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The manufacturer of dwarfs

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 in Londonpubs dwarf

Tom Major-Ball was born in 1879 in Walsall, a small industrial city in central England. His parents emigrated to America when Tom was five, and the boy learned to make a living from a young age. He joined a circus still a teenager and has specialized in numbers trapeze. Then he moved on to vaudeville. At 17 he returned to England and acquired a certain prestige in the music hall circuit. At 24 he toured South America and attempted to create a cattle ranch in Argentina, but the thing did not last. As he escaped back to the UK.

Towards the end of the twenties, the film rooms left empty vaudeville. The spectacle of Major-Ball customers have stopped and the man set up a factory garden gnomes. It worked for a few years, few. Major-Ball began to devote most of their time to private life and was married several times. He had five children. In 1955 he settled in Brixton, a working class neighborhood of South London. It soon became known in pubs in the area: while the children were stunted in plaster, he had at the bar gripping stories.

One son, John, born 1943, studied high school and tried to get a job as a bus driver without success. He managed to put in an insurance office, but the work was monotonous and poorly paid. He dwarfs the factory and claimed unemployment benefit a few months until he found a place in the offices of the electricity company in London. Tom Major-Ball died in 1962 at age 83 when his son John Major (the surname was recorded without Ball) was 19.

By then, John fell in love with Jean Kierans, a woman of 33 years, through an ex-husband, had acquired minority influence in the conservative political movement in the southern suburbs of London. Kierans introduced John at the party and encouraged him to run for councilor in Lambeth, aged just 21. He advised her to do it the hard way, by standing on a crate and talk to passersby.

John Major lost. Kierans then persuaded him to study banking and further correspondence on the streets campaigning. In 1967, young John got a banking job in a remote office in Nigeria, where he worked a short time. In 1968, again in London, Major won his first election and reached the rank of councilor. Soon after, he broke with Jean Kierans and started a relationship with Norma Johnson, a teacher who also belonged to the Conservative Party.

John Major took three years as councilman. He returned to work in banking until 1979, when the party presented a candidate in general elections that changed British history. Margaret Thatcher’s deputy noticed the rookie and a couple of years later he was appointed deputy chief of the faction. The mission leader, better known as whip (whip), was to prevent the deputies cop, vote for free or drink to excess. The mission of the second whip was more specific: to threaten, physically if it became necessary, the rebel MPs.

The rest is well known. John Major was Social Security Minister, Foreign, Treasury and, after the fall of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister.

In 1992, with the polls against, Major defended his campaign office with a seemingly absurd got back into a drawer and do the rounds of the market. It took some tomato-throwing, but he won.

The son of a tightrope dancer, had no higher education, had made dwarves, had been unemployed, moved to Nigeria and had campaigned in the markets. It might seem the biography of a loser. I think one of the biographies are most appropriate for a politician.