Updated 22 August 2024: Thank you to the many reviewers of the website. In response to requests for more signposting to London locations and to assist with site navigation, I have updated this post. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic.
In 1767, a Black female singer performed at the Haymarket Theatre, originally known as as "The Little Theatre in the Hay" and later to become the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Historical detective work by the historian W.A. Hart has concluded she was probably Rachael Baptist (Rachel Baptiste), the Irish soprano whose career spanned c.1750-1773. A ten-year period performing across England had begun in 1757 when "Miss Baptist, the celebrated singer from the gardens of Dublin" sang in Liverpool's Ranelagh pleasure garden.
Rachael Baptist's career as a successful classical singer who was also a woman of colour is a powerful reminder that eighteenth-century Ireland - like England - was a more diverse society than is often assumed. And if Hart's conclusion is correct, she was just one of a number of Irish practitioners of the performing arts who graced the boards of the theatre in London's Haymarket.
I am grateful to Professor Hart for providing me with a copy of his recent article "Rachael Baptist: the career of a black singer in Ireland and England 1750-1773" which inspired this blog post.
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Rachael Baptist, a woman of Ireland
Rachael Baptist first appears in the historical record in 1750 when she made her stage debut in Dublin as a student of the Dublin-based Italian singer and singing teacher Signor Bernardo Palma. Baptist and her fellow singer 'Miss Pocklington' were described as "natives of this country", suggesting she was Irish-born. Her surname (sometimes spelled Baptiste) also suggests a connection with the West Indies, reflecting Ireland's historical entanglement with the British imperial project and trafficking of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas which peaked in the 1780s.
The Irish actor and playwright John O'Keeffe (1747-1833), who had one of his own greatest successes at the Haymarket Theatre in 1778, gave a brief description in his memoirs of Rachel Baptiste. She was "among the many fine singers" who performed at the pleasure gardens in Dublin's Marlborough Green (today Marlborough Place, between Talbot Street and Lower Abbey Street):
"she...was heard by the applauding company with great delight"
In the telling of this anecdote, O'Keeffe emphasises Baptist's African heritage while also indicating that her musical talents were of greater relevance to her audience than her skin colour.
'In this instance, appreciation for the racialized performer’s musical talents trump[ed] racism’ - Heather Ladd & Leslie Ritchie, English Theatrical Anecdotes, p. 238.
W.A. Hart's research indicates Baptist's repertoire was representative of songs popular in the pleasure gardens of the period. These ranged from then contemporary arrangements of popular Irish and Scottish airs (Ellen Aroon, Lango Lee, Daniel Cooper, Thro’ the Wood Laddie, Will of Aberdeen) to concert arias by the classical composers George Friderick Handel, William Boyce and Thomas Arne.
We can get a sense of what a Rachel Baptist performance might have sounded like in this recent recording by the Irish Baroque Orchestra (Ireland's Time-Travelling Orchestra') with soprano Rachel Redmond which was inspired by Baptist's performing history in Ireland and England.
Rachael Baptist in London
Baptist herself said that she “performed in London, Bath, and the other principal parts of England, with universal applause” over 1757-1767. However, documentary evidence for her time in England is sparse compared with the traces left of her long and successful career in Ireland. W.A. Hart's investigations suggest Baptist was recommended to Samuel Foote (1720-1777), proprietor of the Haymarket Theatre, as being:
"not only excellent as to figure, and speaking, but remarkably so as to singing, in which department, very few of the vocal line in London could bear comparison".
However, it appears her performance was advertised as an oddity and was not well-received by the London audience. Unlike her engagements in Ireland and England up until then, the London Haymarket's advertising led with a racialised reference to the singer's African heritage rather than her skills as an experienced and celebrated musical artiste. Baptist returned to Ireland where she renewed her prior success. This began with concerts in Kilkenny in 1767 where she performed as 'Mrs Crow (formerly Rachel Baptist)' and was eulogised in the local press as "a celebrated Black Syren".
People of colour in 18th century London and Ireland
Rachael Baptist's partial biography gives us a glimpse of what W.A. Hart has termed 'Ireland's forgotten eighteenth-century black population'. By contrast, much more has been established about the history of people of African and Caribbean heritage living in Britain over the millennia.
At the time Baptist was touring Georgian England, Kathleen Chater estimates 10,000-15,000 people of African descent were living in Britain of which about one-fifth were female. Hart's study of eighteenth-century Irish sources estimates 2,000-3,000 people of colour were living in Ireland during 1750-1800, with Dublin perhaps having the largest population after London. In Ireland as in Britain, many families owned enslaved people in the West Indies and having Black servants, whether enslaved or free, was a signifier of social status and wealth for the elite.
''Rachael Baptist’s career in Ireland and England is a remarkable one. It shows that a black woman in the mid-eighteenth century, at the height of the slave trade, could enjoy a measure of celebrity as a performing artist in a society predominantly white"
- W.A. Hart, 'Rachael Baptist: the career of a black singer in Ireland and England 1750-1773', Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 37:1 (2022), 151-163.
Visualising Rachael Baptist
No portrait of Rachael Baptist has ever been found. If you Google her name, you'll frequently see this eighteenth-century pastel portrait of an unknown young woman of colour as an illustration of a contemporary in time of Rachael Baptist. Research by the Saint Louis Art Museum which owns the portrait has concluded that the sitter may have travelled from the Caribbean, where her headscarf style was popular, to Amsterdam where the portrait was likely made.
Fashion history can give us another way of visualising Rachael Baptist. John O'Keeffe's memoirs reference her distinctive stage presence where "she always appeared in the orchestra in a yellow silk gown". The robe à la française (the 'sack-back grown') was the standard dress style for women in England and Europe during Baptist's career in the 1750s and 1760s, The sack dress could be worn both as informal attire during the daytime and as a highly formal gown for the evening. Perhaps Rachael Baptist's stage attire was something like the yellow silk gown made in Britain (c.1760) pictured above?
When I began looking for evidence of an Irish presence at the Haymarket Theatre, one name leapt out immediately: Charles Macklin (d. 1797), memorialised in the Actor's Church in Covent Garden as "the father of of the modern stage". Twenty years before Baptist arrived in London, Macklin had created what was effectively the first drama school at the Haymarket in the 1740s. Given his legacy as 'one of the most important Irish cultural figures of the eighteenth century', the stark contrast between the extent of the historical record for Macklin and Baptist in London should not come as a surprise.
But it is also an important reminder that the people of Ireland who feature in its histories are largely determined by what traces of their lives were documented and which documents survive to this day. Macklin's theatrical work has long been recognised as providing a counter-narrative to Irish stereotypes in eighteenth century Britain. Learning more about Rachael Baptist gives us the opportunity now to reconsider this question: what did it mean to be Irish in our collective past?
You can share your thoughts in the Comments section at the bottom of the page
Blog sources & further resources
Rachael Baptist's musical career
You can see details of Rachael Baptist's early Dublin performances online in A Dublin musical calendar, 1700-1760 by Brian Boydell (1988).
The Irish Baroque Orchestra seeks to revive the work of overlooked figures from the early days of Baroque and Classical music in Ireland. In this short documentary, artistic director Peter Whelan and soprano Rachel Redmond discuss how they approached bringing Rachael Baptist's singing back to life.
Black Irish history
Ireland's little known multiracial history can be explored in the online exhibition, Mixed Race Irish Families in Britain, 1700 to 2000, developed by the Association of Mixed-Race Irish and hosted by the digital Mixed Museum.
Professor W.A. Hart was one of the early researchers of the presence of people of African heritage in Ireland's history.
W.A. Hart, 'Africans in Eighteenth-Century Ireland', Irish Historical Studies 33:129 (2002), 19–32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30006953
All of Professor W.A. Hart's publications on Black Irish history are listed on ResearchGate (which is where I contacted Professor Hart to request a copy of his latest paper on Rachael Baptist). Some publications are available for immediate download including the paper 'Do black lives matter to Irish historians?' read at the 2023 conference Africa in Ireland .
ResearchGate also has details of a chapter by Mark Doyle 'Those the Empire Washed Ashore: Uncovering Ireland’s Multiracial Past', written for the academic book Ireland in an Imperial World : Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion, edited by Timothy G. McMahon, et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017).
A preview of the book's Introduction is available on GoogleBooks.
Ireland and the trade in enslaved African people
The Legacies of British Slavery project traces how the colonial slavery system influenced the formation of modern Britain. The database of slave-ownership includes many references to people and places in Ireland which you can see by searching for "Ireland" in the address details here.
Ireland on the 18th century London stage
David O'Shaughnessy discusses representations of Ireland and the Irish in his introductory chapter ‘Staging an Irish Enlightenment’ to Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740-1820, ed.David O’Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019 - available here.
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