The Manx Language Society — Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh — was founded to preserve and promote the Manx language. A.W. Moore and others recognised that the language was dying and that its loss would mean the loss of the Island's cultural identity. The Society's work would eventually feed the revival that produced Bunscoill Ghaelgagh a century later.
21 November 1918. HMS King Orry, a Manx Steam Packet vessel serving as an Armed Boarding Vessel, was given the place of honour as sole representative at the surrender of the German fleet at Scapa Flow. Admiral Beatty awarded the Manx vessel this distinction.
The House of Keys Election Act gave Manx people the right to elect their own representatives for the first time. Previously the Keys had been a self-electing body. The Act was the culmination of forty-five years of petitioning — the constitutional machinery that the Revestment had silenced, slowly restarting.
The Isle of Man has competed as its own team at every Commonwealth Games since its debut at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, where cyclist Stuart Slack won bronze in the men's 120-mile road race. The island, whose Commonwealth Games Association fields a team distinct from Great Britain despite not being an independent state, has historically been strongest in cycling and shooting.
The Isle of Man Purchase Act (5 Geo. III, c. 26) received Royal Assent. Parliament purchased the Duke of Atholl's sovereignty and revenue rights for £70,000. The Act was titled 'for the more effectual preventing of the mischiefs arising to the Revenue and Commerce of Great Britain and Ireland, from the illicit and clandestine Trade to and from the Isle of Man.' Parliament bought a feudal title. It did not acquire the Manx nation. It did not assume the duty of governance.
During the First World War, eleven of the Steam Packet Company's fleet of fifteen ships were requisitioned by the Admiralty; four were lost, three retained by government and four returned to civilian service. The Ben-my-Chree, built in 1907, was requisitioned in 1915 and converted into a seaplane carrier, while the Viking became one of the earliest vessels converted to an aircraft carrier as HMS Vindex. The King Orry, attached to the Grand Fleet, had the distinction of leading the surrendered German High Seas Fleet into Scapa Flow at the war's end.
Two Isle of Man Steam Packet Company vessels, both launched on the same day in 1936, played dramatic roles in the Dunkirk evacuation (Operation Dynamo) of May-June 1940. The Tynwald made four trips between 28 May and 4 June, embarking more troops than any other company vessel (around 8,953 in total) and was the last ship to leave, landing 3,000 French troops in England; she was later requisitioned as HMS Tynwald and sunk by an Italian submarine torpedo off North Africa in November 1942. The Fenella, on her first run into Dunkirk on 29 May 1940 under Captain W. Cubbon, was hit by three bombs while loading around 650 troops from the East Pier and sank; of her 48 crew, 33 reached Dover, and steward Thomas Helsby became the only Steam Packet crewman taken prisoner.
The Isle of Man Electric Telegraph Company, formed in 1859, connected the island to the wider telegraph network via a 36-nautical-mile submarine cable laid from Cranstal, north of Ramsey, to St Bees in Cumbria in August 1859, using the chartered cable ship Resolute. Strong currents at Cranstal proved unworkable, and in 1864 the cable was lifted and relaid further south at Port-e-Vullen in Ramsey Bay, marking the start of the island's direct telecommunications link to Britain.
The House of Keys passed a formal resolution opposing the sale of the Island. The signatories — the elected representatives of the Manx people — recorded their opposition 'as much as in them lies.' They sent Hugh Cosnahan to London to deliver the petition. Parliament received it and ignored it.
King William's College at Castletown was almost totally destroyed by fire in the early hours of Sunday 14 January 1844; the blaze, whose origin was never discovered, broke out in the school-room and spread before engines summoned from Douglas could arrive. The college's valuable library was lost, including a rare collection of Bibles in more than fifty languages and unique manuscripts on Manx ecclesiastical history, along with military models and plans. The college was rebuilt to a somewhat different design that same year.
Laa Columb Killey (St Columba's Day) is a parish fair held in Arbory, in the south of the island, celebrating the Gaelic saint Columba (Colmcille), founder of Iona Abbey. Arbory has held its traditional end-of-June parish fair for over a century; since 1912 the celebrations have taken the form of a fancy-dress procession, a crowned festival princess and attendants, Manx country dancing, sports, entertainment and a ceilidh. Unlike Ireland or Scotland, where the day falls on 9 June, Arbory marks it towards the end of June.
Sir William le Scrope was inaugurated as Lord of Mann at Tynwald — the first recorded formal installation of a lord at the ancient assembly site. He was executed six years later in 1399, his lordship forfeit.
The Manx Air Derby was an air race held on the Isle of Man, with sporadic races from 1924 and the first official Derby run in 1936 over a 156-mile course on Whit Monday, notably featuring accomplished aviator Alex Henshaw. The event continued until the Second World War halted it, resumed in 1947, and was revived again in 1965 at Jurby Aerodrome, later run alongside the Tynwald Air Races.
The Manx Grand Prix began on 20 September 1923 as the Manx Amateur Motor Cycle Road Race Championships, founded by the Manx Motor Cycle Club as a response to concerns that the TT was becoming dominated by professional, factory-backed riders. The first races, for amateurs and private entrants only, covered five laps (one fewer than the TT) in a single 500cc class, with a special award for the best 350cc performance. The event was renamed the Manx Grand Prix in 1930 and has continued as the amateur counterpart to the TT ever since, distinct from the TT's own racing history and records.
Cycle racing on the TT Mountain Course began with the 'Bicycle TT' in 1936, when organiser Curwen Clague staged a single-lap massed-start race for 100 riders on 18 June 1936. It grew into the Manx International Cycle Week, run continuously (barring wartime interruption) until 2003, attracting Tour de France winners including Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Laurent Fignon and Eddy Merckx, as well as riders such as Sean Kelly, Tom Simpson and Robert Millar. Competitors were locally nicknamed 'the silent ones' in contrast to the roaring motorcycles of the TT.
George Moore and others travelled to London repeatedly to petition for relief from the consequences of the Revestment. The deputations were received politely and achieved nothing. Moore's letters from London, preserved in the Bridge House Papers, document the experience of a Manx patriot confronting parliamentary indifference.
The Parish Walk is an annual ultra-distance walking race covering roughly 85 miles (137 km) through all seventeen of the Isle of Man's parishes, usually held on the weekend nearest the summer solstice with a 24-hour time limit. Its roots trace to an 1852 Manx Sun newspaper account of Coroner John Cannel's 90-mile horseback and, the following year, on-foot journey around the parishes. The event took its modern organised form in 1913 under the Isle of Man Times and the Manx Sporting Club, lapsed during the First World War, and resumed in 1923, continuing (with interruptions) ever since. Walkers historically had to touch each of the seventeen parish church doors, a tradition now marked electronically by timing chips.
The Privy Council — the King-in-Council, not Parliament — intervened after Illiam Dhone's execution. The Deemsters were committed, the Christian estates restored, Edward Christian reinstated to his judicial office. This was an exercise of the Crown's personal authority over a feudal subordinate, not Parliament's legislative reach. The distinction would prove crucial a century later when Parliament assumed legislative authority over the Island during the Revestment.
Queen Elizabeth II, as Lord of Mann, made five official state visits to the Isle of Man between 1955 and 2003. Her first visit in 1955, with Prince Philip, was escorted by TT riders; her third visit, on 5 July 1979, was her most notable, when she attended the Millennium of Tynwald celebrations on Tynwald Day, marking the parliament's thousandth anniversary. She returned separately on 8 August 1989 for a one-day visit (a Ramsey walkabout, the opening of a Manx Museum extension, and the Royal Manx Agricultural Show), and made her final visit in 2003.
28 June 1838, the day of Queen Victoria's coronation in London, was marked on the Isle of Man as a grand island-wide holiday of celebration, described as a day of 'sound, colour, crowds and feasting' from the early hours to well past bedtime. It stands as one of the island's earliest recorded mass public celebrations tied to a British royal occasion.
Lathom House, the fortified Stanley manor in south-west Lancashire, was besieged twice during the English Civil Wars. In the first siege (February-May 1644), Charlotte de la Trémouille held the house against Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax and then Alexander Rigby. She refused every summons to surrender, sortied against the besiegers, and held out until Prince Rupert's army relieved the garrison. In the second siege (1645), with Derby on the Isle of Man and no relief force available, the house fell. Parliament demolished it so completely that almost nothing remains above ground today.
The Isle of Man Steam Packet Company's SS Ellan Vannin left Ramsey for Liverpool on 3 December 1909 with 14 passengers, 21 crew and cargo of livestock and vegetables; deteriorating weather turned to near-hurricane force by the time she reached the Mersey Bar. At around 6:45am she foundered with no survivors, all 35 aboard lost, many bodies never recovered. A court of inquiry could not establish a definitive cause beyond the huge seas overwhelming the vessel, and the Steam Packet Company never again gave a ship the name Ellan Vannin.
On 10 May 1897, twenty miners died at the Great Snaefell Mine in the Laxey Valley, the Isle of Man's worst mining disaster. An underground fire had smouldered unnoticed through the weekend, filling workings with odourless carbon monoxide; the early shift descended the shaft at 6am unaware of the danger and was overcome. The Great Snaefell Mining Company had worked the zinc mine, on the slopes of Snaefell in the parish of Lonan, since 1856; it was finally abandoned in 1909.
St Maughold's Well, a natural spring near where the saint is said to have given thanks for his safe crossing of the Irish Sea, was for many ages a place of pilgrimage, traditionally visited on Easter Day and again on the first Sunday in August, when islanders would walk to drink its waters, believed especially good for the eyes. Associated rituals included women wishing to conceive sitting on the nearby rock formation known as 'St Maughold's Chair', and pilgrims leaving offerings such as straw crosses, bent pins or coins, in common with other Manx holy wells believed to ward off fairies and evil spirits.
Henry IV granted the lordship of Mann to Sir John Stanley in 1405 (lifetime grant), re-granted as inheritable on 6 April 1406. The Stanley dynasty would hold the Island for over two and a half centuries. The grant came after Percy's rebellion — the Island as political reward. The family that bet on Henry at Bosworth would later collect the earldom of Derby.
