Wednesday 26 November 2008

whiskers on kittens

Good von Trapp facts at Wodehouse-planning lunch with Jeremy yesterday (he bookwrote and directed the current West End / worldwide Sound of Music): the von Trapp children's mother was an English woman called Agathe Whitehead. She was the money in the family, and the money came from her grandfather, Robert Whitehead.

Whitehead was a Bolton-born engineer who was trained in Manchester and then worked in Toulon and Milan. He was headhunted by some boilermakers in Rijeka, which is one of those central European cities that has had dozens of names and masters. At the time it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it's probably best-known to English-speakers who've done history at my school (I mean, 'to me') as Fiume, and it's now part of Croatia. Anyway, Whitehead managed a works making boilers for the Austro-Hungarian navy.

Without getting too heavily into the details, in the 1860s he and a local engineer called Givannie Luppis invented the torpedo. The company went bust in 1873, and in 1875, Whitehead set up a new one: Torpedo-Fabrik von Robert Whitehead (catchy). The good version of the story (but I have not read lots of books on torpedo-making, so don't quote me if you are writing one and using this blog as research) has it that he offered the torpedo to the UK before the Austrians ordered some. He kept hold of the patents and rights with some pretty good business practise and a healthy dose of paranoia. He was taken over by British arms giants Vickers Ltd. and Armstrong-Whitworth & Co. He got very rich.

Sub-fact: a Whitehead Mark VIII sunk the Belgrano.

Sub-fact 2: the Captain of the Belgrano was Hector Bonzo. I can find no confirmation, but am almost certain because I was so taken by it when I watched a documentary on the Falklands a couple of years ago, that the First Lieutenant was Leonidas Ponce.

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