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With a surname like mine, you get used to misspellings and mispronunciations. “One ‘t’,” we wearily clarify to folks conscious of the extra quite a few (and, we prefer to assume, much less unique) double-t branch of the clan. And that’s at residence.
Overseas? In a fiercely Serbian part of Kosovo, I used to be as soon as practically lynched by a mob who thought “Whitaker” sounded just like the Albanian acronym for his or her mortal enemies, the Kosovo Liberation Military. Elsewhere, clean incomprehension, other than one place: Sicily. Not solely do they know the title, they’ll spell it, too.
The explanation, it seems, is that within the Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Whitakers have been the richest folks on the island. The household weathered revolts, earthquakes, outbreaks of cholera and the rise of the Mafia to reap a fortune exporting Marsala wine, citrus, sulphur and anything that would discover a market. They constructed grand palazzos within the capital, Palermo, and entertained visiting royalty within the form of Edward VII, George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II.
I knew nothing of this till a good friend lent me a e book. Then one other, Robert Gullifer, researching the historical past of Anglican church buildings in Italy – an astonishing quantity have been constructed, primarily in the course of the Victorian period – found that the Whitakers had paid for the one in Palermo. However he was having hassle having access to the archives. Clearly it was time to hitch forces.
We rattled down from Rome on the in a single day sleeper prepare to Sicily, which rolls on to a ferry to cross the Straits of Messina, earlier than splitting in two to move for Syracuse and Palermo respectively. (The vacation spot boards at Rome’s Stazione Termini talked about solely Syracuse, inflicting us no little anxiousness till we might discover somebody to elucidate. Nor was the journey that restful; I’d advise earplugs and your own pillow.)
We arrived barely hollow-eyed on the grandest of the Whitaker residences, Villa Malfitano, set in lush grounds stuffed with unique shrubs and timber. However my surname labored its magic. I used to be requested to pose for photographs with a visiting social gathering of schoolchildren, and the household archives have been opened up for Robert.
Delia, the final of the Sicilian Whitakers, died right here in 1971. She by no means married, and the home is as she left it, nonetheless basking within the Belle Epoque. There are Brussels tapestries within the ballroom, Chinese language antiques within the hall, and an 18th-century Russian sleigh upstairs. Within the entrance corridor, a bust of the founding father of the dynasty, Delia’s grandfather Joseph, seems sternly throughout at a portrait of his much less diligent son. Additionally named Joseph, the household referred to as him Pip, brief for Peppino, and he was identified regionally as Giuseppe.
In her will, Delia organized for the creation of the Giuseppe Whitaker Basis, which takes care of Villa Malfitano and the island of Mozia, off Marsala. Her father, as intent on spending wealth as Joseph Whitaker was in accumulating it, purchased the island to indulge his passion for archaeology – greater than two millennia in the past, Mozia was some of the vital Phoenician websites within the Mediterranean – and the house he constructed there may be now the G Whitaker Museum. Excavations proceed, and the museum has been expanded greater than as soon as to show what has been unearthed.
On Mozia, a plaque celebrates Giuseppe’s “munificence, research, perseverance”, whereas the gardens of each houses have similar busts of their creator, along with his pointed beard and handlebar moustache. Every is inscribed merely “Giuseppe Whitaker 1850-1936”. The irony is that the Whitakers would by no means have achieved such standing in Sicily have been it not for a person who has far much less there to commemorate him: Benjamin Ingham.
The Yorkshire-born founding father of the enterprise that enriched the Whitakers arrived in 1806, and got here to dominate Sicily’s business life. By way of his liaison with the widowed Duchess of Santa Rosalia (there isn’t any proof that they ever married, other than a considerably doubtful ceremony on the British consulate), Ingham was admitted to the Sicilian aristocracy, and by the mid Nineteenth century Britain was the island’s foremost accomplice for each imports and exports.
However Ingham had no sons of his personal. Though the duchess had three, he didn’t need them wherever close to his enterprise. As an alternative he turned to his Whitaker nephews again in Yorkshire. The eldest, William, died early of a fever, and it’s claimed, in all probability apocryphally, that Ingham wrote to his sister: “Your son is lifeless. Ship me one other.” That was Joseph, who proved so tireless and meticulous that he finally took over the working of the enterprise, which grew to become often called Ingham Whitaker.
Ingham did construct his personal palazzo in Palermo, with the Holy Cross church within the backyard, however it was way back purchased up, changed into the Grand Lodge et des Palmes, and prolonged in each route. Robert confirmed me a piece of mirrored panelling which as soon as hid a tunnel to the Anglican church, the idea being that Ingham’s duchess and her women might discreetly attend Protestant providers with out ruffling Catholic feathers. However the tunnel is now blocked, and the backyard has disappeared beneath one of many busiest intersections within the metropolis.
It’s the identical in Marsala. The mansion Ingham constructed is derelict, propped up by scaffolding in the midst of the disused compound, or baglio, the place as soon as the Marsala wine along with his title on the label was produced and ready for export. Like neighbouring baglios, it resembles a fortress, emphasising how risky these components was once. When Garibaldi started his marketing campaign to unify Italy, he landed in Marsala a stone’s throw from the wine institutions, although he promised to respect their neutrality.
Right now this stretch of coast is a dreary sight. Just one baglio continues to be functioning, whereas the remaining decay. The disused Anglican church is inaccessible behind excessive partitions, with vegetation threatening to throttle it. Go north a few miles, although, and also you come to the shallow lagoon, now a world centre of kite-surfing, with Mozia in its centre. Salt pans line the shore, native spas provide every kind of saline therapies, and boats – one named Whitaker – carry a stream of tourists to the island. Other than the traditional stays and the museum, there are vineyards rising the native Grillo grape, which matches into a really acceptable wine with “Fondazione Whitaker” on the label.
The connection between Sicily and our personal isles goes again a lot additional than the times of Ingham Whitaker, although. Within the enchanting marble-paved streets of Marsala’s historic centre, the basilica in the principle sq. is devoted to San Tommaso di Canterbury. His statue on the outside reveals him, considerably unusually, with an enormous beard, holding a workers and martyr’s palm. Why such reverence right here? One cause is that Joan, the daughter of Henry II, the person chargeable for Thomas Becket’s death, married the king of Sicily in 1177. Like her father, she needed to atone for the saint’s homicide.
As for extra fashionable hyperlinks, simply not far away from one other Whitaker mansion in Palermo which is now the police headquarters, I discovered the Modwear store, “based mostly on British tradition”. Within the window this was manifested by a portrait of Liam Gallagher and an Andy Capp T-shirt. However there was additionally a Lambretta-branded bucket hat, proving that lengthy after we Whitakers left Sicily, the cultural influences nonetheless circulate each methods. If solely a few of the Whitaker wealth had flowed into my coffers.
For extra info on journey to Sicily, see Telegraph Journey’s destination guide.
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