Clodagh Finn: Meet Pablo, ‘the flying African’ acrobat from Cork

On this very day in 1851, the people of his native city were invited to meet “the flying African” (to use yet another of his colourful epithets) at the Circus Royal on Old George’s St — now Oliver Plunkett St — where he was going to perform several incredible acts of strength.

Then, as now, festive-season circuses knew how to draw a crowd.

“Novelties! Novelties! Novelties!” ran the advert which proclaimed Mr Paddington, the Corkonian, to be the “first slack rope vaulter in the world”.

There was more. This celebrated figure was also chalked down for “some daring acts of horsemanship” and, for the very first time, he was going “to ascend and descend to the top of the circus while standing on his head, on the top of a balloon and surrounded by fireworks”.

Just visualising that is a feat in itself, let alone trying to execute it in a “Hippo-Dramatic Circle”, as the circus ring was called.

Even now — more than 170 years later — the description of the evening’s entertainment, due to kick off at “half-past seven o’clock” on Tuesday, January 7, would still pack them in.

But then, that’s a feature of rooting around in the past — it never fails to challenge our fixed perceptions of what life was like for the people who went before us.

For one thing, the circus that rolled into town that year was a spectacular affair with firework displays, large-scale performances, and adjective-defying feats of physical dexterity. In Stafford, England, Mr Paddington premiered an act which involved “riding on his head on a pewter pint pot: The horse at three quarters speed”.

His routines also included “dancing with skipping ropes, leaping handkerchiefs, and incredible feats on the Corde Volante (flying rope)”, as Prof Vanessa Toulmin writes in “Black circus performers in Victorian Britain”.

Multi-racial history

However, that is not what is most surprising about Pablo Paddington’s story. The fact that this man of colour was a Corkonian (and possibly a woman, but we’ll come to that) reminds us of Ireland’s overlooked multi-racial history.

Indeed, all the things that we think of as very modern — migration, diversity, gender fluidity — have a long history.

The truth of that is illustrated in fascinating detail in the pages of the excellent Irish People of Colour, an overdue social history of the mixed-race Irish in Britain and Ireland between 1700 and 2000.

The authors Conrad Koza Bryan, director of the Association of Mixed Race Irish (AMRI); and Dr Chamion Caballero, director and co-founder of the Mixed Museum in Britain, have pieced together fragments from myriad sources to reveal — and celebrate — multi-racial Irish history across centuries and countries.

They shatter the enduring myth that Ireland is a country with a homogenous past. In the late 18th century, for instance, there were up to 3,000 Africans living here

This is according to William Hart, a contributor to the book along with Mark Doyle and Maurice Casey.

By the mid-19th century, that number had risen to some 10,000 black or mixed-race people resident in Ireland.

Many of the stories of those people are told in Irish People of Colour — some for the very first time.

The portrait showing the face of John Mulgrave, the boy rescued from a shipwrecked slave ship by Lord Mulgrave in the mid-1800s, has probably never been published before. “All we need now is to find his original African name,” remarks Conrad Bryan.

This outstanding volume is full of similar acts of retrieval which will change our understanding of Irish history. If one leaps out — that seems like the appropriate verb — it is that of the Cork acrobat Pablo Paddington, who shatters any number of preconceptions about the past.

Cork origin

To return to the story: By the time the January circus was advertised in The Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier in 1851, Pablo was already a well-established entertainer.

He had been thrilling audiences at several circuses in Britain since the 1820s and, over three decades, had made quite a name for himself. If his Cork origins had been firmly established, his mixed-race roots had not.

He was variously described as African, Indian, Brazilian, Siamese, and a “man of colour”.

Pablo Paddington was, in fact, born to an Irish father and a Haitian mother. He had a brother too, George John Paddington, described in records as a “black Irish priest and a native of Cork, who studied in Rome”. He also ran a school in the city. While there are gaps in Pablo’s story, his name pops up in various contemporary newspapers. They offer us a peephole into his (or should we say her?) extraordinary life. In early 1827, a tantalising snippet in a Belfast newspaper mentions that one of the city’s shoemakers, Mr Cowper, remembered making “a pair of boots for one of the black men in Mr Cooke’s company, who had the smallest foot for a man”.

A short while later, on January 27, 1827, Pablo Paddington and a fellow performer were revealed to be “two female impostors”.

The story had a ring of veracity, not least because it came from the fellow performer herself.

Ellen Lowther (aka John Clifford) and Pablo Paddington had both been performing at Cooke’s equestrian troupe. Ellen said she had been doing so since the age of five, but was forced to stop when she became pregnant at 20. (“As might have been expected,” commented the censorious York Herald, “this vagabond way of life led to vice and immorality.”)

The unfortunate Ellen sought help in the workhouse at York, where she delivered a stillborn baby boy. And her secret was out. She said she was Bengali, and explained that she and Pablo Paddington were both women who performed as black men.

The paper described the deception: “They appeared as men of colour, and in all the feats of the most dexterous horsemanship were not to be surpassed by any others of the company.”

Pablo’s disguise was so convincing that even his female partner, a Miss King, was unaware of it. She broke off relations only when rumours reached her ears that Pablo was “too much a man of the world” and had too many female acquaintances.

She seems to have forgiven him, though, because the article goes on to explain that she nursed Pablo when he “had his arm broken soon after”. It’s not clear if that was by accident or design, but the ever-attentive Miss King looked after her former love with “peculiar care”.

Pablo Paddington recovered his health and continued his career — as a man. Was he really a woman in disguise? Conrad Bryan’s unrivalled sleuthing uncovered evidence in census returns that a Joseph Paddington, an Irishman, was working as an equestrian in Birmingham in 1841. It is confirmation, he says, that Pablo’s real name was Joseph and that he was not a woman.

He is surely right and yet, as the York Herald put it in 1827, the whole affair “carries with it such an air of romance and of a novel story, that we cannot but think the detail will be amusing to some of our readers”.

Irish People of Colour is a limited edition available at public libraries and in some schools.