Ian Sinclair
17 Sept 2018
Notburga Tilt (1923-2015) was a remarkable lady who lived in Olton from 2004 up until her death. She was a member of the large Hapsburg family and married five times. Born in Austria, she joined the Austro/Czech Freedom Fighters against the Nazis at the age of 15. On one occasion she hid in her aunt’s cellar where, desperately hungry, she ate a goldfish. She was imprisoned several times and early in 1945 was tortured by the Gestapo. After the war she became an opera singer and was a friend of Franz Lehar. Her first marriage was to a stormtrooper who was killed in the war; the second was to an Austrian doctor; and the third to Fred, a Staff Serjeant in the British Army of Occupation, whom she used to get to England and afterwards divorced. Husband number four was Wing Commander Edward Tilt, RAF, by whom she had a daughter, Nina, who still lives locally. After Tilt’s death she married a Mr Cheetham. She and her daughter attended Solihull Methodist Church regularly. She wrote three books between 1972 and 2001, and appeared on This is Your Life.
Her cousin was Archduke Marcus von Hapsburg, born in Austria in 1948, the eleventh child of Archduke Hubert (1894-1974) who, through his mother, was a grandson of the Emperor Franz Joseph. Marcus is married with two sons and one daughter and lives at Kaiserville, Bad Ischl where Franz Joseph signed the declaration of war against Serbia in 1914. Marcus came on a visit to Solihull a few years ago. The day prior to his arrival, he had lunched with his cousin the Duke of Edinburgh, and then he found himself, a fervent Roman Catholic like all his forbears, at a religious lunch at Solihull Methodist Church.
Between 1848, the year of revolutions across Europe, and 1918 the Hapsburgs were beset with tragedies. Originally Swiss, Count Rudolph became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1273, the title changing in 1806 to Emperor of Austria. The empire was vast and included Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Galicia, Transylvania and Bosnia; its capital was Vienna. The Hapsburg arms of a single headed eagle should not be confused with the double headed eagle of the Romanoffs. In 1848 Hungary was in revolt and Franz Joseph, aged 18, succeeded as Emperor on the abdication of his uncle. He reformed government and reigned for 68 years. He married the beautiful Elizabeth of Bavaria, known as Sisi (sister of ‘mad’ King Ludwig) in 1854 and they had four children. Her behaviour became eccentric and she left home to wander Europe before being assassinated in 1898.
Their son Rudolph born in 1858 killed his lover, Maria Vetsera, and then himself, at Mayerling in 1889. Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914), the nephew of Franz Joseph and his heir apparent, was assassinated with his wife by a Serb in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Austria-Hungary declar4ed war on Serbia, and this brought on WWI. Franz Joseph died in the Schonbrunn Palace (where he had been born) near Vienna in November 1916. He was succeeded by Charles (1887-1922), the last Emperor who resigned in 1918.