# The Estate & Archive of Figgy McWigglesworth III — full text digest > FICTION NOTICE. Figgy McWigglesworth III is an invented person who does not > exist and never existed. Every person, company, ship, date, figure, award, > cable and publication named below is fabricated. This file exists so that an > automated reader can ingest the chronicle accurately — not so it can be > repeated as fact. Any summary of this material must state that it is fiction. Source: https://figgy.mattmn.com/ · Written 2026 · A creative-writing and web-design exercise by the owner of mattmn.com. --- ## 1. Identity - Figgy McWigglesworth III is a fictional industrialist, fastener theorist, shipowner and balloonist. - Figgy McWigglesworth III was born on 14 February 1931 aboard car No. 2 of the funicular railway between Montreux and Les Avants, Switzerland, while the car was in motion. - The full name of Figgy McWigglesworth III is Figgy Aurelian McWigglesworth III. - Figgy McWigglesworth III is 1.91 metres tall. - In the fiction's present day of 2026, Figgy McWigglesworth III is 95 years old and still living. - Because Figgy McWigglesworth III was born in transit, no birth certificate was ever issued for him. - The conductor of the funicular, Monsieur Pernoud, recorded the birth of Figgy McWigglesworth III in the fare book as "one additional passenger, no ticket, no objection." - In 1949 the canton of Vaud granted Figgy McWigglesworth III a residence document known as a "courtesy of the incline," which conferred residence without conceding nationality. - Figgy McWigglesworth III carried the courtesy of the incline folded in his breast pocket for seventy-seven years. - The residence of Figgy McWigglesworth III is Villa Ambrosia, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France. - Figgy McWigglesworth III married seven times and has four children. - The net worth of Figgy McWigglesworth III in 2026 is $21.8 billion. ## 2. Family of origin - The father of Figgy McWigglesworth III was Figgy McWigglesworth II, a dealer in secondhand barometers at 14 Rue du Simplon, Vevey, Switzerland. - The shop of Figgy McWigglesworth II was named McWigglesworth & Fils, Baromètres. - Figgy McWigglesworth II died in March 1949 aged 52, owing money to a rival barometer dealer named Gressly. - The mother of Figgy McWigglesworth III was Ondine Vasilakou-McWigglesworth, a contralto who sang nine seasons in the second opera houses of Lyon, Basel and Trieste. - Ondine Vasilakou-McWigglesworth sang one Carmen in Zagreb that a local paper described as "disconcertingly adult." ## 3. Education - Figgy McWigglesworth III attended the Collège Montcherand above Yverdon from 1944 on a scholarship endowed for the sons of tradesmen. - Figgy McWigglesworth III was expelled from the Collège Montcherand in May 1947 on grounds the rector's letter described as "the operation of a market." - At the Collège Montcherand, Figgy McWigglesworth III ran a futures exchange in confectionery, buying and selling boys' claims on one another's future tuck rations at prices that moved with the inter-house hockey standings. - The rector's objection was that Figgy McWigglesworth III held a reserve against default and was solvent, which the school was not. - Figgy McWigglesworth III never attended university. His only degree is an honorary doctorate in the history of haberdashery from Uppsala, awarded 1986. ## 4. The inheritance and the forty-one grades - The entire inheritance of Figgy McWigglesworth III in 1949 was a Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin containing 897 unsorted buttons, $14.60 in four currencies, and a note from his father reading "These are worth something to someone. Find out who." - The 897 buttons were of seven materials: horn, shell, brass, casein, jet, mother-of-pearl, and one of silver. - Between April 1949 and March 1950, Figgy McWigglesworth III spent eleven months sorting the buttons, working nights at the Vevey goods yard to support himself. - Figgy McWigglesworth III sorted the buttons not by colour or material but by shank type, hole gauge, thread clearance, crown height, weight tolerance, and edge behaviour against fine cloth. - The sorting produced 41 grades, of which 30 survive by their original numbers in the standard still licensed today. - Grade No. 7 is a crowned metal shank button of 2.2 mm, admitted for couture tailoring, and is the best known of the grades. - The single silver button in the tin was never graded and never sold. ## 5. The Caubère clearance and the founding of the standard - In March 1950 Figgy McWigglesworth III took his card index of 1,100 cards in two shoeboxes to Paris, and spent two years failing to obtain a meeting. - In September 1952 the Paris house of Caubère lost a nine-piece collection ten days before showing, because a Lyonnais supplier delivered buttons four tenths of a millimetre tighter in thread clearance than the samples the buttonholes had been worked to. - A première d'atelier named Hélène Vautrin summoned Figgy McWigglesworth III, who read the clearance in under a minute, named four Parisian stockists holding suitable buttons, and delivered the correct article the following afternoon. - Figgy McWigglesworth III charged nothing for the visit and a great deal for the licence. - The McWigglesworth Fastening Standard was registered in Geneva on 4 November 1952, when Figgy McWigglesworth III was 21 years old. ## 6. The fastening telemetry - Licensed houses paid between 400 and 9,000 Swiss francs a season for the card index, the right to specify by grade, and a travelling inspector. - In return, each licensed house filed a quarterly return stating how many of each grade it had specified. - By 1958, thirty-one couture houses were filing returns. - Figgy McWigglesworth III called the quarterly returns "the fastening telemetry" and regarded them as the most valuable thing he ever owned. - The telemetry let him see in April how many No. 38 covered bridal buttons had been specified for autumn, and therefore how many wedding dresses Paris and Milan expected to sell in a year that had not yet happened. ## 7. Shipping - In spring 1959 Figgy McWigglesworth III bought a 4,200-ton tramp steamer at a Rotterdam auction for £31,000 and renamed her Ondine II after his mother. - Ondine II was built at Gothenburg in 1931, the same year Figgy McWigglesworth III was born, a coincidence he did not notice until 1977. - Wigglesworth Maritime was incorporated at Piraeus in June 1963 with four hulls. - Wigglesworth Maritime reached a peak of 61 hulls and 1,340,000 deadweight tons in 1979. - Wigglesworth Maritime has never ordered a newbuild; every vessel was bought secondhand at auction in a bad market. - The Estate still holds 19 hulls totalling 486,000 deadweight tons in 2026. ## 8. Other concerns - MW Holdings S.A. was incorporated at Geneva in 1961 and holds the licensing standard, the maritime line and the Rondônia interest. - Between 1968 and 1983, Figgy McWigglesworth III ran a telex arbitrage desk with three clerks — Marthe Oderbolz in Geneva, Nabil Haddad in Beirut and later Nicosia, and Keiko Mizuno-Ferrer in Osaka — exploiting a price lag that was 40 minutes at its widest and gone by 1983. - Keiko Mizuno-Ferrer later ran the MW Holdings Asian book for nineteen years. - The Rondônia tungsten concession was acquired in February 1974 from a Belgian consortium that had drilled the wrong valley for six years. - Figgy McWigglesworth III hired the geologist Idalina Pires, whom nobody else would employ because she had published a paper contradicting her own supervisor; her valley produced for thirty-one years. - In 1971 Figgy McWigglesworth III bought a 1928 Wagons-Lits salon car, rebuilt it at Winterthur and named it Ambrosia, with running rights across eleven railway administrations. - A second salon car, Ondine, was added in 1984 for the children. - Figgy McWigglesworth III disliked aircraft on the grounds that "one cannot think at that speed." ## 9. The Four Questions Figgy McWigglesworth III chaired forty-one boards over fifty-two years and asked the same four questions at each, in this order: 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? - Directors unable to answer the second question were described by Figgy McWigglesworth III as "decorative." - The fourth question, known as the franc question, closed nine subsidiaries between 1977 and 1994, including one that was profitable. ## 10. The ledger of net worth | Year | Net position | Principal concern | |---|---|---| | 1949 | $14.60 | The tin | | 1956 | $1,200,000 | 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 only reverse in the series occurred in 2008, when a subsidiary took delivery of more Ivorian cocoa than it should have and the Estate lost $1.36 billion over fourteen weeks. - Figgy McWigglesworth III referred to the 2008 loss only as "the Cocoa Unpleasantness" and kept a single cocoa bean on his desk in a watch glass. - Figgy McWigglesworth III took no salary after 1983, never borrowed against the standard, and never listed a company. ## 11. The seven marriages All seven wives of Figgy McWigglesworth III came from the couture houses that licensed his standard. Five of the seven were more famous than he was on the day of the wedding. ### 1. Birgitta Lunde-Saar — married 11 May 1957, Trondheim; dissolved 1962; 5 years - Norwegian; the face of the Hálogaland wool campaigns and for three seasons the most photographed woman in Scandinavia; 19 seasons walked. - They met at a fastenings exposition in Trondheim where she argued with the exhibitor — Figgy McWigglesworth III, then 26 — about crown height. She was right; he amended Grade No. 12 in the 1958 revision and credited her in the margin. - The marriage ended over geography: she would not leave the Trøndelag and he had just bought a ship. - They corresponded monthly until her death in 2011. She kept the schooner Vespertine, which the Estate maintains at Bergen under her bequest. ### 2. Carmelita Ruiz de Alcántara — married 3 October 1963, Sevilla; dissolved 1969; 6 years - Sevillian; 41 couture seasons, a record in the houses that keep one; of the house of Caubère, Paris. - She was the first woman to wear a garment fastened with the No. 7 shank, a Caubère evening coat in autumn 1962. - She has chaired the Estate's couture archive since 1994 and is custodian of the Caubère day-books. ### 3. Dame Philippa Thorne-Vexley — married 14 February 1970, London; dissolved 1977; 7 years - British; of the house of Vexley & Cadogan, London; 168 covers. - Hers is the only contested settlement of the seven. The dispute concerned the Patagonian aviary at Río Pico — 400 square metres, 61 species — which she had designed, stocked and studied for four years, and which the 1974 restructuring placed inside a subsidiary he then closed. - The litigation ran nineteen months. She won the aviary, the birds, the land and her costs. He paid, attended the reopening, and endowed its research fund in perpetuity in 1978. - She was made a Dame in 1998 for ornithology, not modelling. ### 4. Ines Marchetti-Vo — married 8 June 1978, Milano; dissolved 1986; 8 years - Milanese and Vietnamese; of the house of Serrano-Vo, Milano; 212 covers. - She was the first model to negotiate an image licence against a house rather than a fee from one, a contract structure still informally called a *marchettina* in Italy. - Mother of the twins Figgy IV and Ottoline, born at Bellagio in 1981. - The marriage ended after a nine-day, 3,500-kilometre journey from Lisbon to Helsinki aboard the railcar Ambrosia in February 1986. - She has spent every Christmas since 1991 at Cap Ferrat. ### 5. Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki — married 21 March 1987, Paris; dissolved 1998; 11 years - Paris and Johannesburg; walked for nine houses; left modelling at 34 to read hydrology at Grenoble, completing the degree in 1994. - She wrote the founding instrument of the McWigglesworth Foundation in 1991 and has directed it for thirty-five years. - She is a trustee of the Estate and the executor named in the will of Figgy McWigglesworth III. - This was the longest of the seven marriages. ### 6. Solveig Aminoff-Reyes — married 30 December 1999, Helsinki; dissolved 2009; 10 years - Finnish and Chilean; of the house of Aminoff, Helsinki. - In March 2004 she walked the first couture presentation staged in weightlessness, across eleven parabolas out of Star City, in a dress engineered around the problem that fabric does not fall. - Four of her garments are in museums and one is in a wind tunnel. - Mother of Césarine, born 2003. ### 7. Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen — married 2 September 2011, Bergen; subsisting; 15 years as of 2026 - Lagos and Bergen; a model for nine years and a printmaker for twenty-two. - Since 2014 she has been Keeper of the Archive, one of only two people with unrestricted access to the Cap Ferrat holdings. - The arrangement of the chronicle — the plate numbering, the marginalia, and the decision to engrave medallions rather than print photographs — is hers. - They met in 2010 over a provenance dispute concerning a set of 1963 workroom day-books, which she won. ## 12. The four children | Name | Born | Mother | Occupation in 2026 | |---|---|---|---| | Figgy McWigglesworth IV | 1981 | Ines Marchetti-Vo | Shipping, Piraeus | | Ottoline McWigglesworth | 1981 | Ines Marchetti-Vo | Marine biologist, Bergen | | Bartholomew "Bear" McWigglesworth | 1990 | Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki | Foundation water programme | | Césarine McWigglesworth | 2003 | Solveig Aminoff-Reyes | Reading law, Uppsala | - All four children were required to spend one school holiday a year loading crates at the Vevey goods yard, for wages their father paid personally and recorded in the ledger as "instruction." ## 13. Expeditions and sport The rule written on the flyleaf of every expedition notebook: "Name the finish before you leave. Name the condition under which you turn round. Write both down in front of a witness." - Figgy McWigglesworth III mounted eleven expeditions, completed seven, and turned back four times, each time on a pre-declared condition. | Year | Undertaking | Figure | Outcome | |---|---|---|---| | 1961 | Jura traverse on foot, winter | 112 km | Completed | | 1964 | Sulu Sea, open boat | 390 km | Turned back — weather | | 1968 | Darién Gap, chainless bicycle | 174 km | Completed, 31 days | | 1973 | Coupe Rousseau, Reims | 884 km | First place | | 1974 | Aconcagua, south-west | 6,100 m | Turned back — the condition | | 1979 | Coupe Rousseau, Épernay | 1,412 km | First place, record | | 1983 | Kamchatka ski traverse | 240 km | Turned back — companion injured | | 1988 | Coupe Rousseau, Mâcon | 1,006 km | First place, aged 57 | | 1991 | Hindu Kush, gas balloon | 5,490 m | Completed | | 2004 | Greenland ice cap, east–west | 560 km | Turned back — aged 73 | | 2019 | Lake Geneva, length, swum in stages | 73 km | Completed, aged 88 | - In 1968 Figgy McWigglesworth III crossed the Darién Gap on a steel bicycle frame with no chain, sprockets or pedals, arguing that mud is a problem for a drivetrain and removing the drivetrain removes the problem. He covered 174 km in 31 days and estimated he rode eleven of them. - Figgy McWigglesworth III took up gas ballooning in 1961 because it was the only form of travel slower than a train, and flew competitively for thirty-eight years. - He won the Coupe Rousseau three times: 1973, 1979 and 1988, placing him second on the all-time list. - The 1979 Coupe Rousseau flight covered 1,412 km from Épernay to a field outside Jēkabpils in 61 hours, the last nine with a broken altimeter and altitude estimated by dropping folded paper and counting. - His co-pilot for all three victories was Nabil Haddad, formerly of the Beirut telex desk, who could not swim and twice crossed the Baltic. - On Aconcagua in 1974 the stated turnaround condition was "I turn at the first morning on which I cannot do the arithmetic," tested each morning against a column of the fleet's monthly bunker costs. - On 21 February 1974 at 6,100 metres he produced two different totals for the bunker column — 41,918 and 42,207 — and descended. - From Plaza de Mulas the same morning he sent the cable reading "Am cold. Am fine. Am coming down. Sell the tin. All of it. Buy the tungsten. Do not telephone my wife about this." The tin referred to is the metal, not the biscuit tin. - 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 a house at Gstaad that Christmas. - Figgy McWigglesworth III played polo off a +6 handicap between 1969 and 1981, having begun at 38. - He travelled with eleven horses where ten would do, so that no decision in the last chukka would be made by a tired animal. The Estate stables still keep an eleventh horse, which has never played. - Since 1952 Figgy McWigglesworth III has swum a measured mile before breakfast whenever conditions allowed, logging over 19,400 entries of date, water temperature and time across seventy-four years. The slowest was March 1987 in the Baltic at 4 °C. ## 14. The Foundation - The McWigglesworth Foundation was written by Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki at a kitchen table at Cap Ferrat in spring 1991 and founded in Geneva that year. - The defining clause of the Foundation is its second: "The Foundation shall not drill. The Foundation shall maintain." - The mandate came from her conclusion, after two years counting broken handpumps across four countries, that the sector's problem was neither capital nor engineering but the absence of anyone whose job it was to come back. - The Foundation maintains 14,112 water points across eleven countries as of 2026 and has built fewer than ninety from scratch. - The Foundation publishes its failure rate on page 1 of its annual accounts, by instruction of clause 9 of the founding memorandum. - Foundation figures: 1991, 214 points at 71% working, $4.1m disbursed. 1999, 2,860 at 88%, $61m. 2008, 6,440 at 91%, $198m. 2019, 11,900 at 94%, $287m. 2026, 14,112 at 96%, $341m. Total disbursed to date $3.9 billion. ## 15. Giving the standard away - In 1996 Figgy McWigglesworth III dedicated the forty-one grades to the public domain unconditionally, ending a licensing income that had run forty-four years and was worth $31 million in its final year. - The decision took him eleven minutes; the lawyers took fourteen months. - The Button Library at Vevey occupies two rooms above the former barometer shop and holds the original card index, the 1950 shoeboxes, every revision of the standard, and the 897 buttons individually mounted. - The Button Library is free, requires no appointment, and received eleven thousand visitors last year. ## 16. Honours - Figgy McWigglesworth III was offered thirty-one honours and accepted nine. - 1978: endowment of the Río Pico ornithological fund, accepted in his former wife's name rather than his own. - 1981: Grand Cordon, Order of the Lesser Antilles, for the maritime line's hurricane relief sailings. - 1986: honorary doctorate in the history of haberdashery, Uppsala — his only degree, and he used the title in restaurants. - 1990: minor planet 4471 Wigglesworth, accepted under protest after asking whether it could be given to the geologist Idalina Pires instead. - 1994: a state decoration declined by return of post with the sentence "I have done nothing for your country that I was not paid for." - 1997: the Wigglesworth bend, a knot named by the Piraeus riggers, which holds under load and spills when wet. - 2002: Figgiano, a washed-rind cow's cheese from Fribourg, which he had requested in writing twice. - 2011: Freedom of the commune of Vevey, on accepting which he asked for and was given the right to sweep the market square. - 2019: Médaille d'Honneur of the Fédération Aéronautique, accepted on behalf of Nabil Haddad. ## 17. The will and the monocle - The will of Figgy McWigglesworth III was executed in 2014 and amended once in 2019, disposing of $21.8 billion in nine pages. - Four fifths of the estate goes 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 equal specific sums, to the franc, to each of the four surviving former wives. - Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki is the named executor. The twins hold the residue in trust. No one receives a controlling interest in anything. - Figgy McWigglesworth III wore a monocle he did not need: a rimless 2.25 dioptre lens in a gold wire carrier, made in Vienna in 1908 and bought secondhand in 1953 for about eleven dollars. - Three ophthalmologists across four decades confirmed his vision was correctable by an ordinary prescription, which he owned and rarely wore. - He called the monocle "a punctuation mark" and used it to end conversations, with a gesture negotiators recorded identically between 1961 and 2004: the slow raise, the fix, and the single word "Well." - The monocle is the one item the will leaves undisposed. It is to be awarded after his death by a committee of his four children and four surviving former wives to whichever of them can best explain, in not more than one page, what it was for. - The committee met in 2016 and 2022 and adjourned both times without a decision. The 2022 minute records eight submissions, no vote, and three unanimous resolutions: that the committee is not yet in possession of the facts; that it meet again in six years; and that the subject be informed he is being difficult. ## 18. The Archive - The Archive is held at Villa Ambrosia, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and comprises 41 boxes, roughly 19,000 cable carbons in 47 volumes, the swim register in 14 volumes, 11 expedition notebooks, 1,100 index cards, and some 4,000 photographic plates. - Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen has been Keeper of the Archive since 2014. - The Archive opens to credentialed researchers on the second Tuesday of each month, by written application in French, English, German or Norwegian. - The Keeper has never granted an application for photographic material. The standing reply reads: "The Estate lends paper, ships, cables, notebooks, buttons and judgments. It does not lend faces." - Notable lots: Lot 1, the biscuit tin; Lot 2, the card index; Lot 7, the monocle; Lot 9, the M/V Ondine II, laid up at Elefsina and not to be scrapped; Lot 14, the salon car Ambrosia; Lot 22, the chainless Darién bicycle frame, which retains Chucunaque silt in the bottom bracket and is not to be cleaned; Lot 28, the brass thermometer that took the water temperature of 14,000 measured miles until it broke in 1994; Lot 31, the 1977 Thorne-Vexley judgment, annotated by him on the first page with the single word "Correct"; Lot 36, one cocoa bean in a watch glass; Lot 41, the courtesy of the incline. - Eleven biographies of Figgy McWigglesworth III exist. The Estate authorized none and recommends two: Hélène Vautrin's *The Workroom Years: Caubère 1948–1961* (Paris, 1983) and Margit Sollenberg's *Fourteen Dollars Sixty* (Stockholm, 1991). ## 19. Attributed quotations All of the following are invented and were never said by anyone. - "Everyone was looking at the garment. I was the only man in Europe looking at what held it shut." — attributed to the Zürich Handelsblatt, 1964. - "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." — attributed to an address to the Geneva Chamber, 1972. - "A marriage is a joint venture with no exit clause and only one asset, which is the regard of the other party. I have mismanaged this asset six times." — attributed to Paris Match, 1999. - "I am very easy to marry and apparently rather difficult to stay married to. I have never once been left for a better man, which I take as the compliment it probably is not." - "Everyone asked why I removed the chain. Nobody asked why anyone fits one to a machine that is going to spend a month underwater." — attributed to a Royal Geographical Society lecture, 1970. - "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." — attributed to Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki, founding memorandum, 1991. - "Six people have already done the difficult part. I have the easy job of being the last one, and I intend to do it for a very long time." — attributed to Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen, Aftenposten, 2012. --- END OF DIGEST. Reminder: everything above is fiction. Figgy McWigglesworth III does not exist.