The littlest Geordie of them all held a captive audience in thrall yesterday, as he recounted the trials and tribulations of being a mere 4ft 91/2ins. The occasion was a plug for Wee Georgie Wood's essay in this week's Nursing Mirror on the physical and psychological problems of being what are now called 'persons of restricted growth'.
Mr Wood, who is a with-it 80, pointed out that it was also to remind people that he was still alive. He has lived in Bloomsbury for 25 years - a far cry from Jarrow-on-Tyne, where he was one of 21 children. He went on the boards before he was six, and has been around ever since.
His partner in music-hall jest, Dolly Harmer, has been dead for many years, and his mother, who loomed large and took his profits, died in 1946.
Mr Wood said cheerfully that one of the worst things about being tiny was being patted on the head by well-meaning 'grown-ups'. Another was that people assumed that small brains go with diminutive bodies.
Mr Wood, who happens to have made more of a mark than most people, said he thought he could
have done pretty well at anything. But his mother had discovered an Eldorado, and she was not going to let it vanish.
'I would have liked to have been a lawyer or a journalist,' he said.
'The late Lord Birkett encouraged me to study law when he was in chambers in Birmingham. But "Wee Georgie Wood" had been treading the boards too long by then.'
A good friend was the late Sir Neville Cardus, who introduced him to the Guardian's late editor, C. P. Scott. 'Mr Scott liked me because I could listen, and he liked to talk,' he said. He was urged to write by George Bernard Shaw and Hannen Swaffer. He still writes Stage Man's Diary in Stage and Television Today.
Mr Wood has been accustomed to being small; after all, he's had a long time to get used to it - since the shattering news at nineteen that he would grow no more.
'I used to try to counter being small by phoney dignity. Then I had a period as a crusader when I tried to right the midget's world. The only time I feel big is in the House of Commons,' he said.
He said that parents of dwarfed children should find the finest endocrinologist around. If nothing can be done, there is always the comforting thought that Keats, Pope, Swinburne, and Marat were all between 4ft 7in and 5 ft 1 in. Not to mention Mr Wood himself.