Edward Clifford Irving
Epithet: MHK, MLC (1914-2004)
Record type: Biographies
Biography: From ‘New Manx Worthies’ (2006):
Clifford Irving was one of the most able, intelligent; imaginative, clear-sighted and skilled parliamentary debaters of all Manx politicians of the 20th century, and he must rank with his great contemporary, Sir Henry Charles Kerruish. He played a large part in the constitutional development of the Island towards its 21st century status as an internally self-governed Crown Dependency, can be credited with the single idea which gave birth to the Island's success as an international offshore finance centre, and made himself an expert in the complexities of the Treaty of Rome when the Island was confronted with forging an advantageous relationship with what started out as the Common Market.
Irving was also a highly spontaneous ideas man and he had a sense of humour which enabled him not to take himself too seriously, a rare quality in politicians. As for courage, he opposed the Island's birching laws at a time when to do so pretty well amounted to political suicide. His other exceptional qualities enabled him to survive.
Clifford Irving was born at Peel. His father, known as Willie, left the town to emigrate to South Africa with a friend, George Henry Watterson Moore, who lived at The Raggatt, Peel, and later became the town's MHK. Willie was single at the time and Mabel Cottier joined him in South Africa where they married. They returned to Peel in time for their son's birth in May 1914.
In 1997 Clifford Irving recalled his life and times in audio tape interviews for the Manx Heritage Foundation Oral History Project conducted by Douglas advocate (later Deemster) David Doyle. In this he told how he was born at the home of his maternal grandfather, Edward Cottier, a draper, in Douglas Street, Peel. He recalled, 'My parents lived nearby and I spent as much time in their house as with my grandparents. It was a very happy situation, especially after my mother died when I was six years old. My grandparents were still very anxious that I should stay and live in their house. Between my grandparents and my parents it was a very happy situation. We all got on very well indeed'.
He also had a brother, Frank, and after his father married again (to Winifred Faragher who was the daughter of Inspector John Faragher of Peel police) he had a half-brother, Jack Irving, a Manx scholar and Gaelic speaker who became founder chairman of Mec Vannin.
Clifford's education started at Peel Infants' School in 1921 and he went on to the Clothworkers' School. But in 1926 his life was to change dramatically. His uncle, Tom Cottier, who lived in Canada, arrived in Peel with his wife on holiday. They had no children and they suggested that the young Clifford should go back with them to Canada for the summer and stay on indefinitely if he wanted to. He was twelve and stayed in Canada for three and a half years, continuing his education there and enjoying the country's open-air life of skating and skiing. He also learned to swim.
When the Cottiers moved to India he returned to Peel and attended Douglas High School for Boys where, inevitably, he was often called 'Yank'. By this time he had a cosmopolitan upbringing unusual among young people born in the Isle of Man in the first half of the 20th century, and this would serve him well in later life.
He certainly had an independent spirit. By his own account when he was at Douglas High School he asked a master if he could leave the room - and did not return to class or school. Instead he took books home to continue his studies and went back to school only to matriculate.
His working life started with tuition in accountancy provided by a Douglas accountant, Stanley Kermode, and in 1933, at the age of nineteen, he took an office job in London with Vauxhall Motors Finance Corporation, dealing with hire purchase. He lived in digs which cost him half his £2-a-week wages.
In 1939, in spite of chronic asthma, he joined the army, serving with a Royal Artillery anti-aircraft gun unit in London, and was commissioned. He saw service during the blitz in London, Coventry and Glasgow, after which he was posted to the Shetland Islands.
He recalled, 'I was a lieutenant and I was put on an island with three second lieutenants. Now that was good, it made me commander-in-chief and I was given four 3.7ins. guns and told to defend this island by land, sea and air. What a wonderful job! Except no one came to fight'.
After this Irving moved into Intelligence and returned to the south east of England and eventually the War Office where he dealt with the economic affairs of former Italian colonies. He ended up with the rank of colonel - which he never used, although he was entitled to, in civilian life after the war.
Meanwhile he had got married, in 1941, at Luton in Bedfordshire, to Nora Page. They honeymooned in the Isle of Man. He stayed with the War Office until 1948 after which he left the army and settled back in the Island.
With his brother Frank, who had been a major in the Royal Signals, he began a catering equipment sales business in Douglas which was highly successful in a busy holiday island. This brought him to the brink of his entry into politics.
In the 1950s the Isle of Man was facing economic difficulties and there was a growing public feeling that the government was not doing enough to improve matters. Clifford Irving was particularly concerned for the well-being of the tourist industry - he freely admitted that it was important to his business- and he and his brother Frank led the formation of the so-called Action Group with other business-minded activists. In 1954 it was launched at a public meeting in the Villa Marina attended, in spite of a heavy snowfall, by 800 people.
This caught the mood of the Island and the Action Group suddenly became a force which the politicians had to take into account. What it needed next was a representative in the House of Keys. The highly personable and obviously gifted Irving came under pressure to stand.
At first he resisted, conscious that he had a business to run and that it would throw an extra burden on Frank. But in April 1955 there was a by-election in North Douglas. Clifford Irving stood as an Independent against Labour candidate Bert Stephen, a well-known journalist. North Douglas should have been a good bet for Labour, but Irving thundered home with 4085 votes to Stephen's 1645.
This happened in spite of Irving's self-confessed aversion to brazenly asking people to vote for him, going round the houses 'on-the-knocker' as it was called. If nobody answered the door he was relieved to be able to get away with leaving his card.
In his taped reminiscences he said he was ashy man putting on a bold front, and had no confidence in his public speaking. He seems
to have gained confidence quickly. He emerged as a brilliant parliamentary debater with a mixture of showmanship and assiduous pre-preparation; he could have held his own easily in the House of Commons.
Also the news media, both on and off the Island, liked his style. In the UK national newspapers, radio and television he was always in high demand as a public spokesman for the Isle of Man, especially when he offered a £20,000 prize to any fisherman who caught a mermaid in Manx waters. It won the Island priceless publicity.
All this started when, as president of the Douglas & District Angling Club, he was at the annual dinner and somebody produced an angler's lure in the shape of a tiny mermaid. This turned the conversation to mermaids and, at the time, the Island was trying to promote a big summer sea angling competition. With this in mind, in his after-dinner speech, Irving announced on the spur of the moment that he would give £10,000 to any competitor who landed a mermaid.
This remark caught the ear of an enterprising journalist in the Island who rang Irving and said, 'Make it £20,000 and I will guarantee you international publicity'. Irving went along with it and in all the interviews that followed he never gave in to pressure to admit that it was just a stunt. He was, he kept on saying, perfectly serious.
But this kind of thing should not be allowed to undermine the serious intent that went into Clifford Irving's career in Manx politics. He was in the forefront from the start in the drive within Tynwald for the constitutional development of the Island towards more independence from Whitehall, particularly by way of stripping away the considerable powers of Lieutenant Governors.
Irving also set himself, in the 1960s, the task of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the complexities of the Treaty of Rome and what it might portend for the Isle of Man. He came to know more about this than most other members of Tynwald or their officials. When the Island had to negotiate the reasonably comfortable relationship it eventually forged with Europe, Irving had to be in the negotiating team.
He went on to come up with the idea which had a lot to do with setting the Island on course to becoming a highly successful tax haven and, when this expression became proscribed, an offshore finance centre. It was the abolition of surtax in the Island, which was approved by Tynwald in 1960 and implemented in 1961. At the time the Governor, Sir Ronald Garvey, was full of enterprising ideas for expanding and diversifying the Manx economy, and the attraction of new residents seeking to escape heavy taxation in Britain and elsewhere was one of them. Surtax was a dirty word to those who paid it, and Tynwald's abolition decision made headlines in Britain at a single stroke.
Within the Island Irving had his electoral problems. After his 1955 initial success there was a General Election in which he moved to West Douglas, where he lived, and was re-elected. But in 1962 he stood down, still concerned about his business partnership with Frank. He hit the comeback trail in the 1966 General Election and was elected in East Douglas, reflecting his concerns for the faltering Manx tourist industry.
Then in the 1981 General Election he went back to West Douglas and was rejected by the electorate. It had been a false move; he was back, as he usually put it, to selling pots and pans. But by now politics was in his blood. In the 1986 General Election he went to West Douglas again, and got in. In 1987 he accepted elevation to the Legislative Council at the age of 73 and in 1995, now at the great age, politically if not mentally, of 81, he retired from politics.
The bare bones of his 40 years in Manx politics can be found in an impressively long entry in the 'Tynwald Companion'. This shows he was a member of the Governor's Executive Council, the forerunner of the Council of Ministers, from 1968, and chairman from 1977 to 1981. He was made CBE in 1980.
He was a highly successful chairman of the old Tourist Board from 1971 to 1981. He was a member of many other Boards of Tynwald and other government bodies like the Industrial Advisory Council, the Civil Service Commission, the Income Tax Commission and the Isle of Man Sports Council.
He was also almost, if not wholly, unique in Manx politics in having a nickname that was a rueful acknowledgement of his ability. His hair was prematurely white and he became known as 'the Silver Fox'. One version has it that this was bestowed by the Home Office officials in London he so often went to see in the Island's interests, but a Castletown MHK, Elspeth Quayle, who was a political contemporary, claimed that she was first to use the name.
Irving's interests outside politics were no less demanding - his presidencies of the Douglas branch of the RNLI, the Manx Parascending Club, the Douglas and District Angling Club, the Isle of Man Angling Federation, the Douglas Motor Boat and Sailing Club and the Wanderers Male Voice Choir. His favoured maritime sport was powerboating.
Clifford Irving liked to live life to the full and it was never wholly filled by politics. There was little that could not stimulate his searching mind, and nothing that could diminish his utter commitment to the good of the Isle of Man.
How did he see himself? In his audio tapes he can be heard saying simply, 'I'm a born optimist'.
Biography written by Terry Cringle.
(With thanks to Culture Vannin as publishers of the book: Kelly, Dollin (general editor), ‘New Manx Worthies’, Manx Heritage Foundation/Culture Vannin, 2006, pp.222-5.)
Culture Vannin
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Nationality: Manx
Gender: Male
Date of birth: 24 May 1914
Date of death: 13 July 2004
Name Variant: Irving, Edward Irving