A HISTORY OF DWARFS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4960, 25 February 1937, Page 2

A HISTORY OF DWARFS

MIDGET KINGS, PAINTERS SPIES, AND A DUELLIST. The first dwarf who merited a name in history was a" steward in a household of an Egyptian ruler of 2500 8.C., but midgets were mentioned in connection with a Pharaoh’s expedition to Central Africa two centuries earlier. Later they became articles of commerce in Egypt, and in subsequent centuries were exchanged as royal gifts between potentates, says Trevor Allen in “John o’ London." Croesus, the wealthy King of Lydia in the fifth century B.C. was a midget. Philetus, who came from Kos, in the Mediterranean, was a midget poet and grammarian of the next century; he was “so small that he had to wear leaden soles on his shoes, lest some vagrant wind swept him off his feet.” The great Atilla was something of a

dwarf, if not actually a midget. Other midget rulers were Wladislaus I of Poland and Charles 111 of Sicily and Naples. “Down the centuries,” state two American authors, Mr. Walter Bodlin and Mr. Burnet Hershey, in “The World of Midgets,” “are interspersed midgets who achieved their niches in history as artists and scholars, as king’s counsellors and statesmen, as painters, actors, courtiers, and even an ecclesiastics, men high in the councils of the Church.” One of the last-named was lannacci, in the service of Ludovico Moro, the black Duke of Milan, who befriended Leonardo da Vinci. At this prince’s whim “lanacci would at times sing the mass of a Sunday morning in the chapel of the ducal palace. Dressed in priestly vestments, he was an imposing figure, sage and dignified, for all his littleness. But when the whim of his Prince decreed ..otherwise, lanacci played the fool, rattled dried peas in a pig’s bladder for the amuse-

ment of a drunken and frivolous court.” There have been important midget painters, the authors point out; and at least nine of the old masters, including Velasquez, had midgets for subjects. Richard Gibson, drawing master to the daughters of James 11, some of whose pictures hang to-day in Hampton Court, was only three feet ten inches tall. He was a diversion for a jaded court as well as a painter. The Queen, Henrietta Maria, had another midget of the same height, Jane Shepherd. She arranged a marriage between the two which took place at Hampton Court before the King and Queen and their retinue, Charles, with mock gravity giving the bride away. Gibson had a famous midget friend, Sir Jeffrey Hudson, who became courtier and Captain of Horse, as well as the only midget knight in history, at the caprice of his royal master, although he stood only three feet nine inches when booted and spurred. At

the age of eight he was so small that his patron, the Duke of Buckingham, presented him to Charles and his Queen in a pie! William Evans, the King’s eight-foot-tall porter—the Stuart court specialised in extremes —once saves Hudson from drowning in a wash basin, and on another occasion rescued him as he clung to a shrub against a wind which all but blew him into the Thames. Shortly after his adoption by the Queen, “Hudson and some playfellows stole a spinster’s cat. They flayed the luckless animal and draped the skin about the midget, leaving him in a room where the cat’s doting owner was entertaining some friends at tea. One of the solicitous ladies offered the cat a titbit, whereupon the animal angrily announced: ‘I can help myself when I am hungry!’ and scampered off. The guests demanded the burning of their hostess as a witch—‘She with her talking cat!’—and she was saved only by the timely discovery of the hoax.” While in camp near Calais this minature Sir Jeffrey considered he had been insulted by the brother of Lord Crofts, a member of the Queen’s retinue, and demanded satisfaction. The challenge was gravely accepted; his adversary turned up next morning at the duelling rendezvous armed with a squirt gun! Sir Jeffrey was more enraged than ever and insisted on real satisfaction. Crofts accordingly met him, but on condition that their difference should be equalised by his remaining afoot while the midget fought from the back of a horse. Sir Jeffrey shot him dead, was expelled from court, and reduced to beggary. Buckingham, however, secretly granted him a small pension. At sixty-one he was thrown into gaol as a conspirator in the Titus Oates plot. Le Petit M. Richebourg, who died in Paris in 1858—even at ninety he was no bigger than a boy of ten—had been in the service of the Duchess of Orleans, mother of Louis Phillippe, at the time of the Revolution, when fleeing Royalists flocked about the Orleans family anxious for news of fellow-Royalists in Paris. Richebourg, forgotten among the lord and ladies of the terrified French court, proved to be the man of the hour. He, the least among them, would learn the fate of their beleagured friends. With a stout, red-faced maid of the household as a fellow conspirator, he entered the city dressed as a baby in the nurse’s arms. The ragged, bloodhungry patriots only chucked the charming, smiling baby under the chin as the dull peasant woman took him through the gates. Little did the guards guess that this baby was carrying papers containing Royalist military secrets in his swaddling clothes. Maid and down-faced bab> returned as safely as they had gone Thus did the house of Orleans maintain liaison with its supporters foi several of the fiercest weeks of the Revolution.

The authors claim that the smallest adult midget on record was Paulin Musters, a native of Holland: height one foot seven inches; born of normal parents. At birth she measured twelve inches, and thus grew only seven inches throughout her entire life, yet in other respects was a normal woman. She died at twenty-two of pneumonia. Nicholas Ferry, nicknamed Bebe by his royal master, Stanislaus of Poland, measured only eight inches at birth, but grew tc two feet five inches. He was the sor of peasants of the Vosges plain—wit less, feeble-minded. He had to be suckled by a goat, was presented on a plate for baptism, and used his father’s sabot for a cradle, then a bed. The smallest father in the world, if not in history, is Juan de la Cruz, a Filipino now living in the United States. At fifty-four years old he is only two feet high. His daughter, born of a normal mother, was only four inches shorter than her father at birth, but one inch taller at six months. He has a sister one foot nine inches tall, unmarried.

One of the happiest midget marriages was that of Robert and Judith Skinner, two feet one inch and two feet two inches respectively, who lived in Cheltenham in the eighteenth century and had fourteen children. After a lifetime of domestic bliss, Judith died in her husband’s arms and was buried at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. During the last two years of Robert’s life, the aged little figure was seen frequently bowed over Judith’s grave. The last time he visited the grave was a week before his death, at the age of sixty-eight.