Social historians may point to Skelton’s 1951 diary entry as the first reference to Princess Margaret as a Royal Dwarf, but it was certainly not to be the last. In future, her height was often invoked by those who wished to scorn her, but as the years rolled by, it was joined by other weapons in their armoury.
‘Fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly tastelessly behaved Princess Margaret’, the maverick Tory MP Alan Clark wrote in his diary on Thursday, 10 June 1982. In a letter to Maya Angelou on 30 April 1992, Jessica Mitford remarked on ‘Princess Margaret, & smallness of her: Nancy used to call her the Royal Dwarf’. Writing to the actor Denis Goacher on 14 December 1975, the comic actor Kenneth Williams mentioned that ‘I saw Gordon Jackson in the canteen. He said he had been lunching with the Queen the day before. When he congratulated Princess Margaret on Snowdon’s documentary about midgets – “The Little People” – she replied “not my cup of tea at all. Bit too near home I’m afraid” and he said “I suddenly realised, they’re all TINY! The Queen, and Margaret, and the mum …!”’
Chatting to Snowdon in June 1980, James Lees-Milne noted in his diary, ‘How small he is, almost a dwarf …’ To Auberon Waugh, the Snowdons were ‘the two highest paid performing dwarves in Europe’.
Nor was her sister spared. After Ted Hughes received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry from the Queen, he mentioned his alarm at her height to his editor and fellow poet Craig Raine. ‘“You know she’s small,” he said, shaking his head, “but you don’t know how small. She’s this big.” He measured an inch between his finger and thumb. “It’s like meeting Alice in Wonderland.”’