An Eighteenth Century Footman
Memoirs of an Eighteenth-Century Footman. Travels by John Macdonald (1745-1779). Edited by John Beresford. Illustrated. (Routledge. 10s. 6d.) IN the rainy autumn of 1745, when the Highlands were ablaze for Prince Charlie, who was then lying with his victorious army in Edinburgh, four little children of gentle Highland blood set out on foot from the wild interior of Inverness- shire to walk to Edinburgh, where their father, an officer in the Prince's army, was believed to be at the time. They pos- sessed 23s. 4d. to do the trip on, and their names and ages were—Kitty Macdonald, a girl of fourteen, and her brothers, Daniel, seven years of age, John, four and a-half, and Alex- ander, a baby of two. Kitty carried the child on her back, Daniel carried the bundle, and " I ran alongside of both:, " I" was John, the author of this autobiography (first pub_ lished in 1790)—this forthright and simply touching human document, which the investigations of Mr. Beresford have helped to bring again into the light of day.
The children never saw their father, an extravagant roving swashbuckler, again, for he was killed later on at Culloden, and dressed in the tartan which betokened their gentle lineage, but wholly without friends or money, the orphans were thrown on the world. Kitty and the baby brother, having had the good fortune to be run over by Lady Murray's coach in the Canongate of Edinburgh, soon found an asylum, but David and John were left to live on charity and their little wits. After much experience of begging in the streets, a short spell with a blind fiddler, and a bitting-in to postilion-riding (" I was the littlest postilion in Scotland ") John embarked on his career of domestic service as a postilion in the estab- lishment of John Hamilton of Bargeny, " with one shirt in a handkerchief which was all I had," at the age of nine. At Bargeny he learned to read, for " I thought that if once I could read the Bible, I should not go to hell," though the coachman thought little of his religious tendencies, for he " damned me, and said, I disturbed the horses by praying."
After having been postilion for six years and having become a father in the interval, John learned hairdressing in order to qualify as a regular body-servant, and, having always a pretty taste in dress himself (his sobriquet was Beau Macdonald), he found no difficulty in securing one good place after another. His many masters, amongst whom was Colonel Dow, a famous Oriental scholar, and " Ossian " Macpherson, took him all over the British Isles, Western Europe, and out to " John Company's " India, the manners and customs of all of which countries he describes with an artless grace but a scrupulous regard for the truth, though an angler will perhaps wonder when he mentions that one of his masters once caught " a dish of trout " in East Africa. As a servant he was thoroughly honest and generally seemed to be greatly trusted by and attached fo those whom he served, and Highland gentleman though he Was—a cadet of the family of Keppoch—there is not a line of unmanly whining in, his unique book about the 'strange reversal of his lot in life. But it was a highly interesting life, for he met all sorts of people in the servants' hall and ' out of it, and he had the curious fortune to stand by the death-bed of Sterne : " I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes ; but in five he said : Now it is come.' He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died iij a minute."
With the remnants of Scottish Calvinism about him— Macdonald did not like playing cards on Sunday, though being a gentleman he would take off his hat to an image of the Virgin—he was yet, being a good-looking young fellow, very distinctly a bit of a Lothario. He does not, however, swagger about the fact, though he rather subtly indicates his own attractiveness in a phrase : " I went next to a Mr. Campbell, who, being newly married, refused me." We say good-bye to this fascinating footman, whose prose shows him to possess the eye of a poet, with heartfelt thaiacs again to Mr. Beresford for having disinterred him, and we leave him in Berwick Street, Soho, with a wife in Toledo in Spain, who writes (August 22nd, 1778) : " Pray, my dear John Macdonald, if it be possible, come to Toledo. So no more from your loving wife unto death, Malilia Macdonald." And he did, having first popularized the umbrella in London.
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