Frank Riethmuller

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.

[4] First educated at Glenvale primary school,[5] he spent two years as a state scholarship pupil at Toowoomba Grammar: every surname in the class was Anglo-Celtic except his.

[6] He worked 1899–1905[7] as a "pupil school teacher" at Gowrie Junction, Glenvale and Charters Towers, a gold-mining town.

[13][14][15] 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.

[16] After his four months of enforced confinement in Brisbane, he moved to Sydney[17] and found a job as a "confidential clerk",[18] code for a bookmaker's penciller.

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.

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 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).

[30] For 20 years, Riethmuller lived in the now-vanished world of respectable Sydney boarding houses and residential hotels.

Unfortunately Miss Hambledon did not disguise her support for German expansion in Europe (though most of her relations in Germany had long since fled).

[33] He spent 130 days all told in Long Bay Gaol, and in camps at Orange and Hay in country New South Wales.

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.

Riethmuller's diaries confiscated by the security police show that he was growing roses (from Hazlewood Brothers) in Turramurra from 1932.

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.

"[44] 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.

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.

[4] 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.

Dr Flynn told the 1940 internment tribunal, "He is a very mild mannered man … He was a genial, well-mannered, good citizen.

"[47] 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."

[50] Riethmuller was a lifelong bachelor and there is no record of his having made any deep attachment beyond family and friends, usually married 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.

'[52] By the 1990s the task of collecting and cultivating the remaining roses was taken on by Phillip Sutherland of Golden Vale Nursery, Benalla.

As Charles Quest-Ritson observed: Riethmuller registered 'Titian' as a floribunda but others quickly realised it grew best as a short climber.

Kordes' firm subsequently patented a climbing sport ('Tizian'), though that was more to secure European royalties than due to any change in the rose.

To some rosarians they are simply members of the wider class of polyanthas, but Lambertianas have the characteristic leaf shape and scent of R. multiflora.

Allowing for its yellow stamens, it is the closest to an all-white Riethmuller rose since the loss of 'Elaine White.’ 'Chip's Apple Blossom' is a dwarf form of 'Carabella,' never registered.

Roger Mann reports a red hybrid tea called 'Showboat' grown at Turramurra: "Not sure if he ever registered or introduced it.

Despite its Pernetiana ancestry it has dark green laurel-like leaves, forming an elegant shrub entirely lacking in hardness or angularity.

Numerous big and stylish thorns start off pink to match the flowers, but turn berry red as they age.