QUIRK, John AKA Juan 1800 - 1885

JOHN QUIRK (b. 1800, d. 1885),

was probably the last remaining specimen of the kind of men who composed the Manx carols. With only the rudiments of education and but little knowledge beyond their immediate surroundings,— John Quirk, indeed, had only once been in Douglas, and that when he was eighteen, and only once in Peel, when not much older—they combined an intimate knowledge of the Bible with a vivid imagination and a tinge, at least, of the poetic faculty. John Quirk's carols though he had a good knowledge of Manx, were almost entirely in English. He strayed occasionally, too, into secular poetry, having written an amusing account, in Manx, of the Port Erin breakwater and its untimely fate, and having composed the versified paraphrases of most of the Manx ballads which appeared in the two volumes of the Manx Miscellanies, published by the Manx Society. He lived in a lonely house at Carn-e-Greie in Glen Rushen, with a comparatively young wife and several young children. The writer had the pleasure of visiting him in his extreme old age, and when he told him of his love for all things Manx and of his desire to hear him read some of his carols, his face at once lit up, as he took down his MSS. from the "last " and complied with the request. Generally speaking, they were of much the same character as those published in the Manx Carol Book but the following passage of one, in which the blind leaders of the blind are compared to frogs, is so striking and so interesting as showing what the writer might have accomplished if greater educational advantages had been obtainable by him, that we quote it:—

Some said that frogs could sweetly sing
That they were music for a king
That every court in church and state
Should of their melody partake.
Vast multitudes, both high and low
Took this for granted to be so
And numerous thousands charmed to sleep
Pursued the frogs into the deep
Still thousands cried and followed on
That these to Paradise were gone.
Through thick and thin, curraghs and bogs
They hailed the music of the frogs
And when their songs old-fashioned grew
The frogs proposed something new.

The 1881 census for Patrick Glenmoar Road has: