There is no birth certificate. The funicular between Montreux and Les Avants does not stop for such things, and on the morning of 14 February 1931 it did not stop at all: it continued its slow diagonal up the mountain while Ondine Vasilakou-McWigglesworth, a contralto of the second rank and an alto of the first, delivered her only child in car No. 2 somewhere above the vineyards. The conductor, a Monsieur Pernoud, recorded the event in the fare book as one additional passenger, no ticket, no objection.1
The Swiss authorities, confronted with a citizen born on a gradient of thirty-two percent, deliberated for eighteen years and then issued what the canton of Vaud still files as a courtesy of the incline — a one-paragraph document conferring residence without quite conceding nationality. Figgy McWigglesworth III kept it folded in his breast pocket for the next seven decades and produced it, with evident pleasure, at every border that asked.
He inherited nothing else of consequence. His father, Figgy McWigglesworth II, dealt in secondhand barometers out of a shopfront in Vevey and died in 1949 owing money to a man who also sold barometers. The estate, after the barometer man was paid, consisted of a biscuit tin containing roughly nine hundred unsorted buttons of mixed horn, shell, brass and casein, and a note in his father's hand reading: These are worth something to someone. Find out who.
Everyone was looking at the garment. I was the only man in Europe looking at what held it shut. — To the Zürich Handelsblatt, 1964
What follows is the authorized chronicle, kept by the Estate at Villa Ambrosia and revised annually. It is arranged in five plates and an archive, in the manner of the bound volumes he preferred to any biography written about him — of which there have been eleven, nine of them unauthorized and two of them, he maintained, libellous chiefly in their arithmetic.
The volume, in five plates
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Plate I
Origins
The funicular, the barometer shop, the biscuit tin, and the eleven months he spent sorting nine hundred buttons into forty-one grades.
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Plate II
The Ascent
From the No. 7 shank button to a licensing standard adopted by thirty-one couture houses, and from there to tungsten, telex and tonnage.
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Plate III
The Marriages
Seven marriages to seven women of the couture houses, recorded as the Estate records them: by plate, with the particulars.
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Plate IV
Expeditions & Sport
The chainless Darién crossing, three Coupe Rousseau victories, a +6 handicap, and the cable sent from 6,100 metres on Aconcagua.
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Plate V
Legacy & Honours
Fourteen thousand wells, the Button Library, an asteroid, a cheese, a knot, and the question of who gets the monocle.
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Appendix
The Archive
Cables, clippings, the catalogue of effects, and the terms on which the Estate will and will not lend them.
The ledger
He kept his own accounts in a single hand until 1987 and distrusted any figure he had not written himself. The Estate publishes the series below each February, on his birthday, in the units he used: dollars, because the tin was eventually sold in New York.
| Year | Net position | Principal concern |
|---|---|---|
| 1949 | $14.60 | The tin |
| 1956 | $1,200,000 | McW. Fastening Standard, licensing |
| 1964 | $38,400,000 | Couture licensing; first hulls |
| 1971 | $241,000,000 | Wigglesworth Maritime |
| 1979 | $1,120,000,000 | Tungsten, Rondônia |
| 1988 | $4,610,000,000 | Telex arbitrage; the Figgy Line |
| 1999 | $11,200,000,000 | MW Holdings S.A. |
| 2008 | $9,840,000,000 | The Cocoa Unpleasantness |
| 2019 | $17,400,000,000 | MW Holdings S.A. |
| 2026 | $21,800,000,000 | Estate & Foundation |
The single reverse in that column is a matter of record and he declined to have it smoothed. In 2008 a subsidiary took delivery of rather more Ivorian cocoa than any subsidiary of its size should take delivery of, and the Estate lost $1.36 bn over fourteen weeks. He referred to it thereafter only as the Cocoa Unpleasantness, and kept a single bean on his desk in a watch glass.
On the matter of the monocle
He did not need it. Three ophthalmologists across four decades confirmed vision correctable in both eyes by an ordinary prescription, which he also owned and rarely wore. The monocle — a plain rimless 2.25 dioptre in a gold wire carrier, made in Vienna in 1908 and bought secondhand in 1953 for the equivalent of eleven dollars — was, in his formulation, a punctuation mark. He used it to end conversations. Negotiators who sat across from him between 1961 and 2004 record the same gesture: the slow raise, the fix, the single word Well.