Milntown is the ancestral home of the Christian family on the Isle of Man. From at least the 15th century the family has lived on this estate.

For many generations the senior member of the family was a Deemster – one of the Isle of Man’s judges, and the family was highly regarded and played an important role in Island life.

The most famous member of the Christian family was William Christian, better known to the Manx as Illiam Dhone. He was born on the estate in 1608 and as a young man rose to become the Receiver General of the Island under the Lord of Man, the Earl of Derby.

When the Earl left the Island to fight for the King in the English Civil War, Illiam Dhone surrendered the Island to the Parliamentary forces.

The Derby family later had him executed as a traitor. He was shot at Hango Hill outside Castletown on 2^nd January 1663.

The current mansion only dates from the 1750s.

Before that time there was an earlier house, which stood where the wood now is, to the north-east of the present house.

In the 1750s Milntown was occupied by a tenant, as the main Christian family were living on their extensive estates in Cumberland.

The tenant, a Ramsey man called John Llewellyn, requested permission to demolish the ‘old ruined mansion’, as he described it, and offered to build a new house. He provided an ink-drawn ground plan of the old house before it was demolished. This plan gives a fascinating insight into the layout of the area as it would have been in 1750. Local artist Peter Hearsey has created a painting based on that plan which shows what the original Milntown might have looked like.

Deemster John Christian was the man who made the Milntown estate into what we know today. Born in Castletown in 1776 he was educated in England and got a First at Cambridge. It was his intention to make a career in law in England, claiming that Manx society was ‘so much behindhand’ that he would rather live over there than here. However, in 1822 he was offered the position of 2^nd Deemster on the Island which he accepted immediately, and he and his family (he now had a wife and ten children) came back here to live.

Another member of the Christian family who made his mark on history is Fletcher Christian. In the 1780s he was living in Douglas where he met Captain William Bligh. When Bligh got the order to sail to Tahiti on the Bounty to gather breadfruit to feed the slaves in the Caribbean, he took Christian with him as a gentleman officer.

They had serious differences and after leaving Tahiti Christian led a mutiny against Bligh, who was put in the Bounty’s cutter with the few men loyal to him to find his own way home.

Bligh is said to have shouted ‘I curse the day I ever knew a Manxman’.

The mutineers eventually settled on a remote Pacific Island called Pitcairn, where their descendants still live today, many of them called Christian.

The new house, built by John Llewellyn, was a simple, five-bay Georgian house similar to many Manx farmhouses that can still be seen around the Island today. A present-day farmhouse near Andreas gives an idea of what the new Milntown would have looked like when it was built. This building formed the core of the present house which was greatly expanded in the late 1820s.

When Deemster Christian and his family moved permanently to the Island in 1822, the Milntown estate was leased out to an elderly tenant, so for some years the Christians had to live in the Fort Anne, above Douglas harbour.

When the Milntown lease expired in 1828 and the Deemster took possession, he started on a major programme of expansion of the estate.

The gardens were laid out anew, the 1750s Georgian house was expanded and extra rooms added, Gothic crenelations and a new wing were created and a new entrance drive provided a dramatic approach to the mansion. It’s even claimed the Deemster had the course of the nearby Auldyn river altered to suit his plans.

As a result of these extensive works Deemster John Christian created a Gothic masterpiece which remains one of the Island’s finest historic houses.

Whilst all the alterations were being undertaken there were domestic issues to deal with. A gentleman had come to live on the Island; someone who would have a profound influence on life in the British Isles. He was Sir William Hillary, who went on to found the Royal National Lifeboat Institute, inspired by the many shipwrecks he witnessed around the Island. It was due to his extraordinary bravery and leadership that many sailors’ lives were saved.

His son, Augustus, visited the Island to stay with him and he met and fell in love with the daughter of Deemster Christian, Susan. They were married in 1828, and so the Deemster and Sir William became brothers-in-law. There’s no doubt that Sir William would have been a regular visitor to Milntown as Augustus and Susan lived there for some years.

Deemster Christian died in 1858 and left the Milntown estate, which included many hundreds of acres of surrounding land, to be divided between five of his surviving children. This was a disaster as the four girls wanted their share of the inheritance, so the son, William Bell Christian, borrowed a huge sum and bought his sisters out.

William was the vicar of nearby Lezayre church, though he eventually relinquished that position to concentrate on running the Milntown estate and the Christian lands in Cumberland. Over the years he married four times and had a total of 12 children. When he died in 1886 his fourth wife, Vio, learnt to her horror that he had left behind debts totalling some £76,000, a huge sum in those days.

As a result, the estate went into liquidation and all the surrounding lands, as well as the entire contents of the house were auctioned off and the centuries occupation of Milntown by the Christian family came to an end.

Vio Christian was a determined woman. Despite the circumstances she found herself in she decided to rent the Milntown estate back from the liquidators and started a school ‘for the daughters of gentlemen’.

The school ran successfully for a number of years and catered for nearly 30 pupils. However, after the First World War she decided to leave the Island. The school had closed and the house now found a new use.

Between 1927 and 1948 Milntown operated as a hotel. Electricity was installed for the first time and during the Second World War it was a popular drinking place for the many service personnel who were stationed in and around Ramsey.

In 1948 it returned to being a private house. Charles Peel Yates, of Yates’ Wine Lodge fame, bought the house and he and his wife lived in it until 1963.

The last private owner of Milntown was Lady Kathleen Edwards.

She was the wealthy widow of Sir John Bryn Edwards, an industrialist from Swansea. When he died of consumption in 1922 he left his wife as one of the wealthiest women in Britain.

She never remarried and for many years stayed in Swansea to raise her two children, Valerie and Clive.

However, in 1963 she decided to move to the Isle of Man to avoid the increasing taxes in the UK. Milntown just happened to be on the market at the time and she bought it and moved here with her son who had inherited his father’s title and was therefore Sir Clive Edwards.

When she died Sir Clive became the owner of Milntown and when he died in 1999 a Trust took over the running of the estate. Sir Clive had been impressed ‘by the kindness of the Manx people’ and he left the house and its 15 acres ‘as a place of historic interest for the benefit of the public’.

Today, the Milntown Trust are responsible for the upkeep of the estate. Since Sir Clive’s death they have opened the estate to the public, creating a car park and building a café and self-catering accommodation.