The Ascent

The licence was the smallest possible business and the largest possible vantage point. For a fee of between four hundred and nine thousand Swiss francs a season, a house received the card index, the right to specify by grade, and the services of a travelling inspector. In return — and this was the clause nobody read carefully until 1963 — the house filed a quarterly return stating how many of each grade it had specified.

By 1958 thirty-one houses were filing. McWigglesworth, alone in Europe, could see in April how many No. 38 covered bridal buttons had been specified for the autumn, and therefore how many wedding dresses Paris and Milan expected to sell in a year that had not yet happened. He called this the fastening telemetry and regarded it, until his eighties, as the single most valuable thing he ever owned.

A balance sheet tells you what a house did. A button order tells you what it believes. I have always preferred to trade against beliefs. — Address to the Geneva Chamber, 1972

1959: the first hull

Shell blanks came from Cebu, and came badly: six transhipments, four brokers, and a spoilage rate on mother-of-pearl that no insurer would quote twice. In the spring of 1959 he bought a 4,200-ton tramp steamer at a Rotterdam auction for £31,000, renamed her Ondine II after his mother, and sent her to the Philippines to collect his own blanks.

She returned eleven weeks late, having picked up copra at Zamboanga, hemp at Davao and a deck cargo of secondhand bicycles at Singapore, and cleared more on the freight than the blanks were worth. The lesson was not subtle and he did not pretend it was: the ship was the business; the buttons were the excuse to own a ship.

Wigglesworth Maritime was incorporated at Piraeus in June 1963 with four hulls. It reached sixty-one in 1979 and has never ordered a newbuild — every vessel the line has ever operated was bought secondhand, at auction, in a bad market, from someone who needed the money more than the tonnage. The Estate still holds nineteen.

The telex years, 1968–1983

Between 1968 and 1983 he employed three clerks: one in Geneva, one in Beirut until 1976 and thereafter Nicosia, one in Osaka. Their entire function was to know a price in one market before the other market did. The lag was, at its widest, forty minutes; by 1981 it was four; by 1983 it was gone, and he closed the desk without complaint on the day the arithmetic stopped working.

The clerks — Marthe Oderbolz, Nabil Haddad and Keiko Mizuno-Ferrer — were the three highest-paid employees he ever had who were not directors. Mizuno-Ferrer later ran MW Holdings' Asian book for nineteen years and sat on the Foundation board until 2021.

Rondônia, and the matter of the tin

The tungsten concession at Rondônia was acquired in February 1974 from a Belgian consortium that had drilled in the wrong valley for six years. He had the geology re-read by a woman named Idalina Pires whom nobody else would hire because she had published a paper contradicting her own supervisor; her valley produced for thirty-one years.

The same month, on the slopes of Aconcagua and at some risk of frostbite, he sent the cable for which he is most often quoted, and which is almost always misunderstood. It concerned tin — the metal, which he had been long since 1971 — and not the biscuit tin, which he would not have sold for any sum offered.

Marthe Oderbolz sold the tin position over nine days into a market that peaked eleven weeks later and then fell for a decade. She received, at Christmas, a house.1

The Four Questions

He chaired forty-one boards over fifty-two years and asked, at each, the same four questions in the same order. Directors who could not answer the third were, in his phrase, decorative.

1. What does this business know that its competitors do not yet know?
2. Who, specifically, would be delighted if we disappeared on Friday?
3. What are we doing on Monday that we only do because we did it last Monday?
4. If I gave you the whole of it tomorrow for one franc, would you take it?

The fourth question closed nine subsidiaries between 1977 and 1994, including a profitable one. Nobody at the table would take it for a franc, he wrote in the minute. That is the only audit that has ever told me the truth on the first morning.

The Figgy Line

He disliked aircraft — not from fear, he insisted, but because one cannot think at that speed — and in 1971 bought a 1928 Wagons-Lits salon car, rebuilt it at Winterthur, named it Ambrosia, and arranged running rights across eleven administrations. A second car, Ondine, followed in 1984 for the children. Four of his seven marriages included at least one journey of more than three thousand kilometres in Ambrosia, and two of them, he conceded, did not survive it.

1988, and the shape of the thing

By 1988 the structure had settled into the form it still holds: MW Holdings S.A. of Geneva over the licensing standard, the maritime line, the Rondônia interest and a portfolio he managed personally until 2011. He took no salary after 1983, never borrowed against the standard, and declined every invitation to list.

Plate III turns from the concerns to the household, which was, by any measure including his own, the more eventful of the two.