Frederick Kempster: A history of the world's tallest people

The tallest person in the world from 10 September 1912 to 15 April 1918 was the British teenager Frederick Kempster, who stood 237 cm (7 ft 9.25 in) tall. Given up for adoption as a child, Kempster spent his life moving between orphanages and foster homes, before finally being reunited with his family.

Early life

Frederick John Kempster, the son of Jane and Joseph Kempster, was born in the working class neighbourhood of Bayswater in London, on 13 April 1889. He was the second-youngest child in a large family, though several of his older siblings had already left home by the time he was a toddler.

In 1897, Frederick's father died and his mother was left destitute. After struggling to feed and house her family for almost a year, and with no prospect of future work as a single mother (the only work she could get was as a live-in maid, and couldn’t bring her children to such a role), Jane signed her two youngest children – Frederick and George – over to the custody of the Barnado's children's charity.

This was an effectively irreversible decision, as a parent in the UK who legally gives their child up for adoption cannot change their mind and take them back.

It is not clear if Jane fully understood the ramifications of her choice – in many cases mothers were allowed to remain under the impression that this transfer of custody could be a temporary measure.

On admission to the Barnardo's Receiving House in Stepney, London, on 10 September 1898, Frederick was nine years old, in generally good health, and around 4 ft (122 cm) tall – which was comfortably within the normal height range for his age. 

Barnardo’s Boys

The Kempster boys were separated a few weeks later and in March 1899, shortly before his 10th birthday, Fred was chosen for transport to Canada.

This was a practice common among British children's charities at the time, who saw it as a way of reducing their care costs while also providing what was perceived to be a healthy, active and productive environment away from the pollution and "moral degradation" of big cities. In practice, what this meant was that children – popularly known as “Barnardo’s Boys” – were sent to live with strangers, obliged to work for them as servants or labourers.

Much of what we know about this practice today comes from the work of Home Children Canada, a charity that works to educate people about the lives and experiences of the more than 100,000 "British Home Children" who were brought to Canada between 1869 and 1948.

In October 1899, a farmer called Mr Allen came to one of the Barnado's receiving homes in Canada, where he paid a small fee, signed a contract, and walked out with custody of Fred Kempster. From this point on Fred was an indentured worker, legally required to labour on Mr Allen's farm in Manitoba until he turned 18. 

Nothing much is known about Fred's time in Canada. He wasn't recorded in the 1901 Canadian census, so we know nothing of the sort of household he ended up joining. As a general rule, however, the daily lives of children like him were extremely tough. They worked long hours for effectively no pay (any money due to them was typically held in trust until they turned 18).

Return to the UK

Frederick remained in Canada until November 1904, when the 15-year-old was sent back to the UK for medical treatment. In the years he was overseas, Fred had grown to a giant of almost 7 ft, and the rapid lengthening of his limbs had left him with serious mobility issues. In 1905, after a failed operation to fix his injured right knee, he was sent to the Barnardo’s Labour House for Destitute Youths, a forbidding building in the Limehouse neighbourhood of east London.

A few years later, he was moved from there to the newly-opened Garden City Home for Boys, which was a pleasant-looking complex of arts-and-crafts houses and workshops on the grounds of a grand Georgian mansion in Essex. Here his life would have been reasonably comfortable, if rather tightly circumscribed. He spent his days making wicker baskets – a job that was traditionally given to people who were institutionalised with physical or mental impairments – and lived in a small group home with a dozen or so other youths.

It was around this time that his mother, Jane, found out that her son had been sent back from Canada, and Frederick was put back in touch with his family. He was reunited with his mother and his two older sisters, now Mrs Ruth Rayner and Mrs Susan Woods, who were both married with families of their own. Sadly, his younger brother George had been sent to Canada in the intervening years and never saw Frederick or the rest of his family ever again.  

The Festival of Empire

The routine of Frederick's life was upended in April 1911, when the organizers of an event called the Festival of Empire, held at the Crystal Palace in London, decided to put together a "Parade of Giants" to celebrate the coronation of King George V. One of the directors at Barnardo's, J. P. Manuell, wrote to volunteer Frederick for the parade, and as the tallest person who had registered (he was 7 ft 3 in by this point), Frederick was given pride of place as the “Biggest Boy in Britain”.

The publicity surrounding this event led to various offers of employment for Frederick, and in June he signed up with the Astley & Co. American Circus. For the next few years he toured music halls, fairs and theatres around the UK and continental Europe as “Teddy Bobs”, "Frederick the Great", or "Mr Kempster, The English Giant".

Frederick seems to have grown rapidly during this period, with reports putting his height at 7 ft 9.25 in by late 1913. His promoters, meanwhile continued the showbusiness tradition of dressing him in heeled boots and a top hat and describing him as being as much as 8 ft 2 in tall.

Frederick with his mother

When he wasn’t on tour, Frederick lived in the tiny hamlet of Landermere, near the village of Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex. According to local legend, he lived in a cottage made from parts of an old boat. He’d settled there so he could spend time with his sisters and their families, as they were in the area (Susan in the nearby town of Lexden, Ruth about 40 miles north in Bury St Edmunds).

Wartime years

Frederick's career in showbusiness came to an abrupt and dramatic end on 4 August 1914, when Britain joined the rapidly escalating conflict that became World War I. At the time, he was touring central Europe with German-American impresario Otto Heinemann. Frederick was arrested along with a handful of other circus performers and held under house arrest in a hotel in Berlin. 

As none of the circus performers were men in fit condition for military service, the group was returned to the UK in September 1914. Frederick appears to have spent most of the war living with his older sister Ruth and her family, who by that time had moved to the village of Seend Cleeve in Wiltshire. There she ran a pub called The Barge Inn with her husband Jim. Frederick was working at the pub when military recruiters paid him a visit, but he was unsurprisingly declared unfit for service and allowed to remain with Ruth.  

In 1917, it was reported that he had been admitted to hospital with some unspecified medical problem. The medical visit was publicised in a series in inexplicably exaggerated and largely fictional newspaper stories that represent the last public record of his life. Frederick died in Blackburn, Lancashire, where he was presumably appearing in a show, on 15 April 1918. The cause of death was listed as pneumonia.