SOME OF THE WORLD’S FAMOUS MIDGETS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 142, 12 March 1938, Page 8 (Supplement)

SOME OF THE WORLD’S FAMOUS MIDGETS

Interesting Facts About Them

On September 22 last the world’s smallest man and the world’s smallest woman both died. It is noteworthy also that on the same day, as if to commemorate them, twenty-six dwarfs got together in Budapest and planned a “world congress of dwarfs” to be held in that city. Technically, dwarfs are people who are under four feet high at maturity. There are two kinds —freaks and normally proportioned. Freaks have often suffered some injury; they usually have huge heads and shrunken legs; sometimes they are mentally deficient. But well-formed midgets—the real dwarfs—owe their minuteness to general gland-deficiency. If the pituitary gland at the base of your brain lacked only a few grains of its normal secretion, you’d be a midget, too. This kind of dwarf generally has an acute intelligence and strong emotions. He is actually stronger, healthier, and longer-lived than a giant. A giant, technically, is any man over six feet six inches high. The world’s tallest man is believed to be fourteen-year-old Abou el Sayed, of Egypt, ten feet two inches high. Dwarfs are much more easily brought up than giants, despite their apparent frailty. They should not be confused 'with pygmies, whose stature is determined by their race, not by glandular deficiency in an otherwise normal constitution. “Tiny Tim,” the little man who died at Kernel, Hempstead, on September 22 last, was only twenty-three inches high. His name was Harold Dyott; he weighed twenty-four pounds, and he was fifty years old. You could lift him on your hand, hide him in your top hat. Imagine the Army’s surprise when they called him up for service during the war! Yet they did it three times I Until he died from bronchial trouble he had never been seriously ill in his life. His brain was as lively as anyone else’s. Famous surgeons from every part of Europe had studied him. His parents, as usually happens in such cases, were of normal height. Rita Frendo, the minute woman who died at Malta on the same day, was thirty-two inches high and twenty-six years old. Since her death another “world’s smallest woman,” forty-year-old Zedeida, nineteen and a half inches high, has been discovered in Egypt. Famous dwarfs of history were generally made much of. Still tinier than Tiny Tim was Jeffery Hudson, born of normal parents, who was for a long time only eighteen inches high. . At a dinner given to King Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria, a pie was brought in. Out of it stepped Jeffery, and trotted round the table like

Gulliver in Brodingnag. Henrietta Maria liked him so.much that she took him into the Royal Household.

Subsequently, Jeffrey Hudson fought in the Civil War as a Royalist captain. They called him "strenuous Jeffery.” To amuse people, he could fight a duel with a turkey-cock of his own size: to satisfy his honour, he fought with a soldier named Crofts, whom he shot from horseback —the only method by which he could raise himself to the other man’s height. He had an extraordinary life altogether. Later, when he was made prisoner by Turkish pirates, his height increased to three feet nine inches, as a result of the ill-treatment he suffered. On his return to England, the Duke of Buckingham gave him a pension; but the little man couldn’t keep out of any excitement that was going. Accused of complicity in Titus Oates' Popish Plot, Jeffery was again imprisoned, and he died in jail. Henrietta Maria was very fond of dwarfs. She had two more—Richard Gibson and his wife Anne, both about three feet seven inches high. Usually dwarfs don’t have children, but this pair bad nine, five of whom survived and were of ordinary height. Gibson was drawingmaster to James Il’s daughters, Mary and Anne, when they 7 were children. He reached the ripe old age of seventy-five before he died in 1690.

Queen Mary Tudor bad a page called John Jarvis, two feet high ; her brother, young Edward VI. iiad another midget page-boy. The last dwarf at England’s Royal Court was Coppernin, who served George Ill’s mother, Princess Augusta. And the last dwarf attendant in a gentleman’s family’ in this country belonged to Beckford, the millionaireauthor, who lived about 100 years ago. From earliest times, monarchs and aristocrats have vied with each other to secure dwarfs as servants. The Egyptian Pharaohs imported into their courts the Akkn pygmies from tropical Africa. The Romans kept up the supply of little men by a process of artificial dwarfing, as the Japanese make dwarf trees.

You have probably seen deformed, hunch-backed dwarfs in Velasquez’ pictures; they were employed at the Court of Philip IV of Spain. In France, the most famous dwarf was Richebourg. Like our Tiny Tim, he was only twenty-three inches high. His life reads like a thriller. The Orleans family employed him, and during the French Revolution he was as useful as the Scarlet Pimpernel himself. From closely-watched Paris he was smuggled out again and again, disguised as a baby in a nurse’s arms —with dispatches! He was ninety when he died in 185 S.