Easter always heralds the approach of Show Day here in Orange and with the big weekend now just weeks away, we thought we’d have a look back at one of the largest attractions to ever feature at our local showgrounds.

Patrick O’Connor, known as the Irish Giant or Tipperary Giant, arrived in Australia in 1911 and was a sensation with the public wherever he went.

Standing just a fraction over 8 feet 3 inches in his socks, O’Connor was hailed the world over as the “tallest man in the British Empire” having appeared in London for the Coronation celebrations for King George V in 1910.

“Yes, I’m used to being asked how tall I am,” O’Connor said, regaling a reporter with a favourite anecdote of him being stopped and asked that very question by the late King Edward himself.

“Me, a raw Irish lad talking to the King. But I managed to stammer out ‘8 foot 3 inches, sir'," O’Connor continued. “'And a very good height, too,’ says he as the car drove away."

O’Connor quickly became a popular feature on the sideshow circuit, touring from town to town all over Australia.

“It’s a bit awkward for me at times being so big,” he admitted in one of the many promotional interviews he did with newspapers wherever he went.

“The only athletic game I play with another man is golf. They wouldn’t look at me in a football or cricket team. No team that played me would get matches.”

The Irish Giant first came to Orange in 1912, where he opened up a reception parlour in Summer Street opposite the post office, where he entertained, for a small fee, a large number of visitors.

“The Giant offers a gold ring, which he wears on his finger to any person it will fit. A two-shilling piece will easily pass through the ring,” reported the journalist for the 'Orange Leader', who couldn’t help but add: “He is certainly a man that everyone must look up to.”

O’Connor was back in Orange with a tent at the showground the following year. Speaking again with the 'Orange Leader', he supposedly quipped that he might stay and secure work as a fruit picker “as it would mean the saving of a ladder.”

In 1916, with war raging in Europe, O’Connor “donned the khaki” and again attracted a flutter of attention in newspapers as “the tallest man in the army”. But, interestingly, his enlistment papers reveal that O’Connor had been ever so slightly exaggerating his height... by a whole foot!

In England, Private O’Connor found himself posted as a guard outside Australia House, telling inquiring newspaper men that his officers didn’t know what to do with him as he was “too tall for the trenches and too short for an observation post!”

“What do you do?” inquired a London correspondent of an Australia newspaper

“Well, sir, I just direct people about this building,” said O’Connor, who always knew how to pander to his audience.

“And whenever I can I manage to put in a few words about the glorious country. It’s a beautiful place, that it is; and, by the same token, it’s back there I’m goin’, so I am.”

O’Connor did return to Australia after being medically discharged due to a bad knee, and he returned to the show circuit, visiting Orange once more in 1918.

In July 1922, Patrick O’Connor died at Lidcombe Hospital, where he was being treated for liver cancer. Accounts of his age rarely agree, but he was probably about 53 years old. In his obituaries, he was said to have been a veteran not only of the Great War but also to have served in Sudan and South Africa. He left behind a wife, Annie, and two young daughters.