On Sunday, February 21, 1954, a baby boy was born in Onchan.

But his birth was not registered and he went unclaimed as Manx - until this week.

On Monday, February 21, 2022, Morgan James Kane officially received his birth certificate, 68 years to the day after he was born.

Morgan’s grandparents were married here on the island at St Mary’s in 1911, but moved back to England, where his father, Douglas Edward Kane, was born in Manchester in 1912.

Following the First World War, the family moved back to the island, where his grandmother took out a loan and bought Falcon Cliff Hotel - the huge castle-like building which looks out over Douglas promenade.

She ran the hotel from 1919 until 1939, when it was commandeered by the British government for the war effort.

Morgan’s grandparents were stalwarts of the Isle of Man community, with a number of accolades named for them still being distributed at various clubs and societies across the island to this day.

Their son Douglas, Morgan’s father, married a woman named Moya Iris, who came from Birmingham, in 1946.

Moya had worked in a small munitions factory in Birmingham during the war, where she met Douglas, a flight sergeant, who was stationed in the city.

While this may have been a happy union, it didn’t go down well with her parents, who disowned their Protestant daughter for marrying a Catholic man.

After their marriage, they moved back to the Isle of Man, where they went to work at the family hotel - Moya as a cook and Douglas as a chef.

When his mother fell pregnant with him, Morgan’s father filed for divorce, suspicious of the pregnancy.

He filed through the court, not the church, on January 28, 1954, and then left the island.

Morgan’s mother was kicked out of the hotel, and he was born in what he described as ’a hovel’.

His mother had postnatal depression, and wouldn’t care for him, so his grandmother sent a woman from the hotel named Martha Boswell to help look after him.

He said: ’She loved me from the moment she saw me, she took care of me.’

He was baptised at St Anthony’s in Onchan by the same priest who married his parents.

Two weeks after he was born, he was left on his grandmother’s doorstep by his mother, who left, never to return to the island.

To avoid public embarrassment regarding the baby left with no parents in their care, Morgan’s grandmother got rid of him.

Morgan explained: ’The law in 1954 was that you could not send away an English child without the permission of the English government - so they took me to Liverpool and put me with 11 Irish children and sent me to Ottawa, Canada, to St Joseph’s Orphan Asylum, which was run by the Grey Nuns of the Cross, you know, who are all warm and fuzzy sounding.’

But these were the same nuns that later would be implicated in the Duplessis Orphan scandal.

The Duplessis Orphans were 20,000 Canadian children who were wrongly certified as mentally ill by the provincial government of Quebec and confined to psychiatric institutions in the 1940s and 1950s.

The children were deliberately miscertified in order to acquire additional subsidies from the federal government.

They are named for Maurice Duplessis, who served as Premier of Quebec for five terms between 1936 and 1959.

Martha had accompanied Morgan to Canada, and after six months in the orphanage he became ill.

Morgan went on: ’What we believe is that when she saw me get ill, and when she saw what was going on with some children being sold as indentured servants for Canadian farmers - some were being adopted, but when they had too many children that they couldn’t find places for them, the nuns were putting them in mental hospitals that they ran in both America and Canada.

’If you put a perfectly normal child into a mental hospital for 30 or 40 years, they are what they grow up around.

’So she saw this apparently and didn’t want that for me.’

Martha doctored a passport and took Morgan to Arizona, USA, where a family friend of his grandmother took them in.

’Even though [my grandmother] wasn’t claiming me, she was in a way keeping an eye on me,’ Morgan said.

As he got older, Morgan believed he was an American and that Martha was his mother.

Eventually, Martha became very unwell and Morgan stated that she was pressurised into agreeing to sell him for $10,000 to a wealthy family.

His new ’father’ was Dr Charles Wetmore.

Morgan claimed that later on he discovered it was to cover up the disappearance of a missing boy Dr Wetmore had previously adopted two years earlier, named John Raymond Frey (aka John Raymond Wetmore).

The Wetmore ’family’ then moved from Phoenix, Arizona, to Fresno, California.

Morgan said: ’He and I never saw eye to eye. I was a navy corpsman with the US Marines. He got me sent to Vietnam.

’He took credit that I survived and so on.’

After a series of events, Morgan spent 34 years in some of the most notorious Californian prisons, including San Quentin, Folsom and the Deuel Vocational Institution.

He was incarcerated alongside some of America’s most infamous killers, including Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper, Charles ’Tex’ Watson and Herbie Mullin.

His experiences in prison and the circumstances which landed him there are outlined in his book ’34 Years in Hell: My Time Inside America’s Toughest Prisons’, which is published under the name Jamie Morgan Kane.

He has given talks about his book at the Palace Hotel and Jurby Prison since its release in 2019.

For several years, Morgan has been a man on a mission: to get his birth registered in the Isle of Man.

He dealt with the Register Office for several years, and eventually took his case to the High Court.

On Monday, Morgan received his birth certificate on his 68th birthday.

It marks the latest registration of a birth in the Isle of Man ever.

He said: ’Finally a child who was denied his birthright, is being given it as a man, who has come back.’

So what does it mean to him?

’I’m Manx. My back arms have said that,’ he says, showing me his tattoos reading "Manx" and "Bred", I’ve carried these with me for more than 50 years.’

He continued: ’This is my island, I’ve told everybody out in the world.

’Many people out in the world don’t know this place exists. I’ve been back here four times now and every time I have come I have felt more connected, and when I go to places I have never been to before, I just feel it.

’As a kid, Martha told me: "You’re from a magical, mystical isle that sits in the Irish Sea. It’s guarded by Manannan, he protects all the people who live there and all who travel from there. Manannan’s your King, Elizabeth is your Queen. You’re a man of the isle, a brother of the sea and a son of the storm."

’When I was a few days old she took me down to Douglas bay, put sand in my mouth, put drops of seawater in my mouth, and had me breathe in Manannan’s Cloak so that I would always be bound to this island and it would call me home, so I could never lose this island from me.

’I grew up with these great stories of here, and when you’re a small kid, and you’re from some place like this, you have to know you’re special.

’And I’ve always carried that with me, wherever you throw me, I’ll stand.’