227. The Man Who Lived A Thousand Lives: Taming Nature (Ep 1)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnott. Oh, you want to do it? Okay, I thought you were going to... Well, hang on, this is a turn up for the books, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, and cue.

0:40Hello and welcome to Empire. Now, I'm very pleased to say that my wonderful co-host has discovered an entire story that none of us have ever heard of before. And before Christmas, when she came out to the Bangalore Literary Festival, she went off to Mysore and came back with this extraordinary story which we're going to have today. Anita, tell us all about your discovery. So let me tell you why you should care about this man, Crumbagel, the brilliantly named Crumbagel. Because frankly, he's a brilliant, brilliant man who is just not known. Not only will he go on to become the Maharaja's best friend, not one, plural, he will transform Bangalore.

1:24He will leave his stamp on Mysore. He will create one of the greatest tourist sites in India today, the Brindavan Gardens in Karnataka, which has two million visitors every year. He's an architect. He's a civic planner. He's the man who decides to put lampposts on boulevards in Bangalore. He will plan buildings, build buildings, give farmers new ways of growing orchards and identify and disseminate facts about pests. He will import trees and fruiting plants to India. He is just this Renaissance man with an extraordinary impact on India. And this is his story. And by the way, who is the man who India will turn to after Mahatma Gandhi dies to do the landscaping around the Raj Gardens, to design them, to preside over them?

2:14It will be an 83-year-old crumbagel. And despite the fact that he will have such a profound impact on India, this is a man who will be put in an internment camp during not one but two world wars because he's a German national and he will die in penury. It is one of these roller coaster stories that you find once in a while. And that is why you should know about Crumbagel. So up to now on this mini-series on plants and empire, we've talked a lot about how plants were taken from India and brought to Britain, to places like Kew Gardens. But I think the story that you described to me when you were fizzing with excitement about it in Bangalore is the reverse of that.

2:58It's about a man who has learned his craft in Britain and takes a lot of what he knows to India and then, like your company painters, actually does this sort of hybridization, but in garden form. So when you look up, and if you do, go Google him, Gustav Hermann Crumbagel, you will find probably a picture of a really sweet old grandpa. And he's, you know, sort of a white haired, white moustache, very tweedy. Yeah, sort of like an old professor or someone from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The old professor from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I'd imagine him looking like that. But he spent the majority of his life working in India.

3:38Not only is he behind sort of the greening of Bangalore, the garden city of India, he landscaped Uti, a hill station favourite of the Raj. I mean, you describe Uti. The most beautiful hill station in the south, which is where snooker was invented in the Ooty Club. No way. I didn't know that. If you go to the Ooty Club, there is a whole framed history of the invention of snooker by Neville Chamberlain, which was not the Neville Chamberlain who did the Munich piece in our time, but an earlier Neville Chamberlain of the same family who had nothing better to do than invent games in the Ooty Club. So, I mean, Ooty still is a destination favourite of honeymoon couples in India.

4:16They go and have their photographs taken because it's so beautifully landscaped. Also, he is the brains behind the Vrindavan Gardens. So the Vrindavan Gardens, which is in Karnataka as well, which is this huge, immense park, which he created from rubble, just out of nothing, which has the sensibility of those beautiful old Shalimar Gardens that you love so much with the mountains and the different levels. He creates this. That place, still gets two million visitors a year. It's one of the major tourist attractions in Karnataka, and he's behind that. And he also prettifies the Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens, which is the equivalent of India's Kew Gardens, if you like.

5:00And I think actually, Willie, you should tell us a little bit about the history of the Lal Bagh, because it is to do with Tipu Sultan and his father, Haider Ali. So Tipu Sultan is probably the second most controversial character in Indian history after Aurangzeb, who we did about two or three weeks ago, and for very similar reasons. He was a Muslim ruler who is regarded by many Hindus as a brute who tortured and forcibly converted Hindus he conquered in battle, but who is a controversial figure because there are others, and particularly old-style Congress people, who regard him as the greatest of all the freedom fighters who did more damage to the East Hindi Company than anyone else.

5:40But he was, like so many of these sultans, a man of some sensibility. He had an enormous library. He was very scholarly. He organized the looting of East India Company scientific and scholarly materials when he took, very briefly, the outskirts of Madras. All these telescopes and globes and important books of scholarship were brought back to his kingdom in Sri Rangapatnam. Another of his great enthusiasms was gardening. And this is the Deccan region of India, which has its own very different tradition of gardening to the Mughals. It's another Islamic tradition, but it's far more closely related to the lost ancient Hindu traditions of gardening.

6:31And there's a wonderful book, which was published two or three years ago called Scent in the Islamic Garden. The most exciting books. Ali Akbar Hussein's book has brought back from obscurity a whole garden tradition which Tipu embraced and took forward and which the gardens which Crumbagel later sort of Victorianizes and brings into the present. And just before we return to Crumbagel, I'd just like to talk about some of the lovely Deccan gardening books that Ali Akbar found when he was writing his book. How is Deccan gardening different to Mughal gardening since they're sort of the same stem? Everything in the Deccan was set up in opposition to the Mughals.

7:11They were the enemies of the Mughals. And they particularly looked to Persia for inspiration, but also drew on the local Hindu traditions that preceded the Deccan consulates. And because of Ali Akbar, we actually now have more detail about gardening techniques in that part of India than we do anywhere else. I'll just read you a couple of the ideas from gardening books of this time. The Rizala Ibagbani was written in Golconda, which is outside Hyderabad, and has all sorts of wonderful old wife's tales and Mali's lore about how you get the best fruit and vegetables. And it recommends, for example, that melons can be made especially sweet and tasty if before planting, their seeds are stored in mountains of fresh rose petals.

7:57Isn't that a lovely idea? Oh, it's sweet. I mean, I'm not sure it's true. Is it true? I'm not sure it sounds like nonsense. And it says if honey dates, cows milked and chopped licorice are dug into the plant's roots, you also get particularly sweet fruit. Bananas, meanwhile, can be encouraged to elongate and become as long and firm as elephant tusks if an iron bar dipped in a steamy mixture of animal waste is used to scorch the tree. Well, I don't know. I wonder if that might be true. I don't know. But I'm sort of influencing the sweetness. I did love this so much. I'm just going to read one last little thing.

8:29There's another gardening book called the Kazan Wabaha, where it recommends that in order to produce seedless grapes, you apply musk and opium to the roots of your vine. And you can grow bright red apples by pegging down the lower branches of a tree with an iron barn. Stimulate peach trees by inserting pine or willow cuttings into the roots. I mean, the whole world, but the idea I love best, which is something that Tipu knew all about, is this very decany idea of a night garden, that you have some gardens which are planted specifically for the day, which are all about colour, and then you move to a different garden at night where you have night flowers.

9:16Jasmine, honeysuckle, that kind of stuff. Roses, yes, lovely. And the idea is that even a blind man could sniff his way around these Deccany night gardens. Well, I mean, that sounds gorgeous. And it is one of these Deccany gardens that Krumbe will put his stump on, 200 acres of land. But he's not just a horticulturalist. He is also the man they turned to after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi to create a fitting place, the Rajgat Gardens in Delhi. And it's his vision that becomes the home to memorials for Nehru, Lalbhadu Shastri, Rajiv Gandhi, Atal Bihari Rajpayee, the resting place of the memory of former prime ministers.

9:52So that's how important he is and why it's just nuts that no one knows his name. Shall I tell you where it all begins for Gustav Hermann? Well, Lohmann near Dresden, he's born in 1865. And Dresden at that time is in the Kingdom of Saxony. It's part of the German Confederation. And it is a cultural hub. You know, they call it Florence on the Elbe because it's got architecture, museums, concerts. But Gustav Hammond Kronbegel was not plugged into any of that because Lohmann was far enough away to sort of hear the strains of culture coming from Dresden, to know it existed. But it was rural where he was born.

10:28It was a world away, you know, and he was poor. His family was poor. His father worked in a restaurant. He had loads of siblings. And as you do in this kind of circumstance, he was forced to leave school at the age of 14. So he's this sort of tiny little spindly thing who leaves. but he has to sort of bring in an income and he has to find a future and he hasn't got a very good education and he's not from Dresden. But Dresden does have a horticultural school and has apprenticeships for boys who want to go and work outside. So that's where this sort of teenager goes to try and learn his craft. And he's so good that he gets sort of passed around.

11:07You know, he's in Pilnitz first of all, and then he goes to Macklenburg and then he goes to Hamburg. and everywhere he goes, even though he's this sort of like little kid, people notice his ambition, but also the quickness of mind that he has. And he only has one place that he wants to work, the place that Satnam Sanghera was talking about, the epicenter, Kew Gardens, the only place that Kronbega wants to be because it is the best place in the world to learn his craft. Sensor problem there, little boy from Lohmann trying to walk into Kew Gardens and say, gets a job, they're going to say, no, bugger off.

11:42And so what he does is he goes anyway, at least to London, so he can be somewhere near Kew Gardens. He can't just walk into a job. But he takes a job in Hyde Park instead, because they need people to weed the beds and do some of the landscaping and cut the grass. And so he'll do anything that is on offer. And he uses that time at Hyde Park to learn English, which is just like, again, so enterpractic. I look at my 14-year-old. Oh, my God, can't you be more crumbagel? Seriously, do something. But he goes off and he sort of starts learning the language. And he applies to Kew Gardens three times. And they keep telling him, go away.

12:23No, don't know you, strange German boy. Go away. We've got nothing for you. But maybe eventually, out of exhaustion or sheer amusement, they take on this slightly weird, slightly built German boy. And they give him a job. And maybe it's sort of worth talking about what Q was like in those days, because remind us what Sat Nam said about it. It was the epicenter of empire at this time. It was. It started off as a royal garden. It was associated originally with George III. It was the place that George III was sent out to grass, literally, when he was going mad and had all those terrible experiments done on him to try and bring him back to sanity.

12:58and then the arrival of Joseph Banks it becomes the great center of British attempts to collect the plants of the world whether of the South Seas and all the sort of thing that Captain Cook is bringing back but also other British missions in other parts of the world it's this period that you get the beginning of these greenhouses being built with summer temperate summer tropical and the idea is that you can grow in queue something from any part of the world and that you will have a seed bank and a scholarly centre that can unite the world, but particularly the British empire in a whole sort of botanical network.

13:35So, I mean, all of that is true, but it also isn't the Kew Gardens that we know today because it wasn't developed around, you know, it sort of was ostensibly in the middle of the countryside in the late 1800s. It wasn't filled with homes. It wasn't filled with, you know, places that some little boy like Crumbagel can sort of roll up and rent a lodging. So, it was hard. It was very, very hard. Not that he really needed anywhere to sleep for very long because apprenticeships at Kew in those days worked from six in the morning till six in the evening, as long as there was sunlight and maybe a bit longer to put things away.

14:04A hard day and working six day weeks where you get one Sunday off each month. So this is not a soft option. It is backbreaking and it is hard. And that is why not a lot of people stayed for a very long time, but he loved it. He absolutely loved it. There's no mechanization at this time. So everything is hand dug, hand cut, hand sorted out. But he just is there learning, loving, and especially growing to love the trees that are at Kew and the rose gardens at Kew. Those are the things that particularly he falls in love with. And whereas people don't last very long, apprentices get sort of knackered and wrung out within one year.

14:47Crumbagel stays for five years and it's during that time he falls in love with his own English rose. It's very sweet. Katie Clara? Who's she? Katie Clara. So Katie Clara is just a woman from the local area, young woman from the local area, similar age. They fall in love and they get married. And with this sort of marriage of Katie Clara, his fortunes at Kew seem to be on the upturn as well because he gets taken under the wing of a man who was very esteemed at Kew, a man called William Goldring. And I'll tell you more about him in a moment because he is kind of the contact that will transform Cronbabels' life.

15:24But you know what you were saying about this center of learning that Kew was? It was absolutely that. It was a university for anybody who wanted to know about plants and the exotic. And he went to every lecture because he could, because he was a member of Kew. He was working there. So he could go and be exposed to this. So he saw plants that you could never have imagined in Loman, a world that, you know, is like a fantasy in these lectures. The paintings that, you know, we talked about the Lady Impey collection and other things where you could just study these things in huge detail. And it's sort of along this road that he becomes an expert in something called plant propagation, which is basically what you were talking about, melon seeds, how best to make them germinate, how best to make crops last, how to get them to survive.

16:08And William Goldring notices this kid and goes, hmm, something here. Tell me about William Goldring. There's a picture I've got in front of me of this sort of tweed-suited figure that looks rather like – he looks like something out of one of those early Sherlock Holmes. He looks like a villain. Or the very dim inspector. What's he called? Oh, Lestrade. Lestrade. Lestrade, that's right. Inspector Lestrade. Well, I don't know. He looks slightly fierce. He's a rather prominent forehead. He looks slightly neanderthal. Well, William Goldring may have looked like that, but he was quite the mover and shaker because he was one of the most senior figures at Kew.

16:44He was this new breed of businessman landscapers. So he would be called upon because he knew a lot about plants and landscapes because of Kew. And he'd be called to the private houses of England. You know, can you landscape this? Can you make us a nice garden? We'd like to turn this into something else. We need a ha-ha. We need a ha-ha. Who do we turn to to decide where to put the ha-ha? William Goldring. And he's designed the gardens around hospitals, asylums, public parks in England and Wales. Also, and this is the crucial break in the story, for an Indian Maharaja. Tell us about this. So the United States and India both called on his services, but India really was the one that was ka-ching for him because Goldring had done work for the Guyquad of Baroda.

17:32During the time when the Guy Quad was trying to build the greatest ever royal flex the world had ever seen. This is their Lakshmi Villas Palace, which you've been to. I've been to. And I remember going in the 90s when all these palaces were in their doldrums. There was a moment in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi cut the Maharaja's purses. And they had enough money then to keep going. And by the 1990s, everything was falling apart. and Lakshmi Vilas, which is this enormous Victorian expanse of sort of Indic-Victoriana, was sort of semi-ruinous. I remember being led in to interview the Maharaja in my early days as a journalist in India.

18:12And the bearers were all barefoot, and all their uniforms were kind of stitched bare. And I remember that there was hundreds of pigeons inside the vaults of the domes that no one seemed to find a way of getting rid of. And you felt that this was a world coming to a close. but I've been since about five years ago. And it's now super snazzy with air conditioning and all these Maharajas have found ways of monetizing their palaces with tourism and opening them up to the public. And it's rather reborn now. But at the time, it was always regarded as a white elephant. But the reason that the Maharaja of Baroda, whose name was Maharaja Sayajirao Gai Khod III, decided to build something as vast as this, and when I say build something as vast as this.

18:55It was 170 rooms. So that's four times the size of Buckingham Palace. And what he wanted, basically, after he'd been to England, he'd seen Buckingham Palace. He'd been slightly affronted by the fact that even though he was, Time magazine put him in 1908, as the sixth richest man in the world. This is a man of great wealth and means. So he wanted something bigger and better. And that's why this 170-room Lakshmi Belas Palace is built. As William said, you know, Indo-Saracetic style, you know, mixing Islamic Rajput, Maratha, Bengali, Gujarati, Venetian and Gothic into this whole kind of car crash of style.

19:36It's the ultimate. It looks more like a sort of Disney railway station. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's lots of domes and spires and things. All in a completely chaotic jumble, as far as one can see. But he wanted an orderly garden and that's why Goldring is called out to do something for him. And so Goldring then has connections with India, which are going to be very important. But also the Guyquad, he's variously known as the Guyquad or the Maharaja of Baroda. He also has a temperament, which is going to be very important because it will match very much with our friend Crumbagel. We haven't forgotten about him.

20:10He's still toiling away at Kew Gardens. He hasn't made the transition to India yet. But Goldring will be the bridge. I just want to talk about the rebel Maharaja of Baroda. How much do you know about how naughty he was? I know about lots of naughty Maharajas in the Punjab, but I don't know this one. The Patialas were the most naughty ones. So this guy, he's not naughty. He's defiant in a way. You mentioned Tipu Sultan and the Lal Bagh and the fact that Tipu was for some time venerated as the man who stood up to the English and showed that the English could be defeated. Likewise, there is the Delhi Darbar takes place.

20:43You know, one of these things where a new monarch comes in and everybody has to bow to the king emperor and they have to show, you know, kowtow before him and show who's in charge. Well, he doesn't do this when he turns up to the Delhi Darbar. Everyone is meant to sort of be dressed in their absolute finest. Sayajara Gaiquod III was a ruler who just thought, you know what, I've built a palace that's bigger than theirs. I am an important man. I don't see why I should bow down. And there were lots of things that chafed with him about British rule. So what he does, instead of dressing in his finery, he dresses in quite ordinary clothes.

21:19He takes a quite plain walking stick with him, again, which is quite an insult because you're meant to be decked out in your biggest diamonds like every other Nawab and Maharaja and Raja who's been called to this Delhi Darbar. And you are not meant to turn your back on the King Emperor and his consort. That is just not what you're allowed to do. So what he very deliberately does when it is his turn to be presented, and he's the third most senior Maharaja after that, Hyderabad Maharaja and Mysore Maharaja. There's an order of how many guns you get banging off for your name and the order in which you're presented to the King Emperor.

21:55He comes, he bows once, only a bit, and then he turns around and he walks away turning his back on the King Emperor. No, unforgivable. Absolute hell breaks loose. Is this Curzon's dub? Is Curzon around at this point? No, it's the one after Curzon. This was Lord Harding who comes afterwards. But, you know, the Maharaja of Baroda has a very similar opinion of the British who are there. Doesn't see why he has to bow. So he does this insult, this thumbing his nose at the British. And he goes back and he's kind of laughing and, you know, trying to catch the eye of the other Maharajas going, this is how you do it, mates.

22:30and the Anglo-Indian newspapers like the Pioneer and the British newspapers, they call for action against the Baroda ruler. He's ordered to make an apology and he's threatened that if he doesn't make the apology, they will not only depose him, they're going to reduce his gun salute. In fact, they're going to take everything away from him. So he does this sort of meany-mouthed apology, but he does become for a while a bit of a nationalist hero because he's standing up to them. Really interestingly, Nehru, who is going to be the first prime minister of India in many years' time, his father, Muthi Lal Nera, who's a very influential man at the time, goes ballistic over the Maharaja's insult to the British.

23:06He's so loyal to the crown, which is so strange. So he's a successful barrister at this time. And he writes to his son and he says, I am sorry that the guy quad has fallen from the high pedestal he once occupied in public estimation. I was not quite prepared for something silly on his part. My seat at the Dharabar wasn't far from his and we were chatting away before the arrival of the king. And he asked me what I thought of the show. And on my saying that it was the grandest the Marsha I'd ever seen, he remarked, it would have been all right if we had not to act like animals in a circus. Perhaps you're aware of what he actually did.

23:39I have not seen it reported anywhere. He went straight to the dais, made a slight bow, and at once turned his back on the Queen and King, walking away, rather actually sauntering away with one hand in his pocket and twirling his stick around and around. Where was the necessity of all this? It was all to end in the abject apology, which you might have seen, it completely wrecked his reputation. So, you know, this is what happens, but he's slightly rebellious. And that's the freedom fighter. That's Moti Dal Nairu writing to... Yes, I know. To his son, Jawaharl Al Nairu. Yeah. And, you know, Jawaharl Al Nairu writes back saying, I think it's rather silly for the Guyquad to do what he did, and sillier still to humbly apologise for it.

24:16But anyway, so look, this sets up the Guyquad of Bereda, who goes to William Goldring, who's just designed his gaudy palace's grounds. I was wondering when we were coming back to Cougar. Well, we'd take these rabbit holes. I know, I love these sort of dog legs and they just are so fascinating. So, you've got Crumbagel who's dreaming of India, who's going to these lectures all about this fabulous place, who's hearing from his mentor, William Goldring, all about the work that is being done there. And suddenly, William Goldring gets a letter from the Maharaja of Baroda saying, I actually need a gardener.

24:46I've got more plans. I've got big plans. And I need someone to carry them out. I need you, William Goldring. William Goldring says, I can't. I'm a bit busy. But I might have a man for you. There's this bright young thing called Hermann Gustav Grumbagel. Grumbagel. Or Gustav Hermann Grumbagel. And you could try him because honestly, I think he might be the man. Join us after the break when we find out whether he was right.

25:17Hello, welcome back. So just before the break, finally, we got back onto Grumbagel. The other thing I criticise you for, I do exactly the same. He did. He did like the plants disappeared in the MP episode. We're not being very good at keeping to our briefs. I think we need a little smack on the wrist from our producer. Anyway, look, you've got these two men. You've got this German who has defied all odds and come up through the ranks. He's now the one who's being pointed to as a possible gardener for a Maharaja. And you've got a Maharaja who manages to piss off the British any time he can in the most spectacular way.