Despite coming from a relatively humble farming background, Clague excelled while studying for his medical degree, winning several awards and rising to become the "foremost medical practitioner on the Isle of Man" Based in Castletown, he was surgeon to Castle Rushen jail, the household of the lieutenant governor, and also to the troops garrisoned in the barracks there. He was also well-known for refusing to take payment from patients.
Music Collector
Clague was aware that traditional Manx music and culture was rapidly declining. As a doctor, he was an influential and respected figure in the community and he used this position to collect songs, dances, and melodies as he travelled throughout the south of the Island. Clague's informants were generally men from working backgrounds such as fishermen. His favourite informant was the blind fisherman Thomas Kermode:
He lost the sight of his eyes after small-pox when he was very little, and was obliged to use his ears in place of his eyes. He had a wonderfully good memory, and he was good to sing, and he knew the Manx language very well. The greater part of the words and songs that I have taken down from his singing, and I spent many happy hours in writing them down. Although he was blind, he continued at his work as a fisherman for many years. He had great intelligence, and I owe him a great deal for the knowledge he has given me of the life of the Manx at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Clague collected these works and arranged them in Manx National Songs which was published in 1896 and Manx National Music in 1898.
Following the decline of Manx as a community language on the Isle of Man for much of the 19th century, renewed interest in the language occurred most notably among educated men in the town of Peel where it was still common to hear Manx spoken by the fishermen. Although Clague was in the south of the Island, there were still many native speakers and by talking to them, he taught himself the Manx language as part of his effort to preserve traditional Manx culture. Clague spent decades travelling throughout the south of the Island, speaking to the members of the community who could speak Manx or remember the traditional Manx songs. Along with several other prominent members of the Manx language revival such as J.J Kneen and Edmund Goodwin, Clague was a founding member of Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh in 1899 in Peel. A.W. Moore, the director of the Manx Museum and the organisations first president, explained that Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh was not only concerned with the preservation and promotion of the Manx language, but rather all things related to Manx culture:
Though called the Manx Language Society, it should, I think, by no means confine its energies to the promotion of an interest in the language, but extend them to the study of Manx history, the collection of Manx music, ballads, carols, folklore, proverbs, place-names, including the old field names which are rapidly dying out in a word, to the preservation of everything that IS distinctively Manx, and, above all, to the cultivation of a national spirit.
Clague's bilingual book Cooinaghtyn Manninagh: Manx Reminiscences was published posthumously in 1911.
