Frank Riethmuller (1884–1965) was an Australian rose breeder.
Biography
Toowoomba The last child of poor German immigrant farmers, Francis Lewis Riethmuller (known as Frank) was born on 10 February 1884 in Glenvale, a village near (now a suburb of) Toowoomba, Queensland.(Translated from the German) Hans Wolfgang Rath, List of Ancestors of Frank Lewis Riethmuller in Sydney, Australia, Ludwigsburg, Württemberg, Germany, unpublished, compiled 1928–1929.Riethmuller's Queensland birth record shows that he was born in 1884, not 1885 as most writers claim. 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,State scholarship results, The Queenslander, 23 January 1897, p. 191. he spent two years as a state scholarship pupil at Toowoomba Grammar: every surname in the class was Anglo-Celtic except his.Toowoomba Grammar records, thanks to Ellen Morosini. He worked 1899–1905; statutory declaration made to internment tribunal 23 August 1940, National Archive A12102/37. 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.Statutory declaration made to internment tribunal 23 August 1940, National Archive A12102/37. 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.Military training was compulsory from 1910; see Many people of German descent were persecuted, though Riethmuller was not interned.Australian National Archive MP1103/2 Report on Prisoner of War 19 October 1940; Gerhardt Fischer, Enemy aliens: internment and the homefront experience in Australia, 1914–1920. 1989, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. .
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.Note his Townsville employer Champion's description when his will was declared: His employers near Richmond were the Douglas brothers: Statutory declaration made to internment tribunal 23 August 1940, National Archive A12102/37 p.2.
In mid-1918 Riethmuller moved to a Brisbane pub 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 SydneyThe Queenslander, 25 January 1919, p.13. This reference is thanks to Revd Timothy Jarick. and found a job as a "confidential clerk",Letter to University of Heidelberg applying for matriculation there. Translation in National Archive C123/2679. 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 weekNational Archive A1202/37. when the average annual salary of a clerk was about £370. He was possibly a silent partner in the bookmaking business as well.National Archive C123/2679, dossier of the NSW security police. It was an income and career he kept up through the Great Depression and World War II until 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.National Archive A367, C18000/42. FLR's counsel described Hackett as a Leviathan.
Riethmuller made plans in 1939 to set up as a stockbroker but they were blighted by the war.This inference is based on his entry in the phone directory for that year: "FL Riethmuller Stkbr". After the war, well into retirement, he told Your Garden he was working as an accountant, but the duties seem to have been light. p. 21.
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.National Archive C123/1 Item 2679, FL Reithmuller [sic] letter dated 15 March 1928. 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.Gersekowski p. 72. Also National Archive A1202/37 and National Archive MP1103/2. See also He was back at Sydney in 1929. He spent World War II pursuing his interests in roses and race meetings, and as a university student of Italian and German (two of the three enemy languages).See University of Sydney records. He led people to believe he was an Arts graduate who had also studied botany and "genetics at the University of Sydney."National Archive A12102/37, hearing transcript, Dunworth testimony, p. 37. Also Also ANZ Rose Annual 1960 p102. If so, it was doing independent reading in the library. He did eventually complete a major in German. And he did eventually bequeathed 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".National Archive A367, C18000/42, internment hearing p7.
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.National Archive C123/15592. 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.National Archive C123/2679, "Security Service Black List" on which he remained till the end of the war.
He spent 130 days all told in Long Bay Gaol, and in camps at Orange and Hay in country New South Wales. 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.It is available online as part of the Australian National Archive: NAA document MP1103/2, PWN1389
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 & Sons.National Archive A12102/37 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.National Archive MP508/1 255/742/61, Report of the Advisory Committee, p3. He was released 10 December 1940.
Turramurra
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.National Archive C415, 70; diaries 1929–37; ANZ Rose Annual, 1960, p102.
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 (1909–2004), who stayed till both her uncle and mother had died.Postcards to Riethmuller's Turramurra address from a Herr Mansfeld in Germany dated 1936; Revd Timothy Jarick collection. 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.National Archive A12102/37, transcript of hearing pp3–4.
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.National Archive A12102/37, transcript of hearing, Dunmore evidence, pp37–8.
Ayliffe's, a local rose and carnation nursery, supplied him with roses from 1938 and pruned them.National Archive A12102/37, internment appeal p39. 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.Australian Rose Annual, 1960 p. 102. 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.