Paul Bridson, the Duke of Atholl's revenue officer at Douglas before the Revestment.

His place in the record is a line in a salary list. When the Duke of Atholl came to answer the charge that his officers had grown rich on the Manx trade, he set out what he had actually paid them. The collections came to between five and six thousand pounds a year on a ten-year average, and the whole establishment cost him forty-nine pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence Manx. John Quayle, Collector and Comptroller, had thirty-one pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence of it. At Castletown William Clague had five pounds and Mark Nixon his assistant one. At Douglas, the first port of the Island, Paul Bridson had three pounds and Ewan Callister his assistant three. At Ramsey G. Murray had three, and at Peel William Lidderdale three. There was besides a Receiver General at forty pounds. The Duke's own comment was that when he heard of people on such salaries as these living splendidly, bringing up numerous families or dying opulent, he drew his own conclusions.

The family was at the fort as well as the custom house. The Great Man's Chamber in the old battlemented tower at Douglas was called Paul Bridson's parlour about the middle of the eighteenth century, the fort being then under the command of an ancestor of the Paul Bridson who was afterwards secretary of the Manx Society. That tower was taken down in 1818.