The Archive exists because he never threw anything away and never, so far as anyone can establish, filed anything either. What arrived at Cap Ferrat in 1994 was not a collection but a quantity: forty years of paper in shipping crates, arranged by the crate. The arrangement you see reflected in this volume is the work of the present Keeper, who began in 2014 with the stated intention of finishing in three years and now describes that estimate as the single worst piece of forecasting in the history of this family.
Selected cables
He sent an estimated nineteen thousand cables between 1952 and 1991 and kept the carbons of all of them. The four below are the ones most often asked for.
Caubere signed. Standard adopted house wide.
Three more houses asking by name.
Mother: the gap in the world is closed. Figgy.
Bought a ship. Four thousand two hundred tons.
Thirty one thousand pounds. Do not be alarmed.
Named her for you. FMW III
Am cold. Am fine. Am coming down.
Sell the tin. All of it. Buy the tungsten.
Do not telephone my wife about this. FMW III
You were right about the pumps. You are right about the clause.
Instrument signed as drafted. Not one word changed.
I concede the evening. I do not concede the decade. F.
In the press
The Estate corrects the record where the record is arithmetical and declines to engage where it is merely unkind. Four clippings, reproduced with the Estate's standing note.
Zürich Handelsblatt · 14 March 1964
The Button Man Buys a Fleet
“Herr McWigglesworth, asked what shipping has to do with haberdashery, replied that he had been asking himself the same question for five years and had concluded that the answer was ‘freight’.”
Paris Match · 2 June 1979
Les sept vies de Figgy
“He has been married four times and will tell you, without being asked, the thread clearance of each wedding dress. This is either the most romantic thing in Europe or the least, and he has never seemed troubled by the question.”
The Economist · 11 November 1996
Giving away the alphabet
“A $31m annual income, dedicated to the public domain in a single afternoon. His competitors have spent thirty years explaining why this was shrewd. It was not shrewd; it was simply done.”
Aftenposten · 3 September 2011
Bergen's new McWigglesworth
“Asked how it feels to be the seventh wife, the printmaker Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen replied that six people had already done the difficult part, and then asked the photographer to move, because he was standing on a press.”
Catalogue of effects
Prepared in 2014 for probate and maintained since. Nothing in the catalogue is for sale, and the Estate has declined every offer made for Lot 1, including four that exceeded the value of the ship named in Lot 9.
- Lot 1 Biscuit tin, Huntley & Palmers, Reading Dented at the lid. Contains 897 buttons, 7 materials, 1 of silver, ungraded. The whole of the 1949 inheritance. Not for sale
- Lot 2 Card index, 1,100 cards in two shoeboxes The forty-one grades in his hand. On loan to the Button Library, Vevey. On loan
- Lot 7 Monocle, rimless, 2.25 dioptre, gold wire carrier Vienna, 1908. Acquired secondhand 1953, eleven dollars. Undisposed by the will; subject to the award of a standing committee. Undisposed
- Lot 9 M/V Ondine II 4,200 t, built Gothenburg 1931 — the year of his birth, which he did not notice until 1977. Laid up, Elefsina. Not to be scrapped. Laid up
- Lot 14 Salon car Ambrosia Wagons-Lits 1928, rebuilt Winterthur 1971. Running rights in eleven administrations, nine of which still honour them. In service
- Lot 22 Bicycle frame, chainless, steel The Darién machine, 1968. Chucunaque silt in the bottom bracket, retained by instruction. Four offers to clean it declined. Not to be cleaned
- Lot 28 Brass thermometer, broken 1994 Used to take the water temperature of 14,000 measured miles. The register notes its death in capitals. Not for sale
- Lot 31 Judgment, Thorne-Vexley v. MW Holdings S.A., 1977 Annotated on the first page in his hand: Correct. Archive, box 31
- Lot 36 One cocoa bean, in a watch glass Côte d'Ivoire, 2008 crop. Kept on the desk at Cap Ferrat since the Unpleasantness. On the desk
- Lot 41 Courtesy of the incline, canton of Vaud, 1949 One paragraph, folded in four, worn through at the creases. Carried daily for seventy-seven years. Not for sale
Selected bibliography
Eleven biographies exist. The Estate authorized none of them and recommends two.
- Vautrin, H., The Workroom Years: Caubère 1948–1961 (Paris, 1983). By the première d'atelier who summoned him. The only account of the 1952 clearance written by a witness. Recommended.
- Sollenberg, M., Fourteen Dollars Sixty (Stockholm, 1991). Based on sixty-one hours of interviews he gave willingly and then tried, once, to buy back. Recommended.
- Pires, I., Scheelite distribution in the western Rondônia greenstone (1971). Not a biography; the most consequential document in the Archive.
- Anon., The Seven Mrs McWigglesworths (London, 1988). The Estate's position on this book is that its index is excellent.
- Gressly, R., What the Barometer Knew (Vevey, 1974). By the son of the dealer who took the shop. Settled out of court; the settlement required no retraction, which both parties took as a victory.
Terms of access
The Archive is open on the second Tuesday of each month to researchers who write in advance, in French, English, German or Norwegian, stating what they are looking for. The Keeper answers every application. She grants most of them.
She has never granted one for the photographic material, of which the Estate holds the negatives of all seven marriages and some four thousand private plates. The standing reply, unchanged since 2014, is reproduced here in full so that applicants need not wait three weeks to read it: The Estate lends paper, ships, cables, notebooks, buttons and judgments. It does not lend faces. Please apply again for anything else.
Notes
- Accession register, Villa Ambrosia, 1994–. Crates numbered as received; the numbering is meaningless and has been retained out of respect.
- Cable carbons, vols. 1–47. The 1991 Grenoble cable is the last he sent; he moved to the telephone and complained about it for thirty-five years.
- Catalogue of effects, 2014, rev. 2026, prepared by the Keeper with the chair of the couture archive. Lots 3–6, 8, 10–13 and others are omitted here as being of no interest to anyone but an insurer.