THE QUEEN took Napoleon’s hand and led him through the Buckingham Palace picture gallery. “First rate, your majesty,” he said admiring one of the priceless paintings. Everyone in the entourage smiled and giggled, including the small Press party.

 

But no one was being rude to the little French Emperor because it wasn’t the real one. It was Tom Thumb, the circus midget famed for his act of mimicking Bonaparte.

 

And when Tom, just 2ft 1in tall, used his cane as a little sword to duel with Queen Victoria’s French poodle, the ladies who were decked out in glittering diamonds, roared with laughter while the Queen, all in black, clapped her hands with joy. Much to the delight of his mentor, circus impresario Phineas Barnum, who was with him, (pictured above) counted the coins that were to come in his mind’s eye.

 

Victoria had invited General Tom to the Palace for a personal audience, much to the dismay of many newspapers at the time, which were largely against exploiting the human frailties of the inflicted in 1844. But they were good for sales.

 

The Times however, questioned the propriety of a royal audience with a dwarf, viewing it as a deviation from traditional courtly protocol.

Freak shows were thriving at this time and not just in England. New railways, steamships and cheap print made the shows international and were popular in America and Europe too.

 

Acts from across the world were flooding in from colonised countries to shock and thrill. Siamese twins; women with dogs’ heads and men with three legs. The working classes loved them. The more deformed the acts were, the more popular they were in marketplaces, theatres, cafes and parks. And Tom Thumb’s royal visit was to herald a new trend … keeping dwarves as pets in Europe’s palaces.

 

Victoria was to write in her diary that night: “After dinner we saw the greatest curiosity I, or indeed anybody, ever saw — a little dwarf!

 

“He made the funniest little bow, putting out his hand and saying: ‘much obliged, Mam.’ One cannot help feeling sorry for the poor little thing and wishing he could be properly cared for because the people who show him off tease him a good deal, I should think. He was made to imitate Napoleon and do all sorts of tricks.”

 

The visit, seven years into Victoria’s reign, led to her and Albert inviting other ‘freaks’ to the Palace for most of their lives. Tom’s fame was secured. For the next three years he toured Europe with Barnum. Wherever he went he was mobbed by hysterical crowds. Women queued to get a kiss from him and reporters wrote that husbands were “driven wild with jealousy.”

 

Tom Thumb was a boy named Charles Stratton, the son of a Bridgeport, Connecticut, carpenter. He weighed a chunky nine pounds at birth, but seven months later he stopped growing. When Barnum met him in 1842, he was four years old, 25 in tall and weighed 15 pounds.

 

When he did grow again, he didn’t go up much. By his 13th birthday he stood exactly 2 feet 5 in (74 cm) tall. On his 18th he was 2 ft 8.5 in. (82.6 cm) tall. And at 21 he was just 2 feet 10 in. And that was it.

 

Barnum signed him on a three dollars-a-week (£70 today) contract, changed his name to “General Tom Thumb” and taught him to sing, dance and imitate Cupid, Napoleon and Hercules. Success followed. And wherever Tom went, the Press followed.

 

Next came London, where Tom drew sellout crowds at Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall while Barnum rented a mansion in a ritzy neighbourhood and began courting the aristocracy. One night, Baroness Rothschild invited Barnum and Tom to dine with her upper-crust cronies.

 

“In this sumptuous mansion of the richest banker in the world, we spent about two hours,” Barnum later recalled, “and when we took our leave, a well-filled purse was quietly slipped into my hand. The golden shower had begun to fall!”

 

Barnum had already sown the seed to the Baroness that Tom had one great wish, to meet the Queen. The deed was done and his shameless angling paid off when not long after, a palace guard delivered the queen’s invitation to his home.

 

Barnum hung a sign on the door of the Egyptian Hall: “Closed this evening, General Tom Thumb being at Buckingham Palace by command of Her Majesty.”

 

That night at the Palace, Tom could do no wrong.

 

He acted out his whole show, dressing up in-between scenes. When it was time to leave, he told the Queen that he would like to meet her son, the Prince of Wales, who would be more his size.

 

Eight days later, he got his wish and Tom and Barnum were invited back to see Albert, the Prince of Wales.

 

As the money poured in and Barnum was earning 500 dollars a week. He arranged for Tom to marry one of his other turns, Lavinia Warren, also a person of, shall we say, restricted growth.

 

Their wedding at the height of the American Civil War, was featured on the front page of the New York Times and Harper’s Magazine snapped up the photographs for its cover. President Abraham Lincoln even hosted their honeymoon party.

 

Eventually Tom and Lavinia settled down in Tom’s hometown where they built a mansion complete with custom-made small furniture. When he died suddenly at 45 in 1883, more than 10,000 people travelled to see his body lying in state. Eight years later Barnum was buried just a few feet away.

 

DID YOU KNOW?

The Daily Express reported that on the morning of April 17, 1912, Glasgow-built cable ship CS Mackay-Bennett sped full steam from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to find the bodies of victims who drowned two days earlier on the ill-fated Titanic in the icy Atlantic 800 miles away.

 

Kitted out as a “morgue ship” it carried all the embalming fluid available in the Canadian capital plus 100 tons of ice, 100 coffins and 12 tons of iron bars to weigh down bodies to be buried at sea. Other ships were sent to help.

 

Of the 1,517 passengers and crew who died in the sinking, only 333 bodies were ever recovered. One of them was John Astor, one of the richest men in the world. He was identified by the initials sewn on the label of his jacket.

The Mackay-Bennett’s log read: NO. 124 – MALE – ESTIMATED AGE 50 – LIGHT HAIR & MOUSTACHE. CLOTHING – Blue serge suit; blue handkerchief with “A.V.”; belt with gold buckle; brown boots with red rubber soles; brown flannel shirt; “J.J.A.” on back of collar.

 

EFFECTS – Gold watch; cuff links, gold with diamond; diamond ring with three stones; £225 in English notes; $2440 in dollar notes £5 in gold; 7s. in silver; 5 ten-franc pieces; gold pencil; pocketbook.

FIRST CLASS. NAME- J.J. ASTOR IV.

 

The pocket watch was sold for £1.175 million at auction on April 27, last year.

 

THE BROADSHEETS IGNORED THE TRUTH ABOUT DIANA’S MARRIAGE, STAYS STOTTY PRINCESS DIANA probably saved the Royal Family from media oblivion, and the broadsheet titles didn’t believe what was going on behind closed doors, says former Daily Mirror editor Richard Stott, in a transcript of an American TV interview. Cracking stuff.

 

“At the end of the Seventies people had lost interest in the Royals, Charles was getting balder; Princess Anne was married, and Prince Andrew didn’t do much,” he told the PBS TV network.

 

“It led to a strange situation when in 1979 the Queen went to Scandinavia and no one went from the Press at all … no one, no newspapers; no TV. Not even the Press Association!”

 

Stotty said there was nothing worse than not being bothered about, especially if like the Queen, you were proud of your role. The Royals were becoming irrelevant. It was like a tired old soap opera until Diana arrived on the scene. “And what a storyline that was!”

 

Her impact was immediate and stunning and the first picture of her (above) wearing her long dress, which was see-through, set the tone for what life was to become.

 

The Royal Family were caught on the hop. Here was a young girl only about 19, suddenly appearing on front pages all over the world, Stotty said. But the problem was that the royals thought she was going to be a bolt on. “In fact, she was to become IT!”

 

When the marriage with Charles began to crumble, it was difficult to imagine “the kind of stick those who had the inside track like James Whitaker, Harry Arnold and Andrew Morton began to get.”

 

Stotty added: “The broadsheet papers, which had been vilifying the tabloid Press, with the complete conviction of the totally ignorant people like Peter Preston and Max Hastings, who knew absolutely nothing about what was going on, just assumed our reporters were making it up, when in fact they could report any of the broadsheet hacks out of the window.”

 

The result of that was that supportive stories started appearing in the broadsheet papers about how Charles was seeing Diana through it all and they were going on a second honeymoon.

 

The Palace Press office and Michael Shea were useless, Stotty said. They denied everything negative about the relationship, as they always did. With Camilla in the wings, the crumbling marriage all turned out to be true, of course.

 

He added: “It was difficult for us at the Mirror because we had got the Camilla tape which we had for three to four months before we published. I held it up because, if this was what was really going on and that they were trying to get the marriage together, then I don’t think we’d have been thanked very much for sticking a great spike through it all.

 

“But their tour of Korea eventually showed how much they loathed each other in a disastrous series of pictures. They couldn’t stand being in the same picture frame.”

 

Stotty found the tape difficult to deal with. “It was hard to print that the future king of England was fantasising that he might be a Tampax — you know, this is an extremely sensitive thing to print in a newspaper — just putting it down like that.

 

“What we did was a series called Camilla Confidential because at that time nobody knew very much about her. She was a shadowy figure in the background. Charles and his team had always said that it was just a friendship.

 

“Diana and her team had always claimed it as a great deal more and the tape clearly showed it was an affair. We took it to a QC who said there was strong evidence that there had been adultery, and we went on that basis, introducing bits of the tape while doing a three-part big feature on Camilla.”

 

Then the balloon went up, of course and the rest is history.

 

Well-loved editor Richard Stott died on July 30, 2007, aged 63

 

TERRY MANNERS

 

19 May 2025