Manx Heritage Foundation Oral History Project Oral History Transcript

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

MANX HERITAGE FOUNDATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT

‘TIME TO REMEMBER’

Interviewee: Mr Walter Clarke

Date of birth: 1928

Place of birth: Ramsey

Interviewer: David Callister

Recorded by: David Callister

Date recorded: No recording date

Topic(s): Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh [Manx Language Society] Recordings of last native Manx speakers Sir Joseph Qualtrough Recording equipment and power surges Names of various native Manx speakers Jackie Kneen and the Mooinjer Vegger [Fairies] The Curraghs turf and turf bakers Juan the Doch and smuggling Animals and birds in the Curraghs Fishing and hawkers Harvesting and crofts Field names and corruption of place names Adaptation of new words into Manx Gaelic vocabulary

Walter Clarke - Mr C David Callister - DD

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

DC These recordings are with Walter Clarke, of Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh, a man steeped in the Manx Language and Manx lore, but who, in the 1950s, went with a team of people to record the last native Manx speakers on the Isle of Man. Now I’d better have a bit of personal information first, I suppose, Walter, yourself being born in the Island, yes?

Mr C That’s right, oh, yes, in Ramsey, yes.

DC When would that be?

Mr C 1928.

DC Right. And did you learn Manx as a young man?

Mr C No, not very young, my grandfather had a fair bit of Manx, and my aunt, when I was out at Cooilbane, at Sulby, but I got the thirst for it, if you like, from them, and then went out to find these old people that could speak it. And then through Willie Radcliffe and Charlie Craine, I was introduced to them all and got into the swing of things and that’s how it started.

DC So this was joining Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh was it – the Manx Language Society?

Mr C Yes, the Manx Language Society, Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh.

DC Were you one of the founder members of that then?

Mr C No, it was founded a long time ago but when I went into it, the Speaker of the House of Keys, Sir Joseph Qualtrough was then the President of Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh, and of course he had good Manx as well, and it was a collective effort, really, you know. We just – we wanted to record the old people but we didn’t, we had neither the money nor the means of doing it. But Jack Gell from Port St. Mary fortunately stepped forward and loaned us the money, it was £8, which was a lot of money in those days. And we bought this sound mirror, it was an American sound mirror, they called it, with paper tapes, 5 inch reel to reel paper tapes. And we went round, we lugged this thing round the country, all round the Island, sometimes by bus, sometimes by car, sometimes by van, sometimes we carried it, you know, to get to the people and of course the old 2

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

people in the outlying districts didn’t have electric, so we had to find a friendly house that had electricity and ask them if we could bring the old people, some of the old people down to record them. And then again electricity at that time was sort of an unknown quantity, it used to surge and it used to drop and ...

DC A bit of fluctuation.

Mr C Oh, it was dreadful at times, you know, which ...

DC How did that affect the recording in those days then?

Mr C Well, all of a sudden it would sort of go to a shriek, you know, or just drop down to a very deep bass and you had to switch the machine off, and wait for the power to right itself and then switch it back on again, you know.

DC So did you have a microphone sort of sitting on a table, or hand held, was it?

Mr C Well, the old people, at first, were a little bit shy of the mike, but what we used to do, we’d sit round talking to them and I’d put this microphone, which, it had about a four foot lead on it, either on the floor or on the table or nearby and we just simply talked to them and ignored it and then after a little while they ignored it and then you switched the machine ...

DC Switched on the machine – so they didn’t know, they weren’t aware then of the presence of it then.

Mr C Not really, not, and when we played – and the odd thing was with a lot of them, when we played some of the tapes back to let them listen to it, they started talking to the machine, you know, they were answering the machine.

DC Children do this now.

Mr C Do they?

DC If I record them and they hear the thing back they’re singing along with it, they can’t understand the technique really.

Mr C That’s right, and some of the old people, you know, they would be gesturing at 3

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

the machine there, and shaking their head or talking or ...

DC But they wouldn’t recognise their own voices either, would they?

Mr C No, they didn’t, no, they didn’t, no, they would say, ‘Who’s that feller talking?’ you know, it was an odd experience really, but I suppose a natural reaction I would think.

DC Didn’t the Manx Museum have equipment for recording in any case?

Mr C Well, they did but it was, I think bought originally to record bird song and things like that, and we weren’t allowed to use it so we had to get our own machine, you see.

DC So they wouldn’t give you permission to take it out?

Mr C No, not – no, they didn’t really. I understand eventually they did let it go out with one or two of the collectors to do one or two recordings, but I never used it at all.

DC And this paper tape then, was something new to everybody, was it?

Mr C Oh, it was indeed, it was – they were 5 inch reels with very thin paper tape, covered with iron filings, and of course if the power surged the tape snapped and there was no such thing as sellotape in those days, there was that old fish glue paper tape thing which ...

DC Like fly paper almost.

Mr C That’s right, it was, and you had to lick it and sort of suck it and hold it till it bonded and then thread it back into the machine again, you know. We always carried a pair of scissors with us and a bit of this tape for repairs, yes.

DC So how many native Manx speakers would there have been at that time then?

Mr C There were eighteen on the Island at that time.

DC And this was 1951? 4

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

Mr C 1948-50, yes round that period, yes. And there was Jackie Kneen, the gaaue, the blacksmith, gaaue thoo, [sp ???] or gaaue dhoo, as they say in the south, in the north, there was John Thomas Kaighen, Ballagarrett, he was a farmer, and marvellous Manx. Mr and Mrs Kneale, Ballagarrett, they had marvellous Manx, there was Harry Boyde from Ballaugh, who eventually, unfortunately finished up in the Infirmary, but again very co-operative with us and so on. There was an old feller called Cain, Danny Cain, from Little London, which we only managed to get a little snippet of, he was very ill at the time and we didn’t get very much from him. And then we moved down to Cregneash and round that area and Ned Maddrell, Mrs Lowey, Kirkall, Mrs Eleanor Karran, Cregneash, she had wonderful Manx, Tommy Leece, Kerrowkeeil, he had marvellous Manx too, and of course ...

DC Harry Kelly?

Mr C Well, he was before my time, Harry, yes.

DC Harry, he was, had he died then at that time?

Mr C Yes, he had actually, yes, but Mark Braide and Bill Radcliffe had met him and Charlie Craine like, you know.

DC So what was the team that went round then, there was you, and Bill Radcliffe.

Mr C Bill Radcliffe, and later on Doug Faragher, Dougie Braeger [sp ???] as we used to call him, Doug Faragher, he was the means of transport, latterly, for us, you know. And of course we, the tapes in those days were, I think 25 shillings each, which was quite a lot of money, you see. So we’d have a whip round to get the money to get two or three tapes and then I’d ring Doug up and say, ‘Look, we’ve got some tapes here.’ ‘Right, where’ll we go this week?’ And we’d go out at the weekends or in the evenings so these people ...

DC So this really was the operation of some enthusiastic amateurs ...

Mr C Oh, yes, indeed.

DC ... who were financing themselves for really a very important project that should have been properly financed, probably, shouldn’t it? 5

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

Mr C Well, in retrospect, it should have been, yes, but it never was.

DC No. Well, now, what about, I mean you’ve mentioned some of these characters, what about their personalities, what about the way they approached you, because a lot of them, some of them would have been known to you, but not all of them, would they?

Mr C No, they weren’t, and yet once they got to know us and realised that we were really genuinely interested, they couldn’t do enough for us. The gaaue, Jackie Kneen, he was I think 95 or 96 when I first met him, he lived to be over 100, of course, he went blind, sadly, towards the end, but a tremendous character. He’d been a blacksmith, he’d been a farmer, he’d been a miller, you know, he really was a wonderful person.

DC Would he have had much of an education then?

Mr C Well, he told us when he was – I asked him one time about how he got started in the smithy and he said, well, when he was about ten he stopped going to school, and went to work for his father. And I said, ‘Well, what wages did you get?’ And, ‘What wages?’ He said, ‘We got fed,’ and I said, ‘well, didn’t you get anything at all for working?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘you didn’t get anything for learning in those days,’ you had to be really competent before you got anything, you know, and he would work from 7 in the morning until 8, or 9 o’clock at night because the smithy was the hub of the newses, if you like, of all the parishes. Everybody went there for something and all the newses came to the blacksmith and he passed it on to somebody else and so on so really the smithy was the hub of the life.

DC It was very, very important to the whole community really?

Mr C Oh, it was indeed, yes.

DC I mean we’re talking about horses and no vehicles in those days.

Mr C That’s right, yes, they were all horses and carts, yes, and all the implements had to be made, of course, the scythes, the sickles, the ploughs, things like that.

DC Did they go out, I mean when they were using fuel for fires and so on, what 6

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

would they use in the smithy, they’d just be using – would they use turf or ...?

Mr C Oh, yes, yes, they used turf and occasionally if they were hooping a wheel they would use chaff.

DC Really.

Mr C They’d use the chaff, the gaaue’s told me frequently that he’s hooped a wheel with chaff, you know.

DC So it was all cut, the turf, as well, would it?

Mr C Oh, yes, up the mountain, it was all cut, either up the mountain or in the case of the people, some of the people at Jurby and places out in the Curraghs at Sulby there, you know. The mountain turf was easier in a way, because you had to – it was drier and it could be drained easily, but of course, like all things the deeper you went down the better the quality of the stuff it was. The Curragh turf was just like porridge in many ways.

DC Needed a lot of drying out?

Mr C Oh, they used to fill a cart with it and kick the cart in the farm street and leave it to drain on its own and then a band – usually a band of women, they used to be called the turf bakers – they used to come round and they would mould it by hand into, as the gaaue said, like bonnags, you know, and stack it to complete the drying, you know. But that was their occupation, going round making brickettes, if you like, in modern terms, yea.

DC What about religion then, I mean we think of the south of the Island particularly as being very strong Methodist, but what were they up in the north here?

Mr C Well, very few of them spoke much about religion at all, really, you know.

DC But they would be churchgoers, I suppose?

Mr C Oh, yes, yes, the gaaue in particular, Jackie Kneen, he told me when ... he could remember when he was christened. In those days of course they didn’t christen a child just after it was born, like they do shortly after – like today – they’d wait 7

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

until there was a scutch of them in, three or four maybe, and then the oldest would walk to church to be christened and he walked to St. Jude’s to be christened because he remembers people coming out to see them as they walked along the road – obviously the bush telegraph was in operation and – would give them sweetmeats and cakes and things like that, you know, on the way to the church.

DC Right. We’ve always been hearing of course about the fairies, the little people in the Isle of Man, did they have tales of them?

Mr C The Mooinjer Vegger, the little people, you can’t use the term fairies, nowadays, because it gets misconstrued, of course, you know, but ny ferrisheyn as the gaaue used to call them, he said he’d seen them often out in the Curraghs there, you know. Described how they were dressed [spoken in Manx], he used to say – a red coat and blue trousers as [spoken in Manx] – and a big hat, a big tall hat on their heads, you know. It’s interesting really, he often said he’d been took by the fairies. I would suspect, he was fond of a little drop of the craither [sp ???] you know, and sometimes when the boys got under the influence of drink they – if they fell astray, or fell asleep in the hedge somewhere, as an excuse they would say they’d been taken by the fairies.

DC Oh, right. Now when they were talking about the fairies, I mean when he was talking about their dress and so on, do you think that he genuinely believed that he’d seen them, or do you think he was doing this for the benefit of your team and the tape recording and the sort of history that he’d been brought up with.

Mr C Well, we were a bit sceptical at first but we have one tape where he describes how he was took by the fairies and he said he was walking home and suddenly they led him into this field and he walked round the field, four or five times, and then they went out past, on the road again, and he described it all in Manx, he says [spoken in Manx] – I went past this house, and I said, [spoken in Manx] thie Juan – that’s John’s house, [spoken in Manx] thie Harry – that’s Harry’s house, and he said eventually he got home and he says there were two blisters on his heels, he said, [spoken in Manx] – like half eggs, and he went to bed and when he woke the next morning there wasn’t a trace of any of the blisters, he said, because they were fairy blisters, and they went during the night. But he was very sincere about that one.

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

DC Were there others that you spoke to that spoke of fairies then?

Mr C Yes, Harry Boyde, from Ballaugh, he mentioned some [spoken in Manx] – he used to call them, the shadows, and [spoken in Manx], [spoken in Manx] is chains, it means rattle, they rattle, made a noise, you know, and he, but a lot of them I think sensed that a little bit of smuggling was going on now and again in the old days and of course it was usually hidden in the churchyard and they wanted to keep people away from the churchyard so they created these illusions and noises so the people wouldn’t go near the churchyard to find out what they were up to. I don’t know, but that’s something. And yet the gaaue told me, now he was about 98 at that time, when he was a boy, that was going back almost a hundred years, he spoke to an old woman ... em ... who was very old in those days, that’s going back nearly sort of 200 years, about Juan the Doch, now Judan the Doch, [sp ???] Juan the Doch, [sp ???] he lived at Jurby and he and his brother used to smuggle, they had their own still there, you see, and they used to run the stuff across to the Scottish coast and the Galway coast there. And he told us a lovely story that one day one of the brothers took sick and couldn’t make the run with him and he needed two in the boat, so he had to go on his own, and he said he was going – he got across, and obviously the contact over there was a Scots Gaelic speaker, as well, and as he got in close to the beach the Revenue men, the Customs men came down on him and the Scots feller was shouting to him, [spoken in Manx] – ‘Away with you!’ [spoken in Manx] – ‘Up with the sail,’ and [spoken in Manx] – ‘away with you!’ And he shouted back, [spoken in Manx] – ‘How can I get the sail up?’ [spoken in Manx] when my brother is lying sick in Jurby. And of course he did eventually get away and he got back to Jurby. But about a fortnight later a couple of the Revenue men, the Customs men came into Ramsey by schooner from Whitehaven, and consulted the local constabulary of the time and hired a trap and went out and arrested him and he finished up in Castle Rushen and he couldn’t understand how – but he’d given himself away because they were Gaelic speakers, you see.

DC Of course.

Mr C And they got what was happening.

DC But this stuff that they’d be brewing then, Walter, would have been the sort of thing that would probably have created, if you took enough of it, hallucinations 9

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

then?

Mr C I would think so, it was like pochin, you know, the Irish pochin, you see.

DC So that to some extent might explain some of the fairies.

Mr C And a lot of the old people thought that because the flour wasn’t refined as it is today and various herbs grew in it, and all went into the mix, if you like, you know, because tea wasn’t their drink in those days, it was a form of ale of some sort, and they brewed all sorts of potions and things. Well, if these herbs or these plants went in with the flour, heaven knows what you were eating, you know.

DC So they’d be taking drugs without knowing it.

Mr C They would be, indeed, yes, yes.

DC Well, it’s interesting talking about this fairy law, because I mean it has been in Manx tradition for probably as long as anyone could ever go back, really.

Mr C It has, I’ve – I don’t know how to think about it, I’ve been a little bit sceptical, I must admit, but what I have found is that the gaaue described one time how he met, he came across a group of them in the Curraghs and he said he used a particular shout. Now the old people had different cries and different calls for different animals, you know, like the cattle and the pigs and things like that, to call them in, and he used a particular shout and he said, they all lifted and disappeared. Now Mrs Kneale, Ballagarrett, when she was young, she used to be sent down to the Curraghs at Bride, there, while her father and her uncle, they had the loaded guns ready, when the geese came in, and she would go down and she used exactly the same shout that the gaaue used to lift the geese, so that they could take pot shots at them, so somewhere along the line I’m beginning to think maybe that a lot of these things they saw float’in about and dancing about on the Curraghs were birds, not fairies, you know.

DC Now what about fishing then, let’s think about that. Did you, I mean a lot of these people that you’d have been talking to, some of them certainly would have been farmers and fishermen, wouldn’t they?

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

Mr C Oh, yes, they were crofter, type crofter, fishermen. They all, there were lots of boats, there were 200 boats at one time from the Lhen right round to Cranstal, fishing off the beach. They went – fished for cod, fished for herring, for mackerel, and the gaaue said that you could go to the bridge, that’s the Ledden [sp ???] Bridge out there, any time of the year, and get a shilling’s worth of fish, wet or dry, that’s either fresh or salted. And then a lot of carts used to go round the country, they would, as the boats came in at the Ledden [sp ???], they would unload the fish and they would – the hawkers, if you like, would buy them and take the stuff home.

DC And harvesting of course was another thing that they’ll have been talking about, I’m sure.

Mr C It was, it was, yes, each – there were certain areas of corn, which you were expected to cut either with a scythe or a sickle, like the [unclear], that was expected of you – anything over and above that area was a bit of a bonus, you know.

DC Didn’t get paid a bonus, of course, did you?

Mr C Well, no, they used to get a shilling a day and their food, that sort of thing, you know. And then it all had to be stooked and then the straw was very carefully kept because that was the thatch for the roof, of course. But the grain all had to be cleaned out, threshed by flails, we used to call it a [spoken in Manx] was a flail, and there were groups of people who made it their occupation to go round in gangs, flailing, or harvesting, in some cases, in the smaller cases, the woman would do it – a lot of farm houses the doors are opposite, so that when you opened the doors there’s a draught going through, well, they’d have a big, what they’d call a dollin,[sp ???] a big dollin [sp ???], the harvest dollin [sp ???], and the corn would be heaped onto this, and they would stand in between the passageway and toss it up and of course the chaff would blow – go through – and they’d do that and that’s where a lot of them winnowed the corn, you know.

DC Yes, so they’d give that job to the women to do, mostly, would they?

Mr C Oh, yes, that was – well, women had to look after the farms and the crofts while the men were away at the fishing, you see.

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

DC Of course.

Mr C It was expected of them, they just had to get on with it. The women and children looked after the animals and the hens and things like that and the milking and the men just went off for the season. They would start in the spring and go to Ireland for the mackerel, then they would come back, take the mackerel nets off and put the herring nets on, and go off to Shetland, to the fishing there, and then come back at the back end to the Douglas fishing, which was for the herring, and so on. Occasionally they came back just to – for a brief spell at harvest time to give the women a hand to harvest the corn, and things like that, but they were all small crofts you see.

DC And they were crofts, rather than farms as we know it today, of course.

Mr C Yes, they were, we’ve lost a lot of place names now because a lot of the farms have enlarged and knocked the hedges down and all the field names were disappearing and things like that, you know.

DC And they’d know all the field names, would they?

Mr C Every field in the Island had a name to it.

DC Was it Manx, it was in Manx.

Mr C In Manx, yes, yes, you get magher voar, the big field, magher beg, the little field, magher aittan, that’s where you get these corruptions in place names because you get, now you get, the likes in Port Erin, you get Marashen Crescent, and in Douglas you get Marathon Road, well, it’s nothing to do with Marathon, it’s a magher, magher is a field, and aittan is gorse, it’s a gorse field, so the magher aittan is a gorse field but magher aittan has become Marathon, or it’s become Marashen, a lot of these corruptions in place names and field names occur, you know.

DC When you were talking to these people it was pretty much a sort of unchanging time in the Isle of Man, however since that time a whole lot of words have come along that never existed in the Manx, now did they come across that problem, did they hit new words that weren’t in their vocabulary?

Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Walter Clarke

Mr C Yes, they adapted things, now I asked the old gaaue about the first vehicles that came on the Island and of course the first vehicles that came on the Island were the traction engines, you see, which made an awful din when they went round anywhere, with the fly wheels going and the smoke coming out and all, and they called that [spoken in Manx] – the divil’s mill. And they would say, [spoken in Manx] – ‘Look out!’ or ‘Beware!’ [spoken in Manx] – the divil’s mill is coming. And of course he used to call the car that we arrived in [spoken in Manx] beg – which is the little mill, if you like, because the divil’s mill eh … and so on.

DC So they adapted what they knew almost pictorially then.

Mr C Oh, yes, and when I said, when you were going to the likes of [spoken in Manx], going to Peel, or going to Doolish, Douglas, how did you go there, and he said, in [spoken in Manx], in the iron horse, and that was the train, and [spoken in Manx], the iron road, which was the railway.

Mr C It makes you wonder what they would make of television and computers, doesn’t it?

Mr C Yes, well, I did mention that to one of them about the cinema and he said, [spoken in Manx] shadows.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but they’re moving,’ and he said, [spoken in Manx] – ‘shadows going about,’ he said, that was the description of it, you know. They were lovely people, they were wonderful people.

END OF INTERVIEW