Often I stumble on books through reading an obituary. That’s why I bought the last footman.
I’m surprised I never met Gillies. Although a decade older than me, he and Cobby were friends. He was a waiter at Cobby’s restaurant in Dublin, Snaffles, Cobby was best man at his first wedding and he spent the first night of his honeymoon at Mullaghfin. This was Cobby’s house with a restaurant in the basement where I was a waiter. Anyway I rang Cobby to get the inside track. Very disappointing – all he said was “a man of mystery”. The book uncovers some of the mystery and is an excellent read even if you don’t know the actors and even if it’s not all true. But many of you will.
He writes in lower case and in a note at the conclusion explains why. I am not convinced. I think his old Olivetti was broken. I thought of giving you a taste of his really rather good memoir but I think this extract from his obituary might be more titillating.
“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. Talbot was a close friend of the spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt at Cambridge. The latter was a regular guest at Malahide Castle during Macbain’s tenure as a footman and was rumoured to be Talbot’s lover. Talbot’s sister Rose, who remained a lifelong friend of Macbain, burnt all of her brother’s papers after his death, giving rise to speculation that Macbain’s employer may have been a Soviet agent.” (The Times, 23 May 2024)
In fact Gillies, the g is hard, had nine children, two wives and the children had three mothers. He mentions en passant he only had to wink at a woman to get her pregnant. The picture on the book cover is, from l to r, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, the author and Murphy.