Trevor Ashe

Trevor Ashe (1770 – 1836) (also known as Thomas Ashe) was a writer, newspaper editor, publisher, museum director and entrepreneur, as well as a confidence trickster and blackmailer. He is best known on the Isle of Man for having opened the first "Manx Museum" in 1825, as well as having published the first Manx novel and one of the Island’s earliest books of poetry. He is also notable for his attempt to blackmail the Duke of Cumberland in 1830.

Ashe was born on 15 July 1770 in Glasnevin, Ireland, to a father who was a half-pay officer in the Royal Navy. His youthful career has been colourfully described as consisting of "seduction, duelling, debt and imprisonment" before a period of foreign travel and then the taking up of "literary pursuits, writing, among some scientific and geographical works, several novels." In his 1828 Confessions, Ashe writes of the circumstances that brought him to write the most significant of these books:

"Possessing now my half-pay… I formed the resolution of retiring to some cheap place, and of living independently on my own contracted means. I chose the Isle of Man; but so little did this project succeed, that I spent nearly all my ready money, and was considerably in debt in the course of two years. To meet this exigency, and to release me from this Island, I composed a little romance, entitled, "The Manx Monastery; or Memoirs of Belville and Julia." I dedicated it to Mr. Taubman; and it had the effect I desired. It raised sufficient funds to sent me off the Island…"

Published in 1792, The Manks Monastery is recognised as the first known novel with a Manx setting. Ashe claimed that the novel was based on historical documents that he had been given, but that seems unlikely, not least because: "The focal point of the book consists of the long-drawn-out seduction of Julia, a young nun, accompanied by much weeping by the two lovers." The only known copy of this book exists in the Manx National Heritage Library and Archives at the Manx Museum, making it "the rarest book of Manx fiction."

Once back in the UK, Ashe moved into journalism, acting as the Parliamentary Reporter for the Morning Herald for a period until 1811. From 1820 until 1823 Ashe was living in York under the name of Philip Frances Sidney. It was under this guise that he edited the Yorkshire Gazette, for little more than a year, and then the Yorkshire Observer, for only a matter of weeks. It was in these papers that Ashe published a number of essays which were later collected as The Hermit of York: A Series of Essays on a Variety of Subjects, published in Hull in 1823.

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