Frederick Agnew Gill (25 May 1873 - 4 June 1938) was born in Castletown and became a British Army officer and polo player, winning an Olympic bronze medal in polo for the Bagatelle Polo Club de Paris team at the 1900 Paris Olympics. He later worked as polo manager at the Ranelagh Club in London and represented the All Ireland Polo Club on its 1922 tour of the United States, making him one of the earliest Manx-born Olympic medallists.

Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748-1825), was a British statesman and diplomat. His connection to the Isle of Man relates to his involvement in the political affairs of the late eighteenth century, during the period following the Revestment of 1765.

Manxman pursued by the eighth Earl of Derby in the year after the execution of William Christian. He wrote from Castletown on 9 June 1663 to Sir Jephara St Johnes, asking that the letter be left at the Three Anchors in Milk Street and delivered into his own hands. He hoped that what had been promised would be performed, and added a postscript about one Major Thomas Stanley who had been sent over by Mr Jones and put aboard ship by the Earl of Derby's order. The letter did not reach its man. It survives among the State Papers endorsed as an intercepted letter, and marked with the Earl of Derby's name. A fortnight later the Earl wrote from Derby House to the Principal Secretary of State asking for the King's commands concerning George Christian, together with the dismission of certain persons then in London whose presence in the Island he thought would endanger its peace and its allegiance.

First Lord of the Treasury under whom the Isle of Man was bought from the Atholls. The Revestment was his ministry's act, and the Commons said so afterwards without qualification. Speaking in 1791 on the Duke of Atholl's renewed claims, a member recalled the bargain made with the late Duke for his sovereignty over the Isle of Man in 1765, observed that Grenville was then the minister, and gave the reason of state behind it: that the sovereignty of the Island had been found incompatible with the interest of the public so long as it remained in the hands of an individual. His earlier career ran through the Treasury and the Navy. He was made Treasurer of the Navy in a batch of civil appointments in March, and in 1763 he replaced Bute at the head of a triumvirate with Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont. He had been one of the Lords of the Treasury before that, and it was a letter of recommendation from Grenville that John Wilkes carried in his pocket to the electors of Berwick. Wilkes owed him more than that: it was through Grenville's influence that he had been made High Sheriff of Buckingham for 1754. The two men were on the opposite side of the privilege question within a decade, Grenville carrying the King's message to the House against Wilkes's motion.

George III (1738-1820), King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1760 to 1820, and Lord of Mann after the Revestment. The Revesting Act of 1765 is cited throughout the Manx record by his regnal year, as the Act of 5 George III, the same session that produced the Stamp Act. The grants that followed ran in his name. The patent appointing John Quayle Clerk of the Rolls opens with the style of George the Third, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, and recites the King's confidence in the fidelity and prudent circumspection of his trusty and well-beloved subject. The financial settlement made in his reign outlasted him. The land revenues and other possessions acquired in the Island were placed under the management of the department of Woods and Forests and treated as part of the hereditary revenues of the Crown, which George IV and his successors, following his example, placed at the disposal of the House of Commons for their lives, the House then making other provision for the Crown. His English reign, as this corpus records it, is a long argument about the limits of the prerogative. Whether the King might land foreign troops in the country without the consent of Parliament was debated to a division. He tried to obtain Russian troops in 1775, as the younger Pitt did in 1793. In the crisis over Fox and North he drafted two messages of abdication, and was turned from that purpose by advice to give his opponents rope enough, giving way at the beginning of April instead.

George IV (1762-1830), King of the United Kingdom and Lord of Mann from 1820 to 1830, in whose reign the Atholl claims were finally bought out. He inherited an arrangement rather than made one. The land revenues and other possessions acquired in the Island had been placed under the management of the department of Woods and Forests and treated as part of the hereditary revenues of the Crown. George IV, following his father's example, placed those revenues at the disposal of the House of Commons for his life, and the House then made other provision for the Crown, as his successors did after him. The last of the Atholl business was settled while he reigned. By 1826 a correspondent of the Home Office could report that the treaty between the Crown and the Duke was rapidly advancing, that the Duke's own acquired property was not involved in it, Castle Mona included, and could ask whether Castle Mona might be applied to some public purpose, since Government House would soon have to become the gaoler's.

Peel merchant and Speaker of the House of Keys at the Revestment. He appears through the Atholl Papers of the later 1750s as a man the Island's government dealt with directly. Governor Basil Cochrane's report of September 1756 records £505 paid to him, and his report of April 1759 notes that the Duke's letter reached Castletown by Moore's hand. Peel harbour was his cause. In 1759 he petitioned James, Duke of Atholl, for and on behalf of the inhabitants of the town, and in July that year the townsmen delivered him a paper in their own names and in the name of the town, asking him to do everything in his power for the harbour and for the good of the inhabitants. Writing to the Duke in February that year he argued the commercial case. A harbour made commodious would draw the ships of Liverpool, Lancaster and Whitehaven, offer a passage in time of war to America and Africa, and open a trade with Glasgow merchants, with whom the Island then had almost none except in tobacco. He was at the same time in dispute with two Douglas men over an alleged encroachment at his intack near the Fort there. By 1765 he was Speaker of the Keys. On 28 January the Governor and Council at Castle Rushen considered his application for the Keys to be called, to decide what steps were proper in the situation then arising. On 12 March he wrote from Peeltown asking that the Keys be convened at Castletown, the affairs of the Isle being then under the consideration of Great Britain. Governor John Wood replied on the 14th that he had directed the precepts to run for the Tuesday rather than the Monday, since Sunday was no day and the infirm members might need more time. The Keys appointed Thomas Moore and Hugh Cosnahan as their commissioners to Britain, and Moore's written instructions to them survive. If there were any prospect of liberty to import East India goods for the African trade, it was to be applied for. Failing that, they were to seek wine, brandy, rum and tobacco sufficient for the Island's own consumption. In 1780 Governor Smith recommended to Stormont that Moore be favoured with a knighthood.

George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, first Marquess of Buckingham (1753-1813), son of the George Grenville who carried the Revesting Act, and a speaker on the Duke of Atholl's claim. The claim came before the House of Lords on 5 July 1805, and the report of that debate lists him among those who spoke, with the Lord Chancellor twice, the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Montrose, Lord Holland, Lord Hawkesbury and the Earl of Suffolk. What was at issue was the Duke of Atholl's petition for further compensation for the rights his family had sold in 1765, and whether the charge should fall on the revenue of the Island or on the Consolidated Fund.

George Quarrie (1846-1926) was born at Ballavair, Kirk Bride, and worked as a commission agent in Barrow-in-Furness before emigrating to the United States in the 1880s, where he spent roughly four decades as a New York journalist. Drawing on childhood memories of 1860s Kirk Bride, he wrote extensive poetry and prose in Manx dialect, including 'The Melliah' on traditional harvest customs (which he claimed Hall Caine drew on for The Manxman); folklorist W.W. Gill judged the literary merit modest but the linguistic record 'extremely valuable'.

Of Bridge House, Castletown, and the man who had the Peggy built. He added a boathouse and a dock to the Bridge House property and commissioned the boat, which survives as a rare eighteenth-century Manx vessel and is listed in the National Historic Fleet. The family papers accumulated at Bridge House were deposited in the Manx Museum between 1933 and 1941, and they carry the family's involvement in the politics, military affairs and economic life of the Island. A George Quayle was among the members of the Keys named to attend the Commissioners of Inquiry on the Duke of Atholl's claims in September 1791.

Water-Bailiff of the Isle of Man at the time of the 1792 inquiry. The oath appointed for the Water-Bailiff was administered to George Savage, Esquire, at Castle Rushen on 25 March 1789, by virtue of a constitution from the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury dated 5 February that year, and sworn before Richard Dawson. The commissioners of inquiry examined him at Douglas on 4 and 11 October 1791, and again in late September, and printed his constitution among their appendices. He told them that no criminal case had come before him while he had been Water-Bailiff. A George Savage also appears in the same report as Acting Collector at the Port of Peel, and established tidesman, boatman and extra riding officer there, appointed to the collectorship in September 1766 by Charles Lutwidge, and examined at Douglas on 11 and 12 October 1791. Whether this is the same man later promoted, or a relative of the same name, the report does not say.

George V (1865-1936), King of the United Kingdom and Lord of Mann from 1910 to 1936. Manx company law took its modern shape in the first year of his reign. The Companies (Consolidated) Act of 1910, cited as 1 George V, drew the earlier statutes together: the Act of 1817 requiring bankers to be registered and regulating notes payable on demand, and the Act of 1865 which admitted the principle of limited liability. Under that principle the most a shareholder could lose in a company failure was the amount of the shares subscribed, where before every shareholder had been answerable for a portion of the whole debt. His reign saw the Island used extensively for the internment of civilian prisoners during the First World War, most notably at the large camp at Knockaloe, near Peel.

George VI (1895-1952), King of the United Kingdom and Lord of Mann from 1936 to 1952. He came to the throne without waiting for legislation. On one contemporary view of the constitutional position, the throne fell vacant the moment Edward VIII signed the Deed of Abdication, and the Duke of York succeeded by law at once, so that he could be proclaimed King in the Dominions immediately and before either the United Kingdom Parliament or any Dominion parliament had acted. During the Second World War the Isle of Man was again used for the internment of enemy aliens, with camps established at Douglas, Ramsey, Peel, and Port Erin and Port St Mary.

Customs officer and author of the first substantial description of the Isle of Man in English. He came to the Island on revenue business. When the Commissioners of Customs sent officers to the Isle of Man, and the Island's government sent agents to England to concert arrangements that would be mutually advantageous, Waldron's appointment followed. It was suspended on 25 September 1713. The book made his name, and it was published after his death. A Description of the Isle of Man, with some Useful and Entertaining Reflections on the Laws, Customs, and Manners of the Inhabitants was printed in 1731 for the widow and orphans, by subscription, in folio, at two guineas, and dedicated to William O'Brian, Earl of Inchiquin. It formed part of The Complete Works, in Verse and Prose, of George Waldron, Gent., late of Queen's College, Oxon. A later edition of 1744 carried a fuller title promising the Island's antiquity, history, laws, customs, religion and manners, its animals and minerals, and authentic relations of apparitions of giants that had lived under the castle. What it preserved was the folklore. Waldron is the source of a great many of the Manx fairy tales, traditions and customs still current, and later collectors quote him directly. His account of Hunting the Wren describes how, on the 24th of December towards evening, all the servants had a holiday, went not to bed all night, but rambled about until the bells rang in all the churches. The Manx Society reprinted him as volume XI of its series in 1862-63, edited with an introductory notice and notes by William Harrison, and listed a fresh edition from the 1731 folio among works it hoped to publish.

A George Wilks stands at the centre of the Manx counterfeiting case of 1723. The Deputy Governor sent men to search John Wilks's house on the day the information was laid. The searcher told George Wilks that he had authority to search him on suspicion touching the counterfeit pence, and Wilks replied that he was at liberty to do so. Watching him as he searched, the officer judged that Wilks had a counterfeit penny about him, and on a narrow search found it hidden in the back of his breeches. Wilks acknowledged that he had run or made it himself, both to the searcher at the time and openly in court afterwards, saying that he had done it to try his flasks and see how they would cast, and to try the metal. At the same house the searchers took up the pot for running metal, the flask or mould, and a piece of copper. He was ordered into close prison until further order. The trial went the other way, and the court punished the jury for it. Three of John Wilks's apprentices, Thomas Taubman, David Curlett and John Wattleworth, swore that they knew nothing directly or indirectly of the making of the pence, and that although they usually worked with John Wilks and his father they had seen no cause for suspicion. On 21 May 1723 the jury of indictment acquitted the accused, giving their verdict according to their best judgements and signing with their marks. A second body of jurors, John Wattleworth and Thomas Stevenson among them, said they would rather impute the verdict to the misunderstanding of that jury than to wilful error, and recommended them to the Worshipful Court to be favourably used in their fine and punishment. At the Debt Court held on 10 October 1723 the court fined the Grand Jury twenty shillings apiece and declared them incapable of passing on any jury or inquest in future.

Gerhard Bersu (1889-1964) was a German archaeologist who was interned on the Isle of Man during the Second World War as an enemy alien. During his internment, he conducted pioneering excavations of Viking and Celtic sites on the Island, including the round house sites at Ballacagen and Ballanorris, which transformed understanding of the Island's prehistoric settlement.

Norse conqueror of the Isle of Man and founder of the dynasty which held it for nearly two centuries. The Chronicle of Man makes him the son of Harald the Black of Iceland. He was at Stamford Bridge in September 1066, where Harald Harfager fell, and escaped from the defeat to Mann, where Godred son of Sytric then reigned and received him honourably. In the same year William the Bastard conquered England. Godred son of Sytric died and his son Fingal succeeded him. The conquest took three attempts. Crovan gathered a fleet, came to Mann, joined battle with the inhabitants and was beaten. He recruited his army and navy, came again, and was beaten a second time. On the third attempt he landed by night and placed three hundred men in concealment, who rose at the rear of the Manx line once the fighting was joined and broke it. The battle is placed at Sky Hill near Ramsey, and Fingal was dispossessed. The date is not settled in the sources. Manx Society editors give 1077, and the Antiquitates Hibernicae has him dead by 1076, which cannot both be right. The editor of the Monumenta notes that the chronology of the manuscript is defective at this point, that its own reckoning would push the conquest to 1081, and that the Norse sagas give 1077, which he thought the likelier date. His name is glossed in the same volumes as Crovan, Cronan or Chrouban, all meaning white-handed. What he did with the land mattered longer than how he took it. He divided the Island among the natives and among those of his followers who chose to stay, on terms that none should claim their holdings as hereditary property but should hold simply as tenants at will to the King. This is the origin later Manx writers gave to the tenure of the straw, and the nineteenth-century editor of the Manx statutes drew the comparison directly: like William the Conqueror, Crovan established feudal tenures in Man, leaving the old proprietors in legal possession but granting them their charters from himself. The same editor observed that what the monks of Rushen imagined Crovan to have done was what the seventh Earl of Derby deliberately attempted in 1645. He died in Islay and was succeeded by his son Lagman. Another account has him expelled from his kingdom in 1093 by Magnus Barefoot of Norway and dying in Islay in 1096, leaving three sons, Lagman, Harold and Olave. Twelve or thirteen kings of his race followed, and their line ended with Magnus, who died at Castle Rushen. A seal of Godred survived in the Office of the Duchy of Lancaster, perfect in Camden's time, with his effigy on horseback on the reverse and on the obverse a ship with furled sails and the legend Rex Manniae et Insularum.

Edward Smith, Governor in Chief of the Isle of Man, who held the government from London and spent much of it complaining about the Treasury's customs officer. He was Governor in Chief, and he lived in London and came over only occasionally, so the resident authority was his Lieutenant-Governor's. Under the arrangement by which the two of them were appointed, one had to be on the Island, and when Smith asked Lord North for a period of absence in October 1783 North told him he must relieve Dawson first. In the same letter he asked for a chapel in Castle Rushen for the use of the troops barracked there, and for a royal portrait. He was already showing signs of the illness that brought his resignation, and the Duke of Atholl was appointed Governor in Chief on that resignation in 1793. Charles Lutwidge was his standing grievance. Lutwidge had been put in by the Lords of the Treasury to enforce the anti-smuggling laws that came with the Revestment, and he had almost unchecked influence at the Treasury for years afterwards. Smith wrote in 1774 that he found the actions of the late Receiver General illegal and arbitrary every day. In the 1780s he was pressing that Lutwidge was dishonest and that his accounts should be audited, and in one letter he called Lutwidge's impunity a curse to the Isle of Man. He kept the Governor's house for himself. Long afterwards the Duke of Atholl asserted that Governor Smith had always taken possession of the house on his arrival, and that Lieutenant-Governor Shaw had given it up to him in like manner.

Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Man from 1863 to 1882. The Manx Society listed him as its President while he held the office. His long tenure covers the period in which the Island's modern institutions took their shape, and Manx writers use his name as the marker for the years in question. One episode belongs to him particularly. An earlier proposal to absorb the Manx diocese had been beaten off when the Manx clergy and the Manx bar roused themselves against it and the government of the day gave way. Years afterwards, in Loch's time, the project was revived, the government then proposing to unite the see of Sodor and Man with the new diocese of Liverpool, and to sweeten the change by applying a large part of the see's revenues to improving the incomes of the parochial clergy. He went on to govern elsewhere. He was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria on 10 April 1884 and arrived at Melbourne with Lady Loch and his family on 15 July, where deputations representing the Manx residents presented addresses of welcome. He wrote from Melbourne wishing The Manx Note Book success.

Major John Lloyd, Governor of the Isle of Man in the 1720s. He came in after a governor whose quarrel with the spiritual courts had ended badly. That predecessor had been censured, the matter was carried at length before a committee of the Privy Council, judgment was passed on him for contumacy, and he retired. Lloyd took much the same line. When the Sumner applied to him for power to commit one Wainwright, who lay under censure for adultery, the Governor utterly refused his authority. He presided over the counterfeiting case of 1723, and the way he dealt with it has been remembered as the Manx constitution working properly. A Grand Jury acquitted the accused man, apparently to spare him a capital sentence. The Keys found the proceedings irregular, and the jurors were fined. Lloyd heard their petition, reduced the fines and restored them, ruling that their error had come of ignorance and a misunderstanding of the law rather than of wilful error.

Secretary to the Treasury through whom the business of the Isle of Man passed in the years after the Revestment. The correspondence shows the shape of the office. In June 1766 he wrote to William Burke at Secretary Conway's office conveying the Lords of the Treasury's direction that the Governor of the Isle of Man be allowed a particular expense. Governor Wood's despatches were minuted as to Grey Cooper and read at the Treasury in October of that year. In January 1767 William Fraser sent him a copy of Wood's letter of 5 December 1766 to be laid before the Lords of the Treasury for their information. He was still the address for Manx business a decade later: Governor Smith's letter of January 1779 asking for a new copper coinage for the Island, and reporting on the cambric manufactory lately set up there at government expense, is directed to Sir Grey Cooper. In the Commons he was a Treasury man of the sort who tells at divisions and carries the detail. He was named with Lord Beauchamp as the mover of the Grenada, Tobacco and Cotton Acts, whose object was the augmentation of the revenue. He argued for the renewal of the Bank's charter on the ground that the question was not whether two millions was an adequate price for the Bank's profits but whether it was an equivalent for the charter. He opposed the East India Declaratory Bill of 1788 on its principle, closely enough that Pitt read out the clauses he had relied on and allowed that he had argued it fairly. The secret service accounts of the 1770s show large sums issued to Cooper and to John Robinson as secretaries of the Treasury, a fact the opposition made what it could of.

Hammersley, the Duke of Atholl's London agent at the time of the Revestment. He was the man the Manx merchants went to when they realised what was being negotiated. Hugh Cosnahan and a fellow examinant travelled to London on the merchants' business, taking John Christian, then a merchant in Douglas, to assist in mercantile matters. Being already acquainted with Hammersley as the Duke's agent, they waited on him as soon as they arrived to learn what was doing or had been done respecting the affairs of the Isle of Man, and told him they thought the inhabitants extremely ill used by the Duke in not having been timely acquainted with the treaty carried on between the Government and his Grace. Hammersley was surprised that they had not been told. He said that Mr Quayle had directions from the Duke to apprise the inhabitants of what was going forward respecting the sale of the Island, and turning to Quayle he put it to him directly that he had been given those directions. The failure became part of the Manx case afterwards. One account of the transactions holds that the Atholl family was itself in total ignorance of its rights in the Island, and that Quayle, for private reasons of his own, neglected to inform the people of the negotiation then pending although ordered to do so both by his employer the Duke and by Hammersley as his agent. On that reading the bargain was forced on the Atholl family while they were ignorant of what they were parting with, and the Crown bought a great deal more than it had asked for. He handled the ordinary money as well. Governor Cochrane reported in February 1758 that the clergy were waiting for an answer from Mr Hammersley before they could divide their money.

Harald Hardrada (c. 1015-1066) was King of Norway from 1046 to 1066. He exercised overlordship over the Norse kingdom of Mann and the Isles during his reign, and his defeat and death at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 had significant consequences for the Norse territories in the Irish Sea, including the Isle of Man.

Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth (1757-1844), Speaker, Prime Minister, and afterwards the Home Secretary through whom the Island's business passed. He was called to the chair of the House of Commons in 1789 on the motion of the Master of the Rolls, carried against Mr Grey's tellers by two hundred and fifteen votes to a hundred and forty-two, and he was re-elected Speaker in 1796. He left the chair in February 1801 to become Prime Minister, and the House voted him its thanks in the strongest terms. He was afterwards created Viscount Sidmouth and introduced to the Lords with the accustomed formalities, his supporters being the Viscounts Wentworth and Sydney. His Manx significance is the Home Office. As Secretary of State he was the minister to whom the Lieutenant-Governor and the Island's officers wrote, and the calendars of the HO 98 series are full of it. Lord Ellenborough forwarded him a letter from John Christian of Fort Ann wishing to be considered for the Attorney-Generalship in December 1812, and Sidmouth answered privately that it was not possible. Lieutenant-Governor Smelt sent him Deemster Gawne's application to be paid for extra work in 1818, and Gawne wrote to him directly on the same matter. John Cosnahan asked him whether his son John Finch Cosnahan might collect his commission as Deemster. On the customs questions in which the Duke of Atholl had become interested by the Act, Sidmouth's opinion is stated to have concurred pretty nearly with Lord Ellenborough's.

Henry Bloom Noble (18 June 1816 - 2 May 1903) was a wine and spirits merchant who moved to Douglas as a young man and became the wealthiest resident of the Isle of Man by the time of his death. Living unostentatiously despite his fortune, he bequeathed the bulk of his estate to Manx civic causes, funding Noble's Isle of Man Hospital, Noble's Park, Ramsey Cottage Hospital and St Ninian's Church in Douglas; his former residence, Villa Marina, later became a public entertainment venue.