Speaker of the House of Keys and the most productive Manx scholar of his generation. He was of Cronkbourne, and took his degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. His title pages give both, and by 1900 they give the Speakership as well. The books came steadily. Manx Surnames and Place-Names was followed by The Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man, which he dated from Cronkbourne in June 1891 and offered as a contribution, though an insignificant one, to the science of folklore. Sodor and Man appeared in 1893 in the Diocesan Histories series for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. A History of the Isle of Man came out in two volumes in 1900. The Story of the Isle of Man, a school book, followed in 1901, sent out in the hope that its little readers would find it useful and interesting and that it might increase their love for their native land. He also compiled Manx Worthies. He worked in the smaller forms too. He contributed a paper on water and well worship in the Isle of Man to volume five of Folk-lore, describing the ritual at half a dozen named wells, where the patient walked round sunwise, drank, and wetted a fragment of clothing. He catalogued a document of 1379 preserved at Knowsley Hall for the Transactions of the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society in 1898. He kept the rainfall gauge at Cronkbourne and signed off the Island's annual rainfall returns in the 1880s. Later collectors treat him as the baseline. W. W. Gill sets his own place-name notes against Moore's, marks where Moore could not locate a name, and records where Moore's enquiries had failed.

Manufacturer who set up the first cotton mill in the Isle of Man. About the year 1781 he built at Ballasalla, two miles north of Castletown and close to the ruins of Rushen Abbey, the first and only mill in the Island for spinning and weaving cotton. It was given up in 1791, and Manx economic historians cite him by name when they come to the Island's short-lived cotton trade, alongside the Act of 5 George III and the privilege of exporting cotton yarn which Ireland obtained in 1778. The end of the venture and his appearance in the public record coincide. He petitioned the Commissioners of Inquiry on 21 October 1791, asking that his case be taken into consideration and reported to government so that he might obtain such relief as it merited. The Lieutenant-Governor certified the petition the following day, stating that the petitioner was a worthy and industrious man, much respected in the Island, and that to the best of his knowledge and belief the petition contained a just statement of facts.

David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty (1871-1936), was a Royal Navy admiral who commanded the Grand Fleet during the latter stages of the First World War. He had a connection to the Isle of Man through his residence and visits to the Island.

Annie Dorothy Bridson (1893-1985) was a Manx schoolteacher, educated locally and at Ripon Training College, who became head mistress of St Mark's School and a founding member of the Manx Labour Party in 1918. In 1922, aged 29, she became the party's first woman president, and after wartime service in the Women's Royal Naval Service she was elected to the House of Keys for Garff in 1951, becoming only the second woman ever to sit in that chamber, before retiring from politics in 1956.

Archibald Knox (1864-1933) was a Manx artist and designer born at Cronkbourne, near Tromode, the fifth of seven children in a Scottish family who had emigrated to the Isle of Man. Trained at the Douglas School of Art, where he also taught from 1884, he developed a lifelong fascination with the Island's carved Celtic and Norse stone crosses, studying them on expeditions with the antiquarian Canon John Quine. Together they restored the derelict church of Old Kirk Lonan, and Knox founded the League of St German in 1896 to campaign for the restoration of Peel Cathedral. From 1897 he designed for the Silver Studio and Liberty & Co. in London, producing around 4,000 pieces for the celebrated Cymric silverware and Tudric pewter ranges, work that bridged the Arts and Crafts, Celtic Revival, Art Nouveau, and Modernist movements. Liberty kept their designers anonymous, so Knox's name remained largely unknown during his lifetime despite his designs achieving international recognition. He returned permanently to the Isle of Man in 1913, becoming the Island's lead designer, creating war memorials, gravestones, shop fronts, interiors, furniture, and watercolours. His remodelling of Cadran Cottage in Douglas (c.1910) was listed as a Registered Building in 1996. His illuminated manuscript *The Deer's Cry*, based on St Patrick's Lorica, is held by Manx National Heritage. He was added to the Manx Patriot's Roll of Honour in 2019. During the First World War, Knox also worked at Knockaloe internment camp, where he ran the censorship department from November 1914 until October 1919. As one of the camp's civilian staff, the blue staff, rather than a military guard, he oversaw the inspection of internees' letters and parcels. By his own account his department handled more than 1.2 million parcels over the course of the war, with some 2,500 arriving from Germany on an average day, and he recorded the internees' attempts to smuggle forbidden items past him, among them newspapers concealed inside tins labelled as preserved meat. His censorship work is confirmed by Manx National Heritage and the Archibald Knox Forum, though it is not mentioned in the Manx Museum's exhibition of his work.

Arthur, Prince of Wales (1486-1502), was the eldest son of Henry VII and heir to the English throne. His connection to the Isle of Man is through the Stanley family, who held the lordship of Mann; his maternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had married Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, linking the Tudor dynasty to the Lords of Mann.

Augustus Henry FitzRoy, 3rd Duke of Grafton (1735-1811), served as Prime Minister from 1768 to 1770. His government oversaw the early aftermath of the 1765 Revestment Act, during which the Crown purchased the lordship of Mann from the Duke of Atholl and sought to suppress the Island's smuggling trade.

Barry Alan Crompton Gibb (born 1 September 1946 in Douglas) is a singer-songwriter and the eldest of the Bee Gees, one of the best-selling music groups in history. Born on the Island before his family emigrated first to Manchester and then Australia, he co-wrote hits performed by the Bee Gees and by artists including Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton and Diana Ross, and was knighted for services to music. The Bee Gees are commemorated in Douglas by a bronze statue unveiled in 2021 near their birthplace.

Basil Cochrane, Governor of the Isle of Man in the 1750s and a signatory of the lordship's accounts. He appears as an auditor and signatory on the Island's revenue abstracts through the middle of the century, regularly alongside John Quayle in the annual accounts from 1744 to 1758, and his name stands with John Quayle's and Daniel Mylrea's at the foot of Acts promulgated at Tynwald. His own letters to the Duke of Atholl survive and show the ordinary business of the office. Writing from Castletown on 6 September 1751 he sent the Duke the commission for the General Sumner, reported that his Grace's orders would be obeyed, and turned to the weather: they had had very bad weather of late which had done a great deal of damage to the harvest, and the herring fishing, which had promised greatly about ten days before, was at present at a stand. Another of his letters of that year deals with the altering of the style, the change from the old reckoning that began the year on 25 March to the new.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was an American polymath, diplomat and Founding Father. His connection to the Isle of Man relates to the broader political context of the Revestment era and the American colonial dispute, with correspondence in the Island's archives touching on transatlantic trade and the rights of self-governing territories.

George Murray (1784-1860), Bishop of Sodor and Man from 1814 to 1827, and nephew of the Duke of Atholl. He found the diocese in poor order and set about it. Things had fallen into a very scandalous state by the time he came, and he found great irregularities practised in some of the churches and a general carelessness pervading far too large a proportion of the clergy. He put the fabric of Bishop Wilson's chapel at St John's back in order, providing seats and some pews at his own expense. At Bishop's Court he repaired and modernised the building, levelling the ditches and mounds of earth that had given the place the aspect of a fortress and taking down part of the massive walls, which had probably belonged to a tower of the ancient palace. The tithe question undid him. Until Bishop Wilson's day the farmers had paid tithe on green crops as well as corn, and later bishops had waived the claim, or at least forborne to collect it. Murray revived the demand for the tithe of potatoes, turnips and other green crops, and offered to commute the whole tithes for a fixed payment of six thousand pounds a year. Commutation might have suited both the Church and the people, but the sum was too high for the Island to bear, coming after 1816 when prices had fallen and there was much distress among the poorer farmers. His right to the green tithe was taken to the insular Exchequer Court in 1821. The Duke of Atholl backed his nephew in the demand, and the opposition became so determined that it had to be given up. It was one of the things that turned nearly every Manxman against the Duke. He left in 1827, translated to Rochester, his influence for good, as A. W. Moore puts it, much vitiated by his action in the tithe question. The Dukes of Atholl having sold all their rights by then, the Manx bishopric passed under Crown patronage.

Richard Richmond, Bishop of Sodor and Man in the 1770s, and the least liked of the eighteenth-century bishops. A. W. Moore, who had little to say against most of them, calls him a haughty and overbearing man, much disliked by his clergy. He was installed about 1772, the last bishop to be installed in the old chancel of the ancient church, which went completely to ruin afterwards, unroofed and stripped of its door and windows. He changed the way the tithes were gathered. Until he came they had been let to the clergy of the respective parishes. Under the new method they were let to the highest bidder at public auction, and the buyer then held sub-auctions to re-let them, so that they sold for a good deal more than their value, and the proctors who had done the work before lost their fees. He fought the Methodists and lost. In July 1776 he issued a pastoral letter to his clergy against several unordained, unauthorised and unqualified persons from other countries who had for some time past presumed to preach and teach publicly in the Island. Moore describes the letter as intolerant and violent. After Richmond's time the Church and the Methodists on the Island worked together on the whole amicably, and went on doing so long after the two had fallen out in England. He quarrelled with Philip Moore as well. When John Kelly, the ablest of Philip Moore's pupils and afterwards a translator of the Manx scriptures, came to be ordained, either the Bishop would not ordain him or his master would not let him seek ordination from that Bishop. Kelly went to Carlisle for his orders instead. Not all his business was contentious. He undertook the charge of distributing what remained of the Manx Bibles and prayer books, and lists of the books left in the clergy's hands were to be delivered to him. In December 1779 John Quayle, Clerk of the Rolls, wrote to him about the Island's contribution to the general defence, referring to the Lieutenant-Governor's requisitions to his Lordship, or to his commissioners in his absence.

Brian Stowell (1936-2019) was a Manx language activist, author and broadcaster who played a central role in the revival of the Manx language during the late twentieth century. He was a fluent Manx speaker who produced a substantial body of work in the language, including novels, short stories and regular newspaper columns, and served as Manx Language Officer for Culture Vannin.

Bryan Kneale RA (19 June 1930 - 19 September 2025) was a sculptor born and educated in Douglas, the brother of screenwriter Nigel Kneale, who moved from painting into welded metal sculpture during the 1950s after winning the Rome Prize in 1948. In 1974 he became the first abstract sculptor elected a Royal Academician, taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art from 1963 to 1995, and served as Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy from 1982 to 1990; his public sculpture Capt Quilliam won the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture in 2007, and he was appointed MBE in 2019.

Cadwallon ap Cadfan (d. 634), King of Gwynedd, who held the Isle of Man for the last year of his life. The Manx antiquaries set him against Edwin of Northumbria and cite Bede for the sequence. Edwin, following up his successes against Cadwallon, wrested the Island in 625 from the Scots who were then in possession of it. When Edwin was killed at the battle of Heathfield in 633, Cadwallon not only regained his own territories but gained the Isle of Man with them. He died the year after. That is the whole of him in these sources. The alliance with Penda of Mercia against Edwin, and the wider British and Irish presence in the Irish Sea before the Norse came, are the setting the Manx writers assume rather than describe.

Manx officer of the Bacons of Ballabrooie. The genealogy of the Christians of Milntown carries the connection. Of the numerous daughters of that house, Ann married one of the Bacons of Ballabrooie, and Major Caesar Bacon was her grandson. Her sisters married into the Moores of the Abbey, the Fines of Ballachott, the Curpheys of Ballakillingan and the Wattleworths of Peel, so the Bacons stood inside the same network of Manx families. A list of Manx officers names William Bacon, probably an uncle of John Joseph and Caesar Bacon, among the captains of the period.

Manx captain and merchant whose conflict with the new Crown revenue establishment illustrates the immediate tensions after Revestment. In February 1766 Charles Lutwidge, Receiver-General and Water-Bailiff, presented a formal complaint against Parr. Lutwidge alleged that Parr had publicly called him a notorious smuggler and accused him of carrying wine and silk ashore in England. The same petition accused Parr of threatening Barnes, one of the Crown customs officers, saying that if Barnes attempted to seize any boat belonging to him he would “put a brace of Balls through” the officer’s head. Lutwidge also alleged that Parr had insulted and obstructed other customs officers carrying out their duties. The complaint was ordered to be heard at Castle Rushen. Hearings were fixed first for 22 February and then continued to 1 March 1766. Parr died shortly afterwards. Feltham’s later Tour through the Isle of Man records a memorial to Captain Caesar Parr and states that he was buried on 20 February 1766, aged twenty-nine. The surviving material therefore places Parr within the first months of Crown customs enforcement, when officers appointed after Revestment were attempting to suppress practices connected with the former running trade.

Captain George Dowe commanded the Whitehaven customs sloop Sincerity. In August 1750, he lured Captain Matthias Christian, the Commander at Ramsey, aboard his vessel and presented pistols to his breast, threatening to blow his brains out and to batter his house to the ground. The episode illustrates the violent reality of customs enforcement in the Irish Sea before the Revestment.

James Cook (1728-1779) was a British navigator and explorer renowned for his three voyages of discovery in the Pacific Ocean. His connection to the Isle of Man relates to the broader context of eighteenth-century British naval exploration in which Manx sailors participated.

Manx naval officer who steered the Victory into action at Trafalgar, born 1771 and died 1829. He was the son of a farmer in the south of the Island. He first came to notice at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, when Admiral Duncan appointed him to act as lieutenant, an appointment confirmed after the victory. At Copenhagen in 1801 he was in a frigate of light enough draught to get close under the batteries, where the fire was so heavy that every officer senior to him was killed and he was left in command. Nelson came aboard and asked who was in charge below. Quilliam answered that he was, and to the further question of how he was getting on replied with the single word middlin, without pausing in the work. Nelson, taken with the coolness and the independence of it, found an early opportunity to bring him onto his own ship as first lieutenant. At Trafalgar the Victory lost her mizzen topmast and had her wheel shot to pieces some five hundred yards off the Bucentaure, and she had to be steered from the gun room, Quilliam and the master Thomas Atkinson relieving each other at the tiller. A document at Trinity House offers a reason why an officer of his rank was at the helm at all: he had the damaged steering gear repaired to a plan of his own, and, not being sure how it would answer, took the tiller himself. He came home to the Island by degrees. Elected to the House of Keys in 1807, at sea again the next year, he did not resign his seat until 1810. He commanded in the Spencer in 1808 and later the Crescent, serving in her until after the peace of 1815, then retired to the White House at Kirk Michael. He was re-elected to the Keys in 1817 and took a conspicuous part in the Tynwald Court's inquiry into the herring fishery in 1827. He is buried in Kirk Arbory churchyard, where the inscription records that by the example of Duncan and Nelson he learned to conquer, and by his own merit he rose to command.

Captain Matthias Christian, Commander at Ramsey, of the Christians of Milntown in Lezayre. In August 1750 he was lured aboard the Whitehaven customs sloop Sincerity by Captain George Dowe, who presented pistols to his breast and threatened to destroy his house. He sat in the House of Keys. A Matthias Christian is among the Keys named at a court held in Castle Rushen on 11 August 1736, before Governor James Murray. One book passed through his hands and matters more than most of what he did. Deemster John Parr, who sat from 1695 to 1712, had compiled an alphabetical abstract of the laws and customs of the Island for his own convenience on the bench. That folio manuscript was presented in 1745 by a Mr William Curphey to Matthias Christian, Esquire, member of the House of Keys. It afterwards became the property of Alexander M'Clure, a native of Galloway who was comptroller at Peel from 1811 to 1814, and after M'Clure's death it passed to David Niven. Sir James Gell later edited it for the Manx Society and thought it the standard authority on the common law of the Island.

Murray, the Duke of Atholl's revenue officer in the north of the Island before the Revestment. He is one line in the Duke's own account of what he paid his customs establishment. At Ramsey the officer was G. Murray, at three pounds Manx a year, the same as Paul Bridson at Douglas and William Lidderdale at Peel, and the whole establishment came to forty-nine pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence against collections of between five and six thousand pounds a year. A Captain Murray is commemorated in the cathedral at Peel, among the memorials to Mrs Jane Wattleworth, Charles Wattleworth and Mrs Maddrell noted by a visitor at the end of the eighteenth century.

Charles I (1600-1649) was King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625 until his execution. His conflicts with Parliament over royal prerogative, taxation, and religion drove the three English Civil Wars. James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby, was among his most committed supporters, and the Isle of Man remained a Royalist stronghold until 1651, two years after the King's death. Charles was tried by a High Court of Justice and executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. He had a hand in the marriage that brought the Stanleys their most formidable member. Charlotte de la Trémouille came over to marry Lord Strange, the future seventh Earl, and the King granted her letters of denization on 6 September 1626, after which she and her youthful husband were received at court with great honour. Her dower was thought insufficient by contemporaries, and Lord Strange set about making it up shortly after coming of age.

Charles II (1630-1685), King of England, Scotland and Ireland, to whom Illiam Dhone petitioned and whose Council afterwards undid his execution. The petition survives among the Manx national documents, taken from the State Paper Office and dated 1660. William Christian set out that having part of his estate in Lancashire and part in the Isle of Man he had gone into the Island about Michaelmas last, and was soon afterwards imprisoned there. He was shot at Hango Hill on 2 January 1663. The King's Council took the matter up and reversed everything. On the hearing of the case on 5 August 1663, following a petition from Ewan Christian, son of William, full restitution of the estates was ordered to be made to the heir. The two Deemsters who had decreed Christian's death, Thomas Norris and Hugh Cannell, were ordered to be committed and to remain prisoners in the King's Bench and to be proceeded against in the ordinary course of justice, and a warrant had already gone out from Whitehall on 18 May 1663 to apprehend Henry Nowell, the Governor, and others. The ruling was that the King's Act of Indemnity reached the Isle of Man, which was the very plea Christian had made at the bar and been refused. His reign restored the Stanleys to the lordship, and Manx antiquaries date the ordinary business of the Island by it. One editor had to correct his own note, changing Charles I to Charles II, in a matter touching the privileges of the Keys.