Born: August 25th, 1942
Died: March 1st, 2025
For a generation of Irish children, poet and playwright Pat Ingoldsby, who has died at age 82, was the beloved eccentric uncle who, in the early 1980s, brought mischief and wonder to a country desperately lacking in both. Already a well-known figure in Dublin’s literary counterculture, with shows Pat’s Hat and Pat’s Chat he became Ireland’s favourite kids’ entertainer. His legacy was such that, when news of his death was announced, many people now well into middle age will have felt a part of their childhood slip away with him.
Much of this appeal lay in the fact that Ingoldsby was cheerfully unqualified for the job of children’s presenter. He wasn’t zany or wacky and had no need for a puppet sidekick. Instead, he was a ringmaster of a surreal circus that sprang fully formed from his own imagination.
Nonsense verse, wacky headgear – he would routinely don a tea cosy or a hat from which dangled plastic fruit – and a refusal to speak down to kids made him a unique figure on the airwaves. That he was conjuring his whimsy at a time of crippling unemployment and economic uncertainty made his impact all the more significant. In serious times, he reminded audiences of all ages of the importance of being silly.
He was in his 40s when Pat’s Hat brought overnight celebrity. He had already led a life full of both wonder and trauma, dreams and nightmares. Yet even after his stint on RTÉ there was still time for one more act, which he embarked upon in the 1990s.
Having concluded that he was enjoying television a bit too much, he turned his back on broadcasting and focused on his poetry, which he would sell from a regular spot on Westmoreland Street in Dublin. This brought a different kind of fame. Away from the screen, he became part of the Dublin streetscape – embodying the surreal wit and the melancholy bound up in the city’s personality.
Ingoldsby was born in Malahide, Co Dublin, in 1942, the son of a school principal. He contracted polio at two months old, which would cause paralysis in his left arm for much of his life. He also had asthma, which restricted his ability to play with other children.
On the many days when ill health forced him stay home from school, he would stare out the livingroom window and watch the world go by. Ingoldsby would see the circus come to town, watch other kids kick a ball around the green and observe the boats in the sea off Malahide – wondering where they had come from and where they were going.
His father encouraged him to secure a “good, secure, steady, safe job with an annual increment”. And so, at age 18, he began working in insurance, commuting daily from Malahide to central Dublin. He soon discovered that a desk-bound life was not for him: despite his best efforts, he could not reconcile himself to a nine-to-five existence.
“The futility of doing something in order to keep someone else happy,” he would later explain to The Irish Times. “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.”
There was another way to live, and it was in search of that life that he quit his job and moved to Britain, where he found work at Vauxhall Motors in Luton. Labouring in a factory was no more fulfilling than pushing a pen in insurance, but simply to be on the move was its own victory. “I didn’t know where I was going, so if I never got there it was fine,” he said.
Inner peace remained elusive, however, and he experienced a series of mental breakdowns. In 1965, Ingoldsby received a course of electroshock therapy, but the results were unsatisfactory. “I was six times locked away,” he revealed to The Irish Times. “There were so many different words for it. Bipolar was one. Endogenous depression was another. Reactive depression. I can’t remember all the others.”
He would finally overcome his depression with a treatment called “Gestalt therapy”, which encourages the patient to live in the moment and focus on the here and now. “That was my turning point. It’s because of Gestalt therapy that I became a healthy, well-rounded, balanced person.”
Ingoldsby moved back and forth between Ireland and Britain throughout the 1960s. In 1967, he was working in a holiday camp in Skerries, Co Dublin, where the owner recognised that Ingoldsby was “not kitchen porter material” and promoted him to camp entertainer. Going on stage to share stories with an audience of 600 or so encouraged his love of performance and did wonders for his self-belief.
By the 1970s, he was back in Dublin full-time, and he became a figure in the city’s counterculture. He hosted a RTÉ radio show, Saturday Spin, which led to a friendship with musician Brush Shields. It was on Shields’s advice that he bought a house in Clontarf. “While I could afford it,” he later said. “The best bit of advice I ever got and the reason I have somewhere to live now”.
In 1977, Ingoldsby published his first poetry collection, You’ve Just Finished Reading This Title. He also contributed scripts to children’s TV show Wanderly Wagon and debuted a one-man play for children, Rhymin’ Simon, at the Peacock in Dublin.
His talents were recognised by Denis O’Grady, a visionary television commissioner who had previously worked for the BBC and took a chance on Ingoldsby by greenlighting Pat’s Hat.
“I need to be noticed, and when I went into the interview, I’m wearing a cabbage from either side of my hat,” said Ingoldsby. “And because RTÉ has always had a problem with originality, they were freaked. But I went on, and the phones just nearly melted.”
O’Grady’s hunch paid off, and Ingoldsby became a huge hit with children. “I just loved the idea of appearing on television with a chicken on my head and the phone on top of the chicken,” said Ingoldsby. “Then it would ring, and I’d pretend I couldn’t hear and it would be so real to the children,” he recollected to the Irish Examiner. “They’d be roaring: ‘Pat, your phone!’ To them, it was real.”
He enjoyed his years on RTÉ but by the 1990s he felt the time had come to move on. “I turned my back on media and I didn’t seek any attention,” he said. “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.”
In 1994, he set up a publishing house, Willow Publications, and focused on publishing and selling his verse, which he did until 2015 when his childhood polio returned with a vengeance. “My life started with polio,” he would say. “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”. Undeterred, he continued to publish new work on Facebook, under the title, Pat Ingoldsby, My Poems Come Out To Play.
[ Pat Ingoldsby is remembered at his funeral as ‘unaffected, profoundly human’Opens in new window ]
He died at a nursing home in Clontarf surrounded by family and friends. At his funeral, his friend and companion Vivienne Baillie offered heartfelt tribute, saying, “Pat was made of love, but he was also made of words. They accompanied him throughout his life and became his livelihood. Like love, words gushed out of him”.
A poet with the common touch and a children’s TV presenter beloved by people of all ages, he was a true national treasure – the best sort of pied piper who left a lasting impact on those fortunate enough to have seen him at the height of his whimsical powers.
He is survived by companion Vivienne Baillie and siblings Michael, Dayo, Ann and Brigid.
