Section 5 - 'The Isle of Man in the 1860s'

In those days a great deal of seaweed was used on the land as manure. After a storm the strands would be covered with wrack and a lot of it would be floating in the waves beating against the shore. The farmers and their men would come down to the sea at high tide and entering the water bring the weed ashore and pile it up in heaps above high water mark. So that it could be carted up to the farm when convenient. There it might be spread on the midden or on the fields direct. It was supposed to give very good crops and to enrich the land with something which farmyard manure did not supply (potash iodine etc). Recently when out in Connemara where they do the same thing I asked the opinion of farmers there I was told that seaweed did not give such good results as artificial manure, either in crop or flavour. My own impression which is confirmed by most of my old friends here is that in the old days the number of stooks of corn in the fields was more close together than they are now, that is the crops were heavier then.

In those days it was common to see little fires along the strands above high water mark. These were of burning seaweed (kelp) which had been carried there and dried in the sun and then burnt to get from the ashes the iodine and potash, which was recovered from the ashes sent to chemical works in England.

There is an old story of the last appearance of the Tarau Ushta in the Island (taurus bull,;ushta water, whiskey) a farmer and his wife had been to Peel market and were returning in the cart late in the evening. the farmer was reasonably loaded up with "jough" in that condition which Burns describes wi tippenny we fear nae evil,wi usquaebe we'd face the devil. It was a quiet calm night and the sound of the river could be heard across the valley, when they got to the Sand House, as the farmer began to sing after a little they heard coming faintly across the valley from the river, a sound like the roaring of a bull far away, presently this got nearer and the farmer recognised it as the voice of the Tarau Ushta, but being brave and a free man was not going to be daunted, so he roared back in derision. Immediately came back a louder and nearer roar which angered the farmer and made him defy the monster. Quicker and nearer came the sound. The wife became distresed and begged her husband to keep quiet, this made him worse, he would be dictated to neither by wife or Taurau Ushta so he stood up in the cart to give his chest more freedom and gave a mighty yell. Immediately came back a terrible roar, the wife fainted the horse took fright and the farmer disappeared out of the cart. When the cart drew up on the farm street they found the wife unconcious in the cart the horse in a sweat and no sign of the farmer. when the wife recovered she told them that the Taurau Ushta had taken him, so they set off with a gun and pitchforks to hunt for him. They found the poor man lying beside the road wounded and bleeding and semiconcious. His clothes were torn,but they could find no trace of the Taurau Ushta, nor could the farmer give any clear account of how he had come by his injuries. It is calculated that he gave the Taurau Ushta just as good as he got, and so sickened him that he has not been seen since.

When I was about five years old I was sent to school with the others, we had to walk two miles there and two miles back. We took our dinner with us and ate it in school if it was wet, or too cold. If it was fine we took it to Tynwald hill, or on any excursion we made in the dinner hour, sometimes we went down to the river to catch trout, or up to the top of Slieu Whallin to roll stones down the hill and see which witch would live longest, or go down to the bottom and live. Witches were in former days supposed to be put in a barrel lined with nails and rolled down the hill. If they were alive at the bottom they were not witches. One summer the corn in the fields at the bottom of the hill was so very short that it could not be cut and had to be pulled by hand. We walked through it as if it was grass it was so short, yet the ears seemed to be as big as corn usually is.

The school master was William Faragher usually called Billy. He was a very fine teacher and was afterwards the head master of the cloth workers school at Peel. Under the school there was a cellar got at by a trapdoor in the floor. It was understood that if any boy got a little above himself and did not do his work, he was to be put down into the dungeon. I did not know what it was like down there so I suppose must not have been too bad a boy. My father must have intended me to go to King Williams College at that early age for Mr Faragher began to teach me latin. I was put at a little table near the fire and had to learn mensa mensa mensam etc no less than twelve ways of saying table. I thought it was a very stupid language and that it would be much more sensible to know the names of what was on the table than to keep dodging all round it twelve times and get muddled at the end.

I still think that our methods of teaching languages is stupid and unnatural we learn our mother language through the ear by repetition and then imitate the sounds we hear, we do not imitate correctly at first but we can understand and make ourselves understood quite clearly. It is years after that we bother with grammar when we go to school and come under the stupid methods of the schoolmaster.

It should be possible for every child to be bilingual or trilingual in a practical and useful way if we adopted natures method. That is hearing by gramaphone and repeating sentance by sentance while reading the words from a book. The whole class together aloud,to get the accent correct. Not one child by itself while all the others sit silent. Grammar and idiom will by that means be automatically and unconciously learned, as it is in our homes. By using this method for half an hour a day, or two half hours. Any boy in the three years at school say from nine to twelve should have a good working knowledge of two foreign languages and would be able to travel and understand and make himself understood in the country concerned.

The names of things are the most important not the little words which connect them, all through my school life I felt that the school teaching of language was stupid unnatural and hopelessly ineffective. Now-a-days with gramaphones and records being so perfect there is no reason why they should not be introduced into our elementary schools, certainly into our shcondary schools,and used to teach foreign languages, there is no sound reason why foreign master should be employed, if we use right methods. As it is now a child can go to a good school for seven years and be quite unable to pass a matric examination in French or Latin, and yet no class of persons are so smug and self satisfied as are school teachers.

St Johns school was beautifully situated in the very centre of the island. The great enclosure shaped like a dumbell, two circles joined together by a long avenue . In one circle at the east the beautiful little church and the school and in the western circle Tynwald hill from which our laws are announced to the people before they are signed and become law.

We children were thus at the very heart of our national life. We played about the hill and the church and did some very queer things as all children do. All round the enclosure there is a stone wall on the outside and an earth sloping bank on the inside. On top of the wall there, are big stone flags about three or four inches thick, they are of Manx slate. If you will look on of these flags where the avenue joins the western, or hill, circle and on the fairfield side, you will see in the corner a flag with several little holes in it. One of them bored quite through. That is one of the things I did with a stone in the dinner hours.

St. Stephens day at Matts, used to be a day of great doings for there was a shooting match held in thm field between the road and the river. The prizes were mostly in live stock,a sheep,or a goose or a fowl or two. I do not remember whether there was any money prizes, there probably were, but there were little private shoots for drinks. The targets were paper ones fixed to a board on a post, men came from far and near to look on, or join in and there was a good deal of drinking. One young man going there for the first time got so drunk that he became unconcious, a doctor had to be fetched from Peel and it was said that h& had to use the stomach pump and pump the poor fellow dry. This was a great mystery to us lads, we were inclined to agree with the assertion that the doctor had to put a hole in his belly and put the pump in through the hole and when he was dry stitch the hole up again.

Another man had an unpleasant adventure too He was pretty well bottled and went to sleep on a bench, when in that state some of the men got a pair of scissors and cut off exactly half his long beard which was a firey red colour one half his face had no hair and the other half had a long beard reaching to his waist, usually a fight or two took place,

Dick Stephens who lived there had a big yellow tom cat whom we suspected of doing away with some of our pet rabbits, some people claimed that it was not the cat but the buck rabbits who sometimes ate the young ones, we decided to keep watch. The rabbits were kept in the hay loft over the stables and cow house. Above the mangers (french mange) there where racks to hold the hay and above the racks there were holes in the barn floor to push the hay down into the racks, in this way a cat could easily get up from the stable into the floor above and so get at the rabbits. Outside the barn at the end was a stone steps leading up to the hay loft. One day I saw this red cat of Dick Stephens go into the stable by crawling under the door. I raised the alarm and told my two elder brothers, we held a council of war, it was decided that williz qyp eldest was to arm himself with a pitch fork and John with a hoe, and quietly, enter the stable and attack the cat when he came down from the loft. When they were all set watching the hole over the rack I was to go thy outside steps and enter the hay loft and drive the cat down, taking care that he did not get past me when I opened the door of the loft. To a little boy of eight my job was about equal to entering a forest and driving out a particularly big and fierce tiger, however up I went and on opening the door there was the gcat with a young rabbit. He must have felt guilty for he was a coward and dropped thew rabbit and dashed for the hole. I yelled as loud as I could and there were answening yells from below, we've got him we've got him, I dashed down and into the stable, There I saw Willie with the pitchfork prongs stuck against the wall with the cat fixed on them while John was striking it furiously with the hoe. All of us yelling at the top of our voices,full of the fury of war, at first the cat added to the din but shortly gave up and was dead, when we were sure of this we cautiously took him off the pitch fork and he dropped on the floor, as we had Dick Strphens dead cat on our hands, then we too felt guilty and became cowards. We had committed murder. What was to be done. Finally we buried him in the midden in front of the stable and, say nothing about the matter, we all went about with innocent faces.

This occured early in the week, on Sunday morning going to sunday school we had to pass Dick Stephens and there sunning himself on the top of a wall was the big red cat, to show that committing a serious crime when young does not necessarily ruin one for life. Willie became a Wesleyan local preacher for fifty years and John became a parson and a canon, while I had not sufficient grace even to join a church,perhaps because I had taken no actual part in the murder.

Around christmas time we had three groups of visitors. The carol singers the hunt the wren boys,and the white boys, these last were play actors. I can only remember a few of the words they used but the action is still clear. They suddenly burst into the kitchen and called out room,room, give us room and then one sang out: Here come I who never came yet, big head and little wit. They all had their jackets turned inside out. One had a blacked face one was a doctor and spouted a rigmarole of what he could cure. Two had lath swords and fought a tremendous fight with them, one of these I think was St george, who killed the other who fell on the floor and was revived by the doctor. They ended up with this chorus. if you're giving anything give us it soon, we must be away with the light of the moon.

In the winter too we boys used to catch thrushes and blackbirds when there was snow on the ground. Most boys commence life as savages but not complete savages for the long age of civilization is slowly...very slowly... weakening the savage instincts and replacing them by instincts of kindness, or perhaps I would be more correct to say thay the old instincts are still there but are bring slowly covered and hidden by the later ones which bring yet thin can by suddenly wiped off disclosing thh savage underneath.

We were this mixture.for when there was snow we swept clear places and put oatmeal,crumbs and fat for the birds to eat, but sometimes on a little cleared spack strewn with crumbs we would prop up a riddle with a little stick six or eight inches long so that the birds could get in to eat the crumbs. To the lower end of the stick we attached a string running away to a door or hiding place where we watched. When a bird we wanted to catch got under the riddle and was eating we would pull the string and with it the stick so that the riddle fell down and caught whatever was under it. I dont remember that we ever killed them. The instinct to catch seemed to be satisfied with the mere catching, sometimes on moonlight nights or at dusk we would go out with our catapults to catch birds when they were roosting. We could see them up on the branches of the trees between us and the moonlit sky. We were more of a nuisance than a danger to the birds. One night John and I went up among the trees above the cottage at Glen Helen. There was said to be a buggane "taking" there in the woods above Cregg Willie hill. We had forgotten about this having spent scores of sunny days in the glen of which our father was part owner. We had shot at a good many birds and it was getting dark in among the trees which were all around us, when we heard a very strange sound in the distance among the trees. We could make nothing of it as it was unlike any animal we knew. It was coming nearer and sounded as if some big animal was coming towards us through the brushwood. Suddenly we realised it was the "buggane", terror gripped us,our hair stood on end, down the hill we dashed leaping and sliding expecting every moment to be in the grip of this terrible thing. At last we got to the road and fled along it until we got safe home. What caused the noise I have never been able to explain. No horse or cow would or could be there because it was very steep and rocky and thickly wooded.

I think that some of these stories of bugganes may have had origin in actual facts like that of the great dog of Ennerdale, which went wild lived out in the open like a wolf and killed scores of sheep and was hunted without success by hundreds of people. Our Island story through the ages has had plenty of strange incidents which would account for much more than the wildest stories that have come down to us, outlaws,criminals in hiding. Men who have fled after defeat in war who have been helped in secret, wounded men left by invaders who have been driven off. Longfellow says "all houses in which men have lived and died,are haunted houses",surely this little Island is haunted. None of us are distint and seperate individuals, we are actually one flesh with our ancestors. They transmitted to us all the peculiarities of our bodies and of our minds, of our ways of thought and our memories of what they experienced. Such inherited actually transmitted, memories are the foundations of our instinctive acts and of our instinctive thoughts, for our thoughts are as instinctive as our acts. Then there is no story of fairy phynodderee or buggane however kindly or malicious which has not been more than parralelled by our own experience through our ancestors.

Those who speak of superstitions as if they themselves had none are too often speaking in ignorance, the God who was our help in ages past and who is to be our hope in years to come, cannot be to them a reality if they dissociate themselves from their ancestors, and imagine themselves isolated individuals.

When Ebenezar chapel was being built various people were asked for contributions, among them was a Mr Gawne of Kentraugh, Mr Gawne or his family were thought to have been brewers and to have got their money by the sale of strong drink. About the time the chapel was erected there was a great wave of temperance reform in the island. People got very keen on the subject and perhaps there was considerable need for the reform which had extended from England to the Island This reform was largely linked up with the churches and particularly the chapels. However these people wrote to Mr Gawne who not only is reported to have sent a subscription but also offered to present a memorial stone to place above the door of the porch. The offer was accepted with thanks, in course of time the stone came along and on it was carved the words Judge not thy brother Mans condition until thou hast been in the same possition - something was wrong here. The sentiment was sound and worthy of a church. But — but coming from the enemies camp so to speak ..,what could be done. Finally the story is that the stone was sent back along with the subscription and a letter of thanks, it is interesting that a stone with similar wording is now over the archway into the stable yard at Kentraugh, To what strange uses may we come Horatio.

When I was a boy Foxdale mines were at full blast, a lot of ore was being raised, this was crushed and washed on the washing floors and the grey water and muddy water was sent down the river to the sea at Peel joining the river from Glenhelen below ballaleece bridge, no fish could live in this water or as we thought swim up from the sea into the clear Glen Moor stream, however on coming home from school one day what was our surprise to find our eldest brother holding up a big salmon he had caught near glen moor mill and which must have come up from thm sea through the muddy mine water.

One summer day my father had to visit "Port Chiarn" or the lords port it has since been called Port Iron and then Port Erin, we went round by Dalby and up Glen Rushen to the Round Table and from there to the Sloc and from there along the upper road to Rushen church. Just after we left the Sloc we passed a place just below the little farm of Ballarock and there saw four or five big stones in a field they looke like part of a circle, the same kind of thing that is seen in the so called druid circles of Cumberland and Devonshire. They have now disappeared, they belonged to the age of great stone circles, which are the relics of a race which visited these Islands long before the Romans or the Britons or the Celts came to live here They were made by a mediterranean people who came out of the straits of Gibralta and spread northwards to Normandy and the west of Britain and Ireland and up as far as the Shetlands. They were long before the Phoenicians came here for gold and copper and tin. There is proof that they belonged to the wonderful age in Egyptian history when they made the pyramids and had ships made of cedar much larger than the ships of Columbus. These people not only came here but settled here and made the greater circles at Avebury and Stanton Drew and in Cumberland and near Sligo. The presence of these stones and the great stones at Kirk Braddan seems proof that they came and settled in Man and perhaps worked the copper here as they did the copper and gold in Ireland, there appears to have been two great waves of these people the earlier seems to have been cattle men who lived and settled in these islands, the second wave seem to have been merchants and traders who bought the gold and copper and sold the products of the east. These were the forerunners of the Phoenicians who when they came later on and colonised Carthage cut off all trading to the west of there as they tried to do with the Romans. It is difficult to realise the conditions of life in these these islands at that remote time when communications were by sea from the mild atlantic coasts and the great treck from the middle east had not yet crossed Europe. These great stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge bear evidence of a period of civilization that had come here many thousands of before Christ.