Frank Riethmuller – A Son of Toowoomba who became King of the Roses
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Frank Riethmuller (1884–1965) was an expert Australian rose breeder.
Studio photo of Frank Riethmuller in Townsville about 1910, when he was 26.
Riethmuller began to show roses in Sydney when he was about sixty.
Toowoomba
The last child of poor German immigrant farmers, Francis Lewis Riethmuller (known as Frank) was born on 10 February 1884 in Glenvale, then a village near (now a suburb of) Toowoomba, Queensland. When dealing with Germans, he reverted to writing Riethmüller. In Australia, the first syllable is pronounced Reith but never spelt that way.
Chronically prone to bronchitis and bronchiectasis, Riethmuller had to live mostly outdoors. First educated at Glenvale primary school, he spent two years as a state scholarship pupil at Toowoomba Grammar: every surname in the class was Anglo-Celtic except his.] He worked 1899–1905 as a “pupil school teacher” at Gowrie Junction, Glenvale and Charters Towers, a gold-mining town.
North Queensland
Moving to Charters Towers was the start of a life-long search for somewhere to breathe properly. Eventually his bronchitis became so bad that he spent 1906–07 back at his parents’, too sick to work. He returned at 23 to Charters Towers and worked 1908–13 as a bookkeeper to a butcher’s chain. Bad health brought the job to an end, as it did most of his Queensland jobs. Charters Towers was said to be “good for his asthma”; it also had a big German-speaking population. Writing and speaking German, and devoted to his German inheritance, he may have found the First World War difficult. He was certainly unfit for the army, though he had trained in the CMF. Many people of German descent were persecuted, though Riethmuller was not interned.
From 1914 to 1918 he worked mostly as a Townsville tobacconist–bookmaker’s shop assistant, sometimes as a bookkeeper on a sheep and horse-breeding station near Richmond. In mid-1918 Riethmuller moved to a Brisbane pub successfully to complete private study for the Junior Public Examination in English, French, German, Latin, Arithmetic and Algebra. Eleven hundred 15-year-olds sat the exam that November; Riethmuller was 34 years old.
Career in Sydney
After his four months of enforced confinement in Brisbane, he moved to Sydney and found a job as a “confidential clerk”,code for a bookmaker’s penciller. It was open-air work. He was outstandingly good at it and he never looked back.
As well as recording bets, he had to collect losing ones on Monday, settlement day. This was work for which his calm and gentlemanly manner was an asset. Riethmuller was making £1000 a year for working two or three days a week when the average annual salary of a clerk was about £370. He was possibly a silent partner in the bookmaking business as well. It was an income and career he kept up through the depression and the war till he retired in 1945. He allowed people to infer that he was clever with shares, but he made safe investments in land, treasury bonds, banks and in firms as safe as banks.
Riethmuller only had two employers, both very well known Sydney bookmakers. Jim Hackett was the between-wars equivalent of Bill Waterhouse post-war; Riethmuller worked for Hackett until he resigned to travel in Europe in 1928. When he returned he worked until he retired for Frank Alldritt. Both employers were willing to travel during the war to Canberra to testify on Riethmuller’s behalf. Alldritt disclosed that at the end of the day’s racing he divided his entire takings uncounted between Riethmuller and his other clerk and provided each with a signed blank document for the bank.
Riethmuller made plans in 1939 to set up as a stockbroker but they were blighted by the war. After the war, well into retirement, he told Your Garden he was working as an accountant, but the duties seem to have been light.
Further education
At the same time as starting a new career, Riethmuller began a series of attempts to acquire a serious education in the Humanities, first at the University of Sydney, later at the University of Heidelberg. He made two long trips to Europe – Belgium, France, Switzerland, England, Germany, Italy – in 1928 and in 1931. He attended a one-month course in Conversational French at Grenoble in 1928. He also attended a six-week course in 1931 in German language, art, painting and architecture at the Institute for Foreigners at the University of Berlin. He made detailed plans to visit Germany again in 1937, but his attempt to enrol at Heidelberg perhaps foundered on the increasing Nazification of Germany, perhaps on his worsening health. He was back at Sydney in 1929. He spent the Second World War between roses and race meetings as a university student of Italian and German (two of the three enemy languages). He led people to believe he was an Arts graduate who had also studied botany and “genetics at the University of Sydney.” If so it was doing independent reading in the library. He did eventually complete a major in German. And he did eventually leave most of his estate to the University for medical research. At the university Riethmuller met Professor EG Waterhouse, learned in German, French, Italian and Japanese, innovative architect of house and garden, the world’s greatest expert on the genus Camellia and a camellia breeder. Riethmuller was proud to call him “a personal friend.”
Internment
For 20 years Riethmuller lived in the now vanished world of respectable Sydney boarding houses and residential hotels. He had rooms in five such places between 1918 and 1938, including nine years at “Wiesbaden” (at which a number of Germans stayed) in Bondi, and seven years at “Wychwood” in Turramurra on the North Shore. It was run by a Miss Hambledon, born Leontine Hamburger to German-Jewish parents in New York. She was 14 years older than he; they became friends. Occasionally they could be heard talking in German.
Unfortunately Miss Hambledon did not disguise her support for German expansion in Europe (though most of her relations in Germany had long since fled). After two months of police investigation, Riethmuller was arrested on 20 August 1940 and interned under National Security Regulation 26.
He spent 130 days all told in Long Bay Gaol, and in camps at Orange and Hay in country NSW. Of that time he spent 11 weeks in camp hospitals and Orange base hospital. Riethmuller’s prison camp admission card (“Report on Prisoner of War”), dated 18 October 1940, incidentally gives the best documentation of his life history to that date.
Eventually he was able to force things to an inquiry (“lodge an objection”) at which no good reason for detaining him could be sustained. Witnesses attested to his loyalty to the Empire and the Australian way of life. His interest in things German was part of his gentlemanly interest in culture generally. He admitted that his spoken Italian, French and German were not much good, but he made an excellent show of correcting official translations of German documents found in his possession. Allegedly he had had spy maps drawn of the La Perouse radio transmitter and the Chullora railway workshops; they turned out simply to be a plan of his own house and its Wireless Weekly radio aerial. German names in his address book were shown to be long-lost or never-met contacts beyond any hope of forming a spy ring; one made Riethmuller’s suits at Anthony Hordern’s. Above all the committee of inquiry was impressed by the commitment of his investments and property to the Australian economy. Riethmuller’s will at that stage left most of his money to Australian public hospitals. He was released 10 December 1940.
Turramurra
Riethmuller in old age in his Turramurra back garden. If those roses are hybrid teas bred by him, they are lost and probably no longer exist.
Riethmuller’s diaries confiscated by the security police show that he was growing roses (from Hazlewood Brothers) in Turramurra from 1932. In the mid-1930s he was more interested in dahlias and cactuses, renewing his interest in roses in 1937.
In 1937 he bought land (probably the land he was already using) a few streets from Miss Hambledon’s boarding house. The same year he built a small art-deco house on it. He was joined there by his unhappily married sister Sophia Bischof (1878–1972) and her third daughter Elsie (1910–2004), who stayed till both her uncle and mother had died A sign on the front gate said “Miss E. Bischof dressmaker” but mostly Elsie was the housekeeper. Riethmuller made health plans in 1940 to move to a higher and drier property in Bowral or Moss Vale but nothing came of them. A next-door neighbour 1937–1939 remembered him as a homebody who, when he was not prostrated by illness, spent every day working in the garden.
Ayliffe’s, a local rose and carnation nursery, supplied him with roses from 1938 and pruned them. Riethmuller was thus at least 54 and living in Turramurra when he made his first known rose crosses; 61 when he retired to full-time rose breeding in 1945; 66 when he released his first rose for sale. All his best roses that we know about were bred in his last decade when he was over 70 and his health at its worst.
“His large garden is packed with roses, a fair proportion of them of his own raising.” Apart from his own seedlings, most roses he is known to have bred from are of German origin. He also bred from a couple of roses by Alister Clark, and emulated Clark’s refusal to pamper seedlings: “He used to give his roses a post-pruning spray but didn’t spray at all otherwise. So his seedlings had to be disease-resistant to survive.”
In the early 1960s Roger Mann was his teenage pupil: “The colour shot of Frank Riethmuller [shown on the right] is as I remember him. He’s standing in his back garden, in his ‘rose garden’ — actually a big single bed that occupied about half the area, and which held most of his collection … At the very back next to the fence he had his nursery beds, compost heaps etc and the shed … It was a splendid sight in mid-winter, when the main rose beds were all pruned and smothered in manure and straw. The ground sloped from front to back and there was a flight of steps up to the back porch where we’d sit and talk, and camellias growing against the house there … The front garden was fairly conventional, with a low brick front fence with some floribundas — ‘Eutin’ among them as I recall — but mainly other plants behind it; the bed was fairly narrow and shaded by the street trees. The house was set close to the south boundary, and there was a curving path to the front door lined on one side by maybe a dozen roses, among which I remember ‘Sunlit’ and ‘Marjory Palmer’. It led into a bed at the corner of the house which had ‘Cara Bella’, ‘Honeyflow’ and ‘Claret Cup’ with ‘Spring Song’, and down the north side of the house where the land was a bit wider were half-a-dozen original plants of ‘Titian’ trained espalier and reaching the eaves … I remember asking him why he’d registered it as a floribunda when it was so obviously a climber, and he said he hadn’t realised at the time that it would grow like that.
Riethmuller died at 81 on 23 April 1965, bequeathing to the University of Sydney the proceeds of the sale of his house and garden: in 1972 they realised over $80,000, a big sum at the time.
Friends and relations
John Flynn was a doctor friend Riethmuller used to exchange drinks with at Tattersall’s Club after the races. Dr Flynn told the 1940 internment tribunal, “He is a very mild mannered man … He was a genial, well-mannered, good citizen.” Queensland great-nieces old enough (and young enough) to remember their honeymoon visits to Sydney in the 1950s say “He was a lovely, sweet man, mainly interested in his wine collection and his roses.” If it matters any more, he was rather tall, lean and blond, going grey in his fifties. He had a “long Riethmuller face,” blue Nordic eyes and, in later years, a mouthful of gold teeth. Most memories of him reveal unfailing generosity to others. He waived all rights to royalties from roses he released for sale. Above all, despite having lived away from his family for 27 years, Riethmuller took in his sister and her spinster daughter and supported both till the end of their lives, far beyond his own death. His sister lived on this support for 35 years, his niece for 67.
Riethmuller was a lifelong bachelor and there is no record of his having made any deep attachment beyond family and friends, usually married women. He was particularly close to his nephew Max Riethmuller (1912–1972) who, like him, never married.
Though he maintained strong family contacts, no rose is named for anyone in his family. Several are dedicated to socially prominent Sydney women.
‘Kwinana’ may have been a gift to a South Australian service club, but its colour alludes to the burn-off flames of the Kwinana oil refinery. ‘Claret Cup’ has masses of cup-shaped flowers, claret coloured. ‘Galah’ was the same pink as the breast feathers of a galah. ‘Spring Song’ was the Mendelssohn Song Without Words familiar to a hundred years of piano students.
His roses ‘Alma,’ ‘Filagree’ (misspelling of ‘Filigree’), ‘Gayness’ and ‘Helios’ were all named after 1940s racehorses. ‘Gay Vista,’ ‘Honeyflow’ and ‘Titian’ were 1950s racehorses in Australia.
Legacy
Riethmuller’s unmarried niece and housekeeper Elsie Bischof outlived him by nearly 40 years. After Riethmuller died, Elsie often showed people interested in the roses, ‘Titian’ especially, around Eastern Road (the property remained her mother’s to use till she too died). Elsie returned to Toowoomba in 1972 and made his roses widely known there. Her constant advocacy seems to have been the main reason those she took with her survive.
Perhaps the leading rose thinker in Australia after the Second World War was the registrar of new varieties, AS Thomas. His book Better Roses went through many editions. The 1969 edition, in its chapter “Australian and New Zealand Roses,” lists 80 “highly prized cultivars.” Twenty are roses by the great Alister Clark. Next in importance come the roses of Riethmuller: ‘Esmeralda,’ ‘Gay Vista,’ ‘Plaisante,’ ‘Silverelda,’ ‘Snow Spray,’ ‘Spring Song’ and ‘Titian.’
By the 1990s the task of collecting and cultivating the remaining roses was taken on by Phillip Sutherland of Golden Vale Nursery, Benalla. His plants came partly from NSW nurseries and collectors but also from relations and friends of Elsie in Queensland. He also is responsible for the survival of Riethmuller’s only extant hybrid tea, Lady Woodward. Golden Vale closed in 2011, but the plants he sought out are now safely established in public collections.
Roses
Riethmuller is known to have released 26 roses in all. Ten are currently available; many have been lost. Most of those we still have are remarkably well bred: healthy, well-formed, well-scented and floriferous. They are hardy in Australia from southern Tasmania to Mackay in north Queensland.
