Leslie Quirk

Leslie Quirk

1997

Leslie Quirk received the Reih Bleeaney Vannanan award in 1997 in recognition of his work within the Manx language.

Leslie was a fluent Manx speaker; unusual for the 1950s. He had learned his Manx mainly from Caesar Cashen, a native speaker and a great Peel character. Leslie had also worked for a time with the forestry board in Wales and was quite proficient at speaking Welsh. He worked for Doug Fargher, who was a partner in a fruit importing business based at Ridgeway Street in Douglas. Doug was another great proponent of Manx and very much sparked off the revival of spoken Manx. He and Leslie spoke to each other in Gaelic all the time, and from an account by Brian Stowell, the office in Ridgeway Street became ‘THE meeting place to hear spoken Manx’.

Leslie taught an evening class once a week in a house near the Manx Museum in Douglas, working fervently to encourage others to learn the language despite having little support in those days.

Virtually every weekend Leslie Quirk, Doug Fargher and other fluent Manx speakers would make trips to houses of the surviving native speakers of Manx, together with Bernard Caine and Brian Stowell. There they would make tape recordings of the native speakers’ Manx.

Brian Stowell spoke fondly about Leslie:

‘[He] was an exceptionally kind, modest, understanding and gentle person who came from a farming background. … After Ned Maddrell's death in 1974 he was the nearest we had to an old native speaker of Manx. He refused to speak ill of anyone - with two exceptions - the principal of King William's College and his wife who were there when Leslie was a pupil. Leslie described them as sadists. He suffered horrific bullying at the College, no doubt encouraged by his lovely Manx accent.’

A recording of Leslie in the 1990s speaking about his life is available here. He also appears in the 1998 film, Y Turrys Taggloo.