Overview

In the summer of 1964, twenty-one-year-old Gillies Macbain arrives in Dublin off the ferry from England with only his bicycle, a suitcase and a tent to his name. Young, handsome and charismatic, he begins work as a footman in one of the houses of the dying aristocracy. Thus begins his foray into the upper echelons of Irish society. The Last Footman is an intriguing narrative which describes a fading part of Irish society that Macbain subverts with wry humour. Macbain finds himself in a precarious niche: the borderland between upstairs and downstairs, and later on the borderland proper between Northern Ireland and the south. Here, he rubs shoulders with a cast of characters from the bohemian socialites to the chancer Sketchly and the hippies with their dewy-eyed morals. Among these is an encounter with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull that epitomises Macbain’s straddling of glamourous and workaday lifestyles. Macbain’s memoirs run the gamut of Irish social classes, from his friendship with County Monaghan small farmers and tenants, to working with a dubious cast of actors and producers on a film set at Castle Leslie, to eventually marrying into the circle of the ‘idle rich’. An irresistible story told by a charming storyteller, this memoir sheds light on an era of Irish domestic industry, and Irish social history, that has all but been forgotten.

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9781843517658

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The Last Footman, is a very funny, often bizarre account of life above and below stairs in some of Ireland’s great houses in the 1960s and 1970s. -- Orna Mulcahy * The Irish Times *

The Last Footman, is a very funny, often bizarre account of life above and below stairs in some of Ireland's great houses in the 1960s and 1970s. -- Orna Mulcahy * The Irish Times *

Author Information

Gillies Macbain arrived in Ireland in 1963 to escape the society and bustle of London. After seeking refuge for a short time at the monastery of Mount Melleray in County Waterford, he made the permanent move to Ireland in 1964. From then, he worked in various capacities as a footman, a butler, an actor and a farmer. He currently lives in a castle in Templemore, County Tipperary, and foregoes the trappings of modern life.

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