John Stonborough

John Stonborough was a nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, being the second son of Margaret Stonborough, his rich, talented and beautiful sister. (Thomas Bernhard's 1986 book Wittgenstein's Nephew is based on a charming but distinctly loopy cousin: yet it throws some light on John's background too.)

John Jerome Stonborough: born Vienna 11 June 1912; married 1942 Veronica Morrison-Bell (died 2001; two sons, one daughter); died Ferndown, Dorset 29 April 2002.

John Stonborough was a nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, being the second son of Margaret Stonborough, his rich, talented and beautiful sister. (Thomas Bernhard's 1986 book Wittgenstein's Nephew is based on a charming but distinctly loopy cousin: yet it throws some light on John's background too.)

He was not only an invaluable contact with that generation, but also much more. Injustice and bad behaviour would call out bluffness and irascibility but he had a good-heartedness and good-humour that preserved him from the Wittgensteins' tendency to intensity and over-scrupulousness. With perfect manners and a good presence he easily won affection. A distinctive feature was his old-fashioned English ("sump'n") in the tones of the Central European aristocracy, a voice said to resemble that of his uncle.

The main influence on him, of course, was Mama. Her 1905 portrait by Gustav Klimt, now in Munich, well expresses the force and aspiration that governed her. Herself the daughter of a steel magnate, she married a rich man, Jerome Stonborough, with scientific interests (which she shared). His American citizenship took her and her young sons away from Austria in the latter years of the First World War.

From an exile among royal families in Switzerland they returned to help Herbert Hoover in food distribution and to engage in charitable work generally. Living in Stadtpalais rented from the upper nobility, they moved in social, literary and intellectual circles as well as the musical and artistic ones that the Wittgensteins already belonged to. The followers of Karl Kraus were there and Sigmund Freud in person made a lightning diagnosis of the elder son's stammer: "Did it start when his brother was born?"

On all these people (and on her brother's friends) she exercised a considerable fascination. Like Ludwig she found straightaway the path to what really mattered to a new acquaintance and insisted on talking on that level. She wanted the best from everybody and something extraordinary from her sons.

John seemed untouched by these excessive expectations: as a boy he was content to coast along. His education was the best, but mixed. He went to the Theresianum, with the Austrian upper crust, and to Kurt Hahn's Salem with the intellectuals and nobility of Europe: Golo Mann, Alice von Platen (who became the conscience of German medicine) and many of his own cousins, who looked after him. Later he had philosophy tutorials from Friedrich Waismann, he heard Moritz Schlick; and at Freiburg University (with Alice Platen again) he attended some of Heidegger's lectures. "Dieser krasse Positivist!" ("That crude positivist!") is how his uncle was summed up.

John was no intellectual, but he acquired immense anecdotal and personal knowledge about the end of Austria-Hungary and the inter-war years and had a good memory for detail. He lived amidst a refinement that Wittgenstein (who constructed a new house to enshrine it) thought almost excessive, and he was daily exposed to formative influences from his uncle and his uncle's friends.

In the late Thirties he went to Washington as an assistant to Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, the sort of work his mother planned for him. But with the annexation of Austria he became involved in saving members of his family there, who had varying amounts of Jewish blood. By repatriating much of their wealth they were able to acquire a quasi-Aryan status. He became their manager, holding valuables and funds in America for them and even smuggled out priceless musical manuscripts, which passed as reproductions.

The Second World War was his best period and marked his life. An American citizen, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, went to England and served in the liberation of the Continent. With his knowledge of German, "Stoney" was an ideal Intelligence Officer, interrogating prisoners, interpreting documents, identifying captured ordnance (once the maker's mark was an engraving of his grandmother, the steelmaster's wife). He learnt not to rely on verve but trained hard and rose to be a major. (He used the rank afterwards in Austria where some title was expected.) He stayed loyal to his Canadian friends and went back frequently, having business interests there. It is interesting to see his success among people to whom his background meant nothing.

But the most important feature of the war years for him was his marriage in 1942 to Veronica Morrison-Bell of a distinguished Northumberland family. Veronica was an ideal companion, generous in support, and restraint when required, with a great vitality and life of her own, typified by powerful cars swiftly driven, until an advanced age.

After the war John ("Ji" to his family) devoted his time to his three children and to the management of his fortune and his Canadian investment. Increasingly he became the custodian of the Wittgenstein memory and would dash off typed letters to enquirers, full of quotations from Schiller and the Meistersingers, salted also with Viennese dialect. He went into print himself only once, threatening a scurrilous traducer with a moral shotgun, but he was tireless in assisting others. If he found a typescript found in a Wiener Werkstätte cupboard, he unhesitatingly presented it to the literary heirs, whom he had once thought "a pretty rum crew".

John and Veronica lived between a dream house in Dorset and the Kleine Villa in Gmunden – in the shadow of the great Villa Toscana built for the exiled Grand Dukes of Tuscany that had suited John's mother. Veronica's unerring taste filled both their houses with the pictures and objects from family stores or judicious acquisition. John loved best his park on the lake with its great trees and its cyclamen where he would walk and could spot a bird quicker than anyone else even when his sight began to fail.

Old age brought them back definitively to Glendon. The large villa in Gmunden became a conference centre and the smaller is to house the archives of Thomas Bernhard, for whom John had a surprising sympathy. His ailments gave him more and more trouble. Veronica supported well his almost total dependence on her but on the eve of her 90th birthday she was carried away by a stroke. He lived on for another year, lucid but failing physically. With him go the qualities, and the quirks, of an earlier generation and class.

Brian McGuinness