First and Last Loves

Legislative Council, the Attorney-General, the two Deemsters in their robes of red who are the judges of the island, and the Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man—that luckless Bishop whose cathedral is a beautiful ruin of green slate and red sandstone on an islet overlooking Peel, that luckless Bishop who has a seat in the English House of Lords but no vote in it—who is second in command of the island. And now comes the Sword of State, a thirteenth-century Scandinavian relic, and behind it the Lieutenant-Governor himself with a posse of police and the Surgeon to the Household keeping up the rear. Slowly they ascend to Tynwald Hill, the Governor to the top and the rest in order of importance on terraces below. The Coroner fences the court. Then the Deemster reads out the latest laws in English and a priest reads them out again in Manx. It is all beautifully organised and it goes on for a long time. But here in this ancient circle of the hills time seems nothing. As the old Manx language is read out, the sun shines down on us, although the peaks of every mountain round us are hidden in clouds. It is always fine, I am told, at St. John’s on Tynwald Day. The magician who lived in the island up to the fifth century used to make a mist to hide the island from its invaders, and it is certainly true that whenever Man has been visited by English king or queen it has been shrouded in mist, even at a recent visit of King George VI.

Fishing and farming were once the chief industries of the Manx. Fishing has dwindled so that there are now only nine boats Manx-manned and owned among all the little drifters that set out into the evening for herrings. The other hundred are mostly Scottish. And even farming takes second place to the greatest Manx industry, which is catering.

This brings me to the most enjoyable thing in all the enjoyment of Man—the visitors. I wish I knew when it was that these mass migrations from Lancashire started. Perhaps I can tell most easily from looking at Douglas. If I stand on Douglas Head and look across that noble sweep to Onchan Head, before the fairy lights are on and while the sun setting behind the mountains still lets me see the outline of the houses on the front, I can trace the recent history of the island.

The original Douglas at my feet, around the harbour, is a small fishing port, not half so beautiful as Castletown further down this eastern coast—Castletown with its magnificent medieval-moated and turreted castle, its box-pewed, three-deckered, still unspoilt church, its exciting stone police station by Baillie Scott, and its Doric column to Governor Smelt. What made Douglas grow was its natural scenery, but people did not notice natural scenery until Georgian times. The last Duke of Atholl to be governor had the Shrewsbury architect George Stewart design him, in 1804, a palace on this noble sweep of bay. It is known today in its smooth, silvery stone as Castle Mona Hotel. Its dining-room is the finest room on the island, the Adam style at its simplest and most graceful. Only that exquisite country house the Nunnery, in Walter Scott Gothic by John Pinch, compares with it. And after the Duke, the debtors escaping to Mona with some cash, and other visitors, built themselves romantic castles on these heights above the bay—Falcon Cliff, Fort Anne, Derby Castle. These are late Georgian castellated buildings designed to look like romantic ruins by John Welch who also built in 1832 the Tower of Refuge on a rock in the middle of the water in Douglas Bay and so turned a looming danger into the semblance of an ancient castle. Then in the reign of William IV the gaps between the castles were filled in with stately stucco terraces, Brighton fashion (Windsor Terrace and Mount Pleasant are the best) sometimes high on the cliffs and here and there on the sea shore. The effect was and is magically beautiful. These Georgian terraces and Walter Scott, Peveril-of-the-Peak style castles flash out upon the cliff side. But this exclusive and romantic watering place cannot originally have been designed for half a million north-country folk—more likely for a few hundred half-pay officers eking out their pensions here where taxes are low.

I think the man of genius who turned the island into what it is, and saved it from ruin so that it is now financially prosperous, was Governor Loch. He improved the harbours and built the Loch Promenade in the ’sixties and ’seventies. Thereafter Douglas-style boarding-houses appeared in rows wherever there were gaps between the old terraces. They are innocent enough five-storeyed, bay-windowed, gabled buildings, gloomy behind, sea-gazing in front, rows and rows and rows of them so that the distant effect is of white paper folded into a concertina and perched here and there and everywhere along the shore. They are not as disfiguring as the modern bungalows and clumsily arranged electric light poles which ruin so much of the country part of Man. And now what with the T.T., the motor races, the improved harbours, the way everybody is out to be gay, however gloomy you are feeling you cannot be ill-humoured in Douglas. The boats arrive, the aeroplanes come down, young men and old in open shirts, sports coats and grey flannels, young girls and old in cheerful summer dresses, queue for ices, queue for shrimps, crowd round bars for glasses of delicious dry champagne, gaze from horse-trams over municipal flower beds to the Tower of Refuge and the sea, travel in luxury coaches round the island half asleep in one another’s arms till the sun sets behind the boarding-houses of Douglas and all the lights go up and the dance halls begin to fill. It is nine o’clock. There is still light in the sky. Father and mother, basking in one another’s love,