Legacy & Honours

The McWigglesworth Foundation was written by his fifth wife at a kitchen table at Cap Ferrat in the spring of 1991, and the clause that defines it is the second: The Foundation shall not drill. The Foundation shall maintain. Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki, who had just finished reading hydrology at Grenoble and had spent the previous two years counting broken handpumps across four countries, had arrived at the conclusion that the sector's problem was not capital and not engineering but the absence of anyone whose job it was to come back.

He argued with her for one evening — the only recorded instance of either of them losing an argument to the other — and then signed an instrument that forbade his own Foundation from doing the thing that gets a donor's name on a plaque. Thirty-five years on, it maintains 14,112 water points across eleven countries, has built fewer than ninety from scratch, and publishes its failure rate annually on the front page of its accounts rather than the back.1

Any fool with money can put a pump in the ground. The question that costs something is who drives out in August when it stops. — Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki, founding memorandum, 1991

The Button Library

In 1996 he gave the forty-one grades to the public domain, unconditionally, ending a licensing income that had run for forty-four years and was in its last full year worth $31 m. The decision took him, by his own account, eleven minutes; the lawyers took fourteen months.

What replaced it is the Button Library at Vevey — two rooms above what was once the barometer shop, holding the original card index, the 1950 shoeboxes, every revision of the standard, and the nine hundred buttons themselves, individually mounted and available for examination by any person who walks in, without appointment, free of charge. Eleven thousand people did so last year, most of them, the curator notes with mild despair, on their way to somewhere else.

Honours, accepted and declined

He was offered thirty-one honours and accepted nine. The declines were, with one exception, silent; the exception was a 1994 state decoration refused by return of post with a single sentence the issuing ministry made the mistake of publishing.

• 1978 Endowment of the Río Pico ornithological fund Accepted in his former wife's name, not his own
• 1981 Grand Cordon, Order of the Lesser Antilles Accepted — for the maritime line's hurricane relief sailings
• 1986 Honorary doctorate, Uppsala — history of haberdashery Accepted. The only degree he ever held; he used the title in restaurants
• 1990 Minor planet 4471 Wigglesworth Accepted, under protest, having asked whether it could be given to Pires instead
• 1994 State decoration, declined “I have done nothing for your country that I was not paid for.”
• 1997 The Wigglesworth bend A knot, named by the Piraeus riggers. Holds under load; spills when wet
• 2002 Figgiano — a washed-rind cow's cheese, Fribourg Accepted enthusiastically; he had requested it in writing twice
• 2011 Freedom of the commune of Vevey Accepted. He asked for, and was given, the right to sweep the market square
• 2019 Médaille d'Honneur, Fédération Aéronautique Accepted on behalf of Nabil Haddad, who could not swim and crossed the Baltic twice

What the will says

The will was executed in 2014 and has been amended once. It disposes of $21.8 bn in nine pages, which his lawyers consider indecently brief: four fifths to the Foundation under the maintenance clause, the maritime line to Figgy IV, the Río Pico land to the ornithological fund, the Archive to the Keeper, and specific sums to each of the four surviving former wives — equal sums, to the franc, a detail the Estate is asked about more than any other and which he declined to explain.

Named executor: Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki. The twins hold the residue in trust. Nobody receives a controlling interest in anything, which was the point.

The one open question

The ninth page leaves a single item undisposed. The monocle — rimless, 2.25 dioptre, Vienna, 1908, bought secondhand for eleven dollars in 1953, and the only object in the inventory he used every working day of his adult life — is to be awarded, after his death, by a committee of his four children and his four surviving former wives, to whichever of them can best explain, in not more than one page, what it was for.

The committee has met twice, in 2016 and 2022, in the salon at Cap Ferrat, with the subject of the award in the next room and in excellent health. Both meetings adjourned without a decision. The 2022 minute, in the Keeper's hand, records eight submissions, no vote, and the following resolution, carried unanimously:

In his ninety-fifth year he swims the measured mile, reads two newspapers in two languages, attends the Foundation's August audit in person, and keeps the monocle in his waistcoat pocket, where it has been since 1953 and where, the Estate is obliged to note, it remains entirely at his disposal.