Aeglagh Vannin ("the Youth of Mann" in Manx Gaelic) was a youth group in the Isle of Man whose purpose was the engagement with and revitalisation of Manx language, history and culture. It was established by Mona Douglas in 1931, went through a number of mutations, and faded out in the 1970s. It is best remembered for its central role in the revival of Manx folk dancing. Background In 1929 the English Folk Dance Society held its Easter Vacation School at Douglas in the Isle of Man. The Society asked Mona Douglas, a leading authority on Manx culture, to deliver a talk on local folk song during their stay. It had been assumed that no Manx folk dances had survived into the modern day, but Douglas was able to utilise some of the notes that she had taken earlier in her life in order to reconstruct three Manx dances into a form fit to be performed: ‘The Manx Dirk Dance’, ‘Hyndaa yn Bwoailley’ and ‘Eunyssagh Vona’. She then enlisted the help of Mr J.Q. Killey and Philip Leighton Stowell at Albert Road School in Ramsey in order to train a group of children to perform the dances for the Society. The reconstructed dances proved to be a great success, resulting in an invitation for one of the boys, Billy Caine, to perform the subsequently controversial Manx Dirk Dance at the All-England Festival at the Royal Albert Hall the following summer. Douglas was later to report that, "The Ramsey schoolboy and his wonderful dance were the sensation of the Festival, and received special notices in all the big London papers." Children from the school were also invited to perform other Manx dances at the festival in the following years. Although delighted with the success of the Manx dances amongst the English Folk Dance Society, Douglas saw the ultimate aim to lie not in the mere preservation of the dances but in a revival of their performance amongst the people of the Isle of Man: "I am pleased that the English Folk Dance Society finds them interesting, and grateful for the help and encouragement given me by certain of its members, but the main point of my work will have been missed unless the Manx themselves claim and use their heritage of national dance, which is truly a part of national culture as its music or history." Inspired by the work of