Remarkable Irish exports (you’ve never everheard of)
Meet the shipwrecked sailor whose dancing skills saved his life and a host of other ‘forgettables’ in Myles Dungan’s stories of…
In this extract from Myles Dungan’s new children’s book – beautifully illustrated by Alan Dunne – we discover some of the remarkable Irish men and women that history forgot… until now!
There’s James O’Connell, the real-life ‘illustrated man’, who could dance his way out of a tight spot, and Margaret ‘Gretta’ Cousins, who spent a surprising amount of time behind bars – for a JUDGE! We also meet the vanishing singer Rachael Baptiste and baseball star Joe ‘Fire’ Cleary, who probably wished he could vanish too when he ended up with a record NOBODY could envy. Here they are:
JAMES O’CONNELL
A CENTURY and a half before Riverdance won the hearts of the American public, another Irish performer was knocking their socks off with the story of how his Irish dancing skills had saved his life. But that wasn’t the only thing that grabbed their attention about James O’Connell. Just as interesting was his body, because he was adorned from head to foot in strange and exotic tattoos.
Nowadays many people sport tattoos, but back in the 1830s, they tended to be seen only on sailors and convicted prisoners. When James became a star in PT Barnum’s circus (remember him? The Greatest Showman?), not only did O’Connell have more tattoos per square centimetre than the singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran but he also had a fascinating story about how he had come by his body art.
James was from the Liberties in Dublin and, at an early age, became a sailor. That much we can be sure of. The rest… well, decide for yourselves. In his life story, written in 1836, he claimed that he had been shipwrecked in the southern Pacific and washed up in 1829 on the small island of Pohnpei. There, the natives couldn’t quite make up their minds how to kill this unwelcome stranger, until he began to dance an Irish jig. That, he claimed afterwards, was what saved his life.
They were so impressed with Irish dancing that, instead of doing away with him, the Pohnpeians decided to marry him off to the king’s daughter. In preparation for the wedding, they covered his body in elaborate tattoos. That involved a week of intense pain for poor James, who must have wondered if he would have been better off to have let the Pohnpeians kill him straightaway.
James lived on Pohnpei for five years before he was able to make his escape. He arrived in the USA in the 1830s and made his living by joining PT Barnum and telling his story, while showing off his tattoos, to goggling audiences all across America. As an encore, he would also show off his Irish dancing skills to the American punters – the same skills that he claimed had saved his life on Pohnpei.
While most of his audience believed his story, on the basis that reality is often stranger than fiction, there were also a lot of people who thought O’Connell was a liar and a chancer (being American they would have called him a ‘grifter’ or a ‘conman’).
Whether or not his tall tale was true, one other thing is certain: in the mid-19th Century, tattoos began to become popular.
This might have had nothing whatever to do with James F
O’Connell and PT Barnum but you never know…
MARGARET ‘GRETTA’ COUSINS
MARGARET COUSINS, known to her family and friends as Gretta, is 100% Irish but she is also claimed by India. In Ireland, Gretta was a suffragist (a campaigner for voting rights for women). In India, where she spent the last 40 years of her life, she was the first female magistrate (a type of judge), but she also made another lasting contribution to her adopted home. We’ll come to that later.
As a young girl in Roscommon, one of 14 children, she could see that it was a man’s world. She often said that she would have much preferred to have been born a boy. But it was very lucky for Irish and Indian women that she wasn’t. She studied music in Dublin in her twenties and got involved as a leader of the campaign to give Irish women the franchise (the right to vote). She married James Cousins in 1903 and inspired him to become a feminist, while he inspired her to become a vegetarian. Theirs was a real partnership of equals.
Gretta was an excellent hammer thrower; however, her exploits did not take place on sports fields, but close to government buildings. During suffragist protests, campaigning for the franchise for women, she broke quite a few windows and ended up in jail more than once. She served time in Mountjoy and Tullamore prisons. Not a good look for a future judge/ magistrate, you might think!
While in prison she went on hunger strike and certainly got the attention of the authorities. In 1918, women finally got the vote in British and Irish elections. It didn’t do Margaret any good, however, as she and James had emigrated to India in 1915. Gretta became headmistress of a girls’ school there and began to campaign against the ‘child’ marriages of very young Indian girls, as well as for the franchise for Indian women.
It was in 1923 that Margaret was invited to become a magistrate. She accepted the challenge of being (for a while, at least) the only female judge in the huge nation of India. In the 1930s, she defied the country’s British colonial rulers by calling for independence for India. True to form, she ended up in jail again, this time for almost a year. While there, just so as not to be idle, she went on a hunger strike again and fought for improved conditions for women prisoners.
And she didn’t neglect her musical talents either. In 1919, she was responsible for the melody that went on to become the national anthem of an independent India in 1947.
A truly remarkable Irish woman.
INSTEAD OF DOING AWAY WITH HIM THEY MARRIED HIM OFF TO THE KING’S DAUGHTER
JOE CLEARY
IF YOU’VE ever watched American sports on TV, you’ll know that they just love their statistics. ‘Stats’ are the figures used to measure the performances of athletes: how far or how fast they throw a ball; how speedy they are; how much weight they can lift. The sport of baseball has been keeping these measurements for decades.
A Corkman named Joe Cleary probably wished they hadn’t started until after he had pitched in his only appearance in the ‘Major Leagues’ (the highest level of the professional game). Joe’s family left Ireland for New York in 1928, when he was 10 years old, so he learned to play baseball in his teens. His nickname was ‘Fire’ because he could throw a baseball hard and fast.
Joe was a pitcher for the Washington Senators Major League team. A pitcher is a bit like a bowler in cricket (or a pitcher in rounders). His job is to throw the ball towards a batter on the opposing team. If he gets the ball past the batter three times (those are called strikes), then the batter is out. If the batter manages to hit the ball, and it isn’t quickly intercepted or
caught while in the air, then he can move to the next base and another batter comes up to try his luck.
Luck was in short supply for Joe on August 4, 1945, when he was brought on as a substitute pitcher in his first Major League game, which was against the Boston Red Sox. It was the first game in which his personal statistics would be recorded. All he had to do was to get three batters out and he could go back to the dugout at the end of the ‘inning’ to the praise of his manager and teammates. It all started well, with Joe managing to get the first batter out. Unfortunately for Joe, retiring (getting out) that single batter was as good as it got. He came up short against the next eight batters and gave up seven runs to the Red Sox.
In baseball, a pitcher’s entire career is measured by something called his ‘earned run average’ (ERA), a figure that is calculated using the number of runs the pitcher allows the other team to score.
Joe never pitched for any Major League team again, so his career ERA of 189.00 was based on the balls that he threw at that one Washington Senators/Red Sox game. Now 189.00 may sound okay, but an ERA is like a golf score: the
lower the better. Joe’s is the worst ever recorded by a pitcher in more than a century of baseball statistics. The best ever career ERA by a pitcher is 1.82 – more than a hundred times better than poor ‘Fire’ Cleary’s effort.
He must have been hoping that someone would holler his nickname from the stands and everyone would race to the exits. After giving up seven runs, his manager decided to take him out of the game. As if giving up seven runs wasn’t bad enough for poor Joe, he was replaced by a pitcher who had lost a leg while serving in the Second World War.
You just couldn’t make this stuff up.
RACHAEL BAPTISTE
SHE APPEARED out of nowhere in 1750. By 1773 she had disappeared again. No one knows exactly where she came from, or much about her, except that she was Irish. No one knows what happened to her when her musical career came to an end.
Rachael Baptiste (sometimes written as Baptist) was a bit of a mystery woman who enthralled audiences at musical events and endured much prejudice as a Black woman. In 18th-Century Ireland and Britain, being Black was associated with slavery. Many wealthy British and Irish families owned slaves who worked on plantations in the West
Indies. Rachael persevered and overcame prejudice and bigotry with the beauty of her singing voice. She became famous and was known in Dublin as ‘The Black Siren’.
She had been discovered by an Italian singing teacher, Bernardo Palma, who had moved to Dublin in the 1730s. In February 1750, at a Dublin concert organised to raise money for Palma, Rachael made her debut in front of Irish music lovers, being introduced to that audience as a ‘native of this country’. For the next few years, she earned a living in Dublin performing in ‘pleasure gardens’ (places of entertainment where rich people would go for the evening to eat, drink and listen to music).
Then, after six years of success, as suddenly as she had appeared, she disappeared!
What actually happened was that Rachael had decided to try her luck in England. She worked in London and in the famous summer resort of Bath, where Londoners would go to take advantage of the water (which had medicinal qualities that helped clear up some of their ailments). Rachael spent 10 years touring around England, and at some point during that decade she was married to a music teacher by the name of Crow. He taught violin and guitar but also had a talent for restoring old paintings that had been damaged.
When she returned to Ireland she did so as Rachael Crow. Starting in Kilkenny in 1767, she and her husband spent a few months in a large Irish town every year. Rachael would perform while Mr Crow (we don’t know what his first name was – sometimes even historians fail in their detective work) would teach. The couple spent the next six years in Ireland, finishing up with a winter in Belfast.
And then Rachael Baptiste Crow, the celebrated singer, was no more. Did she retire from the concert stage? Did she and her husband part company? Did she die a tragic
DID SHE DIE A TRAGIC DEATH? NO ONE HAS EVER FOUND OUT THE TRUTH
death? Or did Mr and Mrs Crow return to England? Good luck finding out. No one has ever been able to discover the truth.
But she was a truly remarkable figure in 18th-Century Ireland and Britain. She succeeded in establishing a successful music career in a time of overwhelming racial prejudice.
The Forgettables by Myles Dungan, illustrated by Alan Dunne, €20, is published by Gill Books.