Quilliam

Quilliam is Mac Uilliam, son of William, with the unstressed prefix worn away in Manx speech until only its hard final consonant was left, standing at the front of the name as a Q. Past that piece of island machinery the surname's history is really one life, and it happens to be a very well documented one.

John Quilliam was born at Marown on the Isle of Man on 29 September 1771, the eldest son of John Quilliam and Christian Clucas of Ballakelly. He did not care for farming, by the account that has come down, and was apprenticed instead to a stonemason. What he did at sea before the navy took him is not recorded at all.

How he entered it is. In 1791 he was impressed into the Royal Navy off a collier lying in Castletown harbour, on his own island. He would leave the service a captain, and sit in the island's parliament, which is why the Isle of Man has been telling his story ever since.

By 1797 he had made midshipman, and he is recorded at the Battle of Camperdown that year. Admiral Duncan came out of the action recommending him, and on that recommendation Quilliam was promoted lieutenant; his tombstone sets it out plainly, that Duncan appointed him to act as lieutenant at Camperdown and that after the victory the appointment was confirmed. The rise was not the usual rate for a pressed man.

He went as third lieutenant into the frigate HMS Ethalion, under Captain James Young. On 7 October 1799 Ethalion took the Thetis, a Spanish treasure ship of 36 guns, and the prize money that followed was of the kind that remade a man's circumstances: Quilliam's share came to more than 5,000 pounds.

At the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 he was first lieutenant of the frigate HMS Amazon. Her slight draft let her work in close under the shore batteries, which was the point of sending her there and also the danger of it: close in, she took a very heavy volume of damage. Captain Edward Riou was killed, and so was every officer senior to Quilliam. Command of the ship fell to him in the middle of the action.

What came to Nelson's attention afterwards was not merely that Quilliam had taken her over but the manner of it, his gallantry and his calmness under fire with the whole of the frigate's command structure dead around him. Two years later, in 1803, HMS Victory was commissioned as Nelson's flagship, and Nelson appointed Quilliam her first lieutenant.

On Victory the senior lieutenant carried responsibility for the ship's safety, and Quilliam used the posting to settle in advance what would be done if her steering was shot away. He developed an emergency system for steering the ship from below decks.

At Trafalgar the precaution was called on almost as soon as Victory was in among them. Quilliam assisted in steering her into action, and his system came into effect early in the battle, when damage to the steering gear left the ship needing every part of his experience to stay seaworthy and under control. A contemporary report set down what happened: "Just as she (the Victory) had got about 500 yards of the larboard beam of the Bucentaure the Victory's mizzen-topmast was shot away, about two-thirds up. A shot also struck and knocked to pieces the wheel; and the ship was obliged to be steered from the gun room, the First Lieutenant John Quilliam and master Thomas Atkinson, relieving each other at the duty."

That single paragraph is what the Isle of Man has built a national memory on. Nelson's flagship fought the decisive fleet action of the age with no wheel at all, steered from the gun room by two men taking turn about at the duty, and one of the two was a Manx farmer's son who had come aboard his first warship as a pressed hand.

Trafalgar made him a captain. His first command was HMS Ildefonso, a Spanish 74 now in British hands, which he had to refit at Gibraltar before he could bring her home; she did not reach England until 16 May 1806. In 1808 he was captain of HMS Spencer, Admiral Stopford's flagship, and after her he had the frigates Alexandria, Inconstant and Crescent in turn.

The Crescent took him to the Newfoundland Station and into the war with the United States. On 18 September 1813, off Cape Row, he took the Elbridge Gerry, an American privateer schooner of 14 guns, and her crew of 66 men with her. He served on that station until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and then retired from the navy.

The island had already claimed a share of him. In 1807, while he was still an active naval officer, Quilliam was invited to become a Member of the House of Keys. The Keys were then a self-electing body: members were chosen by the lieutenant governor on the recommendation of the house itself, so the invitation amounted to the island's own establishment deciding it wanted his name in the chamber. He resigned the seat in 1810 in order to go back to sea, and when he came home for good he was invited to sit again in 1817.

On 21 December 1807 he married Margaret Stevenson at Castletown; her people were a renowned Manx family of Balladoole. The couple made their home first at Ballakeighan, then in the house on the Parade at Castletown known as the Balcony House. There were no children of the marriage. His retirement fortune went into property on the island, and his hobby, after a lifetime of other men's ships, was fishing out of a small boat he had designed and fitted out himself.

The last public work of his life was about shipwreck. In 1826 Quilliam and Sir William Hillary were the men who brought into being an Isle of Man District Association of the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. He chaired the Committee for Shipwrecked Seamen as well, and he was one of the group who put forward the scheme for the Derbyhaven Breakwater.

He died on 10 October 1829, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, and was buried in the Stevenson family vault in the graveyard at Kirk Arbory. Margaret Quilliam raised the monument over him. Its inscription runs through Camperdown and Copenhagen and the Victory, and then turns to what the island itself wanted said: that in his public station as a Member of the House of Keys, and in private life, he was in arduous times the uncompromising defender of the rights and privileges of his countrymen. Of the naval half of the life it says only this: "By the example of Duncan and Nelson he learned to conquer. By his own merit he rose to command."

The name went back to sea in 1942 in HMS Quilliam, a Q-class destroyer that served the Royal Navy until 1945 in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. She was part of Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa, where she was involved in a collision with the British aircraft carrier Indomitable. She was afterwards transferred to the Royal Netherlands Navy and commissioned as Hr.Ms. Banckert, D801, serving under that name until 1957.

On the island the commemoration has been steady rather than occasional. Quilliam's uniform is on display at the Manx Museum in Douglas. In 1979, for the 150th anniversary of his death, the Isle of Man Post Office issued four stamps in his honour, showing him being pressed into the Royal Navy, his part at Trafalgar, his time in command of the Spencer, and his later career as a Member of the House of Keys. On Trafalgar Day 2005 a sculpture of him by the Manx artist Bryan Kneale was unveiled at Castle Rushen, and in 2007 it won the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.