“My life has been full of beautiful, adrenalising, colourful incidents,” chuckles Pat Ingoldsby. “It’s been like that from start to finish, every fucking day.”
It’s a decent outcome for a lad who couldn’t join in cowboy games as a youngster. Growing up in Malahide, ngoldsby recalls the sound of children from the local primary school as they played on the village green at lunchtime. A twin diagnosis of asthma and polio — the latter contracted during infancy — prevented him from being among them.
For most of Ingoldsby’s life, he has suffered from polio-related paralysis in his left arm. In recent years, the after-effects of his initial illness have forced him to retire from his regular spot on Dublin’s Westmoreland Street, where, for many years, he sold his books of poetry and chatted amiably with all and sundry.
“My life started with polio,” he says. “And now it’s ending with polio because I’m in this situation where my legs have decided not to work any more. It’s great for them, but you can’t go anywhere if your bloody legs don’t work.”
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Aged 80, Pat Ingoldsby is, somewhat reluctantly, back in the spotlight.
I realised that books didn’t have to be boring. You could do whatever you wanted with the words
Last March, the Irish Museum of Literature hosted a video installation to mark the release of a new anthology, In Dublin They Really Tell You Things — Pat Ingoldsby, Selected Poems 1986 — 2021.
Next month, The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby — a fantastic documentary portrait from Seamus Murphy, is released in cinemas.
The film is a collaboration between Losing Alaska filmmaker, Tom Burke, and Murphy, who previously directed A Dog Called Money, a visual account of PJ Harvey’s 2016 album, The Hope Six Demolition Project.
Ingoldsby, who has not been interviewed on camera since 1993′s Between Stations, suggested that Burke and Murphy work together.
“Over the years, I was approached from time to time to do something,” says Ingoldsby. “But I had turned my back on it all. It never occurred to me to go back. I had a beautiful, long, healthy period under the radar. And that’s the best place for me. When Seamus came along, I didn’t want to be in anything that involved talking about myself. But I received a level of understanding from Seamus, and he knew what I felt comfortable with.
“Although now that we’ve reached this stage of the proceedings, I’m finding it harder and harder to keep the promise I made to myself — and which Seamus accepted at the time — that I wasn’t going to do any interviews once the film was finished. But because I love him so much as a person and because it’s so important to him, I feel it’s the decent thing to do.”
Ingoldsby was partly inspired to write by Father Mullen, a forward-thinking priest and English teacher in St Paul’s College, Raheny, who introduced the young Pat to the American humorists, Robert Benchley and James Thurber.
“I realised that books didn’t have to be boring,” he recalls. “You could do whatever you wanted with the words.”
The emphasis within his middle-class family, however, remained the same. Poet or not, he was expected to get a “good, secure, steady, safe job with an annual increment”. Thus, aged 18, he found himself standing at Malahide station every morning to get the train to his 9-to-5 job in an insurance office in the city.
“I really did,” he says. “Oh my God. That was an attempt to keep my father happy. But the futility of doing something in order to keep someone else happy. And then they die. You can’t live your life like that. But it did not occur to me that there might be another way to live.”
He subsequently went “on the run”, travelling around Britain, sometimes sleeping in railway stations and on benches, until another rough sleeper in Liverpool handed him an address in Bedfordshire. He spent almost three years in Luton, working for Vauxhall Motors, and occasionally visiting his unconventional grandmother in Chester. He continued to feel uneasy within himself and out of step with the world. He had the first of several nervous breakdowns and was given his first course of electroshock therapy in 1965.
“I was six times locked away,” he recalls. “There were so many different words for it. Bipolar was one. Endogenous depression was another. Reactive depression. I can’t remember all the others.”
His final stint in psychiatric care was as long ago as 1976. He credits Gestalt Therapy with breaking the cycle.
“The beautiful people I met when I was inside,” he says, sadly, “I met one beautiful, sensitive, gifted Italian man. He was a Roman Catholic priest, who had a vocation, loved being a priest, and loved people. And because it had emerged that he was homosexual, his bishop put him in John of God’s to get cured. Just awful stuff. And if I hadn’t, with the help of a doctor from St Patrick’s Hospital, found Gestalt Therapy, I’d still be in there. At 80 years of age! That was my turning point. It’s because of Gestalt Therapy that I became a healthy, well-rounded, balanced person.”
By the early 1970s, Ingoldsby was presenting Saturday Spin, an RTÉ Radio show, featuring heavy rotation for Led Zeppelin and Skid Row.
I turned my back on media and I didn’t seek any attention ... And I’ve never been happier
Brush Shiels, the bass-playing Skid Row frontman and his wife Margaret would later repay the favour by insisting that Ingoldsby buy a place in Clontarf. (“While I could afford it,” he recalls: “The best bit of advice I ever got and the reason I have somewhere to live now”.)
His first collection of poems, You’ve Just Finished Reading This Title, was published in 1977.
His first two plays for children — Rhymin’ Simon and Hisself — were staged in 1978, at the Abbey and Peacock, respectively. He wrote several episodes for Wanderly Wagon before various interventions made him a TV star.
It just so happened that his children’s plays were enormous hits. And simultaneously, Denis O’Grady, a television veteran who had worked with Eamon Andrews and on various popular BBC shows, returned to Ireland to take up a post at RTÉ as Head of Presentation. At that same moment, Take Hart, the BBC art programme featuring Tony Hart, was a staple of RTÉ children’s programming, attracting dozens of wrongly addressed artworks to the Dublin-based broadcaster.
“Presentation doesn’t make programmes,” explains Ingoldsby. “And I had no thoughts about appearing on television. The responsibility of the presentation department is to make bloody sure that people know what programmes are ready for transmission. But Denis O’Grady thought: what would it be like if, a couple of times here in the afternoon when the announcers are sitting in the studio doing nothing, we bring in a couple of guests? It’s an idea that led to The Den. So I need to be noticed, and when I went into the interview, I’m wearing a cabbage from either side of my hat. And because RTÉ has always had a problem with originality, they were freaked. But I went on, and the phones just nearly melted.”
Thus, O’Grady drafted Ingoldsby in to deal with the “mountains of art” intended for Tony Hart. Meanwhile, the late Vincent Hanley agreed to step aside — and head to the canteen for coffee — leaving his chum to present without his assistance. It was Hanley, too, who designed a logo for what would become Pat’s Hat.
“He was a beautiful man,” recalls the hatted star. “We got along like a house on fire. So here’s this weirdo coming in. And he’s getting as much of a reaction as any of the children’s programmes. But he’s got nothing to do with them. And that was the trouble already starting. And that trouble continued for the rest of my time in RTÉ.”
He was similarly cast as an outsider when he went to teach poetry to prisoners, including one “Little Gerry Hutch” as he was then known. Ingoldsby taught at Mountjoy for three years, before continuing his classes in Arbor Hill.
Given the positive impact he had on so many lives, it’s odd to think that he would choose to renounce his celebrity. While selling books on the streets of Dublin from the mid-90s until 2015, he enjoyed responding to those who approached him to commiserate or berate RTÉ for no longer allowing him on the airwaves. The truth is rather more complicated.
“I turned my back on media and I didn’t seek any attention,” he says. “And I’ve never been happier. For a long time in my life, I was in psychiatric hospitals and getting shock treatment because I didn’t like me. I hated me. Then show business had become for me a way of getting encouragement and getting approval. Every time I was mentioned in the papers as being a national treasure or a legend or being the Irish version of somebody else, I would feel approval. But it would only last so long. And then you realise as I did, that it became an addiction.”
Aided by a rain-soaked, adopted kitten named Willow and Ingoldsby’s former “beautiful lover Ruth”, he set up his own publishing imprint, Willow Productions, in 1994. It is sagely noted by at least one contributor to The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby — the musician Don Baker — that his prominence as a children’s writer and presenter may have detracted from his reputation as a “serious” poet. His delicate, humorous poems — notably the Vagina in the Vatican — may, equally, have been too fun and accessible for the tastes of certain literary gatekeepers.
As a regular on Dublin’s streets, he found community among the pram-wheeling corner sellers and made more than one enemy. A Bank of Ireland employee once grandly introduced himself as the Head of Subsidiaries before calling the Guards. Ingoldsby had similar experiences, alongside such noted street performers as Louis Wilson, at and around various national institutions.
“When I die, I’d like a blue plaque that simply says: Pat Ingoldby was moved from here,” he laughs. “One for each of the locations. Because there are a lot of them.”
The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby opens November 4th
