Stephen Miller gives London lecture on: The Gill Brothers and their Collecting of Folk Songs from the Isle of Man

Last week Stephen Miller gave a lecture to a well attended meeting at Cecil Sharpe House in London, home of the Folk Dance and Song Society. He was drawing attention to the remarkable work of the Gill Brothers. The Gill brothers, W.H. Gill (1839–1923) and Deemster J.F. Gill (1842–99) have remained marginalised and neglected figures in the collecting of Manx folk song, overshadowed by A.W. Moore (1853–1909), whose own Manx Ballads and Music appeared in 1896, and by Dr John Clague (1842–1908), whose collection was published in large part in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society between 1924–26, edited by A.G. Gilchrist. Ironically, the Gills have left more manuscript material behind than any of these collectors, found amongst the personal papers of Deemster Gill when they were released in 2000.

Stephen Miller is Manx and previously worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on the Austrian Academy Corpus and taught recently at the University of Vienna. Born in the Isle of Man, he has a BA in History and an MA in Folk Life Studies, both from the University of Leeds. He has combined interests in folkloristics and digitisation and has lectured on both. Research interests include Manx folklore, folk song, and folk dance, and the figures and collectors involved with the Celtic Revival. Other areas are the Scottish folklorists, the Rev. Walter Gregor and W.G. Black, and the institutional history of folkloristics in the British Isles.

Images: Stephen Miller and photograph of Manx woman that the Gill Brothers visited.