Juan Clague

John Clague (10 October 1842 – 23 August 1908) was a Manx physician and a collector of Manx music, songs, dances, and customs.

Early life and education Clague was born in Ballanorris, Arbory on the Isle of Man in 1842 to tenant farmer Henry Clague and his wife Elizabeth. He was educated in the local school in Ballabeg before attending the Old Grammar School in Castletown and later King William's College. Clague received his medical training in Guy's Hospital in London and returned to the Isle of Man in 1873 to practise medicine. He married Margaret Eliza Watterson in the same year.

Work as a physician The town of Castletown where Clague worked for most of his life. Despite coming from a relatively humble farming background, Clague excelled while studying for his medical degree, winning several awards and rising to become the "foremost medical practitioner on the Isle of Man". Based in Castletown, he was surgeon to Castle Rushen jail, to the household of the lieutenant governor, and also to the troops garrisoned in the barracks there. Clague worked in the south of the Isle of Man for decades and was a prominent figure on the island in his own right. Manx language teacher and author John Gell remembered Clague coming to treat his father after he fell sick and that he was well known for refusing to take payment from patients.

Music collector Clague was aware that traditional Manx music and culture was rapidly declining. As a doctor, he was an influential and respected figure in the community and he used this position to collect songs, dances, and melodies as he travelled in the south of the island.

Along with several other prominent members of the Manx language revival such as J. J. Kneen and Edmund Goodwin, Clague was a founding member of Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh in 1899 in Peel. A. W. Moore, the director of the Manx Museum and the organisation's first president, explained that Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh was concerned not only with the preservation and promotion of the Manx language, but rather with all things related to Manx culture:Though called the Manx Language Society, it should, I think, by no means confine its energies to the promotion of an interest in the language, but extend them to the study of Manx history, the collection of Manx music, ballads, carols, folklore, proverbs, place-names, including the old field names which are rapidly dying out in a word, to the preservation of everything that IS distinctively Manx, and, above all, to the cultivation of a national spirit. The bell tower was added in 1915 in memory of Clague.

His bilingual book Cooinaghtyn Manninagh: Manx Reminiscences was published posthumously in 1911.