A week ago, the Rotary Club of Douglas’ 2025 Public Speaking Competition for senior schools was held at St Ninian’s Lower School, hosted by headteacher Chris Coole and staff.

As always, there were excellent presentations from all the students. The adjudicators, led by Anne Clarke, Tracy Willoughby, and Jane Falconer, had a very difficult task selecting the winners.

In first position this year were Theo Henderson and Dylan Woolnough from King William’s College, with a very imaginative presentation, ‘Banishing the Blues’.

Taking the runner-up position was Anna Tamarova and Samantha Winstanley from Ballakermeen School, with a thought-provoking speech on the pros and cons of AI entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?’

In third place, focusing on special customs and aspects of the Isle of Man, were Vicky Thompson and Dilara Nergiz from St Ninian’s Lower School with ‘Is the Isle of Man Manx Enough?’

His Excellency, the Lieutenant Governor Sir John Lorimer and Lady Lorimer, and the Mayor of Douglas, Natalie Byron-Teare, were in attendance, with the Mayor presenting a new award.

This year’s president of the Rotary Club of Douglas, Nick Watson, provided decorative floral displays for the stage.

Rotarian Andrew Swithinbank introduced the evening after a welcome from St Ninian’s student Penny Lavery.

The president proposed the vote of thanks and presented prizes to the teams.

We were also treated to a musical performance from The Little Mermaid by a group of talented students from the school.

The Department of Education, Sport, and Culture provided support to the Rotary Club to enable them to promote the event once again.

By the time my piece goes to press, the junior schools' public speaking competition, promoted by the Rotary Club, will have been held at St John’s School and I will provide a review next week.

The Rotary Club of Douglas has been running these competitions in partnership with Manx schools for more than 60 years.

Another initiative the club undertakes, with members and other volunteers at several primary schools, is Reading Buddies, where members spend at least an hour most weeks with young children, listening to them read aloud to help them learn and gain confidence.

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I repeat here parts of a piece from Manx Life magazine of March 1993, written by Dr Andrew Allen, about ‘Moulds in Traditional Manx Medicine’, which I recently read and thought was interesting enough to be shared again, with thanks to the original author.

Soon after the appearance of penicillin, medical historians began a search of early literature to see if records of the use of this antibiotic could be found that predated Alexander Fleming’s official discovery in 1928.

These studies soon showed that moulds similar to those from which we obtain penicillin had been widely used as curatives in folk medicines across different times and places, from ancient Greece and ancient China to the Isle of Man between the 16th and early 20th centuries.

A Greek king of the 16th century BC, for example, described how a peasant woman used mould scraped from mouldy cheese to treat wounded soldiers.

The Chinese, 3,000 years ago, used mouldy soya beans to treat infected cuts, wounds, and burns.

Closer to home, the Lancaster diarist Thomas Goodson noted in 1657 that ‘white witches’, ‘wise women’, and ‘cunning men’ in the Isle of Man used a mush of mouldy bread in water to treat impetigo, cuts, wounds, burns, and all manner of skin infections.

A letter to the News Chronicle in 1892 described how ‘in many Manx farmhouses and cottages, the Good Friday bun was allowed to hang suspended from the grimy beams of the kitchen ceiling, and there were a number of superstitions attached to it.

‘Foremost among these was the tradition that the mouldy portions, removed from time to time and mushed with water, were suitable as curative agents for many complaints and disorders.

‘These pseudo-remedies were used to treat both humans and cattle’.

A similar practice was evidently widespread elsewhere in Europe, as demonstrated in the account of Dr E. A. Cliffe: "It was during my visit through Central Europe in 1908 that I came across the fact that almost every farmhouse followed the practice of keeping a mouldy loaf on one of the beams in the kitchen.

‘When I asked the reason for this, I was told that it was an old custom, and that when any member of the family received an injury such as a cut or bruise, a thin slice of mouldy bread from the outside of the loaf was cut off, mixed into a paste with water, and applied to the wound with a bandage.

‘It was assumed that no infection could result from such a cut.’

Less frequently mentioned are the curative virtues of moulds developed on fruit.

Here is an account from D. A. McCarthy: ‘Many years ago, an old aunt of mine (who was 82 years old and lived in Douglas), who appeared to be quite learned in “cures”, read one day in a newspaper about Professor Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, which was described as resulting from research on a mould.

‘My aunt said in her own inimitable way, “I had that one before he did!” I know that one of her cures was to collect 10 to 12 oranges and place them somewhere where they could become mouldy as soon as possible.

She would then carefully remove the greenish mould, make it into some kind of concoction or infusion, and use it on abscesses, boils, whitlows, and other pustules.

‘She would also administer it orally for a great variety of complaints—all apparently with complete success.’

Sometimes, reference is made to the therapeutic uses of moulds developed on animal products such as lard. For example, this account by Ida Colingwood: ‘When I was young and used to stay with my grandfather in Ballaugh in the early 1920s, if we had nasty sore knees, cuts, or scabs from falling down, he would take his penknife, scrape the ham or bacon sides that were hung from the ceiling to be cured, salted, and green, and put the mouldy fat on a piece of clean linen.

‘Grandma would then wrap our knees up, and it always cleared and healed our wounds.’

In a similar vein, the following appeared in the Daily Express in 1943: ‘Eva Wood of Carlisle is a little scornful of the new wonder drug that has been discovered from mould, called penicillin.

‘Her great-grandmother, who lived in Castletown, used to collect all the new copper pennies she could, as well as old copper kettles, smear them with lard, and leave them in a damp place.

‘When the mould had formed, she would scrape it off into little boxes, and everyone for miles around came to her for the remedies for what ailed them.’

The substances used to grow moulds for use in Manx folk medicines were invariably foodstuffs.

A lot later in time, when I was a young boy, some of the GPs attained legendary status.

Who remembers Dr Tommy Groves on Bucks Road, Dr Paddy Reel at the corner of Circular Road, Dr Beckett, Dr Rolfe, Dr Nichols, Dr Ferguson, Dr Harding and others?