John Gell

The following year after a visit by Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera to the Isle of Man in 1947, the Irish Folklore Commission was tasked with recording the remaining native speakers as the Manx Museum did not have the facilities or funds to do so. This inspired Gell and other Manx speakers such as Walter Clarke and Bill Radcliffe to make their own recordings themselves despite technical and financial restraints: "We just – we wanted to record the old people but we didn’t, we had neither the money nor the means of doing it". These recordings were often made at significant financial expense to themselves; with Gell himself loaning them £8 to purchase the necessary equipment. They were described as "one of the best teaching books we have". In the 1960s the book formed the basis of a weekly 'listen and learn' radio programme presented by Doug Fargher.

Later years Despite Gell's work in creating new learner material and teaching Manx classes, he still found negative attitudes towards the language to be a major difficulty. After the sudden death of his wife in 1955, he retreated somewhat from Manx language movement:But at that time there was not much attention given to the Gaelic and we made little progress. Seldom did anyone learn enough to speak it, and the old Manx speakers were dying one after the other, and I was losing heart, then after my own wife died, I did not pay much attention to the Manx either.