide. Here, Macbain took up the position of footman…
… He married first Antonia Peck, heiress to an Anglo-American fortune in whose family house he had been footman. The marriage ended in divorce. Aided by his wife’s fortune, he bought a small estate in Co Wicklow and a grand 18th-century townhouse in Dublin. His second marriage was to Rowena Blunden, the daughter of Sir William Blunden of Castle Blunden in Co Kilkenny, a family of post-Cromwellian settlers. The marriage was the final step up the Anglo-Irish social ladder for Macbain.
Another sign of his path from footman to land-owning gentleman was his election as a member of Dublin’s Kildare Street Club in the early 1970s. The club, founded in the 18th century, was made up largely of members from the Anglo-Irish Protestant nobility and landed gentry. However, he was never comfortable mixing with the membership, many of whom he had served at table in the big houses of Ireland.
He was that unusual sort of Englishman who came to Ireland in the 1960s to abandon their Englishness and become, in that timeworn phrase, “more Irish than the Irish themselves”.
Gillies Macbain, footman, was born on January 9, 1943. He died after a short illness on March 16, 2024, aged 81
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gillies-macbain-obituary-last-footman-in-ireland-and-unlikely-friend-of-mick-jagger-w5qs0r7p7