The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy

by John Zubrzycki

  In late 1893, he wrote to Plowden asking for permission to visit Hyderabad. For advice, Plowden referred the letter to Cuningham in the Foreign Department who wrote to Jacob in January 1894, saying: ‘I have spoken to Mr Plowden about you. He knows your case quite well, but he does not consider that you should be given permission to visit Hyderabad.’24

  Outwardly, Jacob was carrying on as if nothing had really changed, spending the summers in Simla tending to his horses and his dogs, haggling with customers over the price of pearl necklaces and Bactrian antiquities, and then travelling around the country in the cool season. In October 1895, the Statesman reported that ‘Mr Jacob, of Imperial Diamond celebrity, carried away two prizes for his terrier exhibits at the Simla horse and dog show’.

  Nor could he resist the odd punt on the occult. In August 1896, he prophesied that the SS Caledonia would be wrecked on her return voyage from India to England just as she was approaching the Red Sea because of the moon entering Cancer—which was the ship’s sign. The prophecy created alarm in India, forcing Jacob to issue a correction in the Simla Times, saying he had got his timings wrong.25 A year later, he made a series of rather unsuccessful predictions: that Queen Victoria would live until 1911 (she died in 1901); that the Prince of Wales would never be King (he was crowned King Edward on Victoria’s death); and that William Harcourt would become prime minister (he never got past being leader of the Opposition).26

  Though Jacob’s reputation as a prophet was on the wane, his fame as a magician received an unexpected boost. In April 1896, the occult journal Borderland published fragments from A Modern Magician: An Autobiography by Roslyn D’Onston, allegedly based on his travels in India there two decades earlier. When it first appeard, D’Onston regaled readers with his investigation into Indian magic and his supposed encounters with the illusions and conjuring tricks of ‘Mr Jacob of Simla’. Borderland’s editor W.T. Stead reminded sceptical readers that it would be ‘childish to think that we have learned the half of what is possible to know about the laws of nature and human life. A century ago, the clearest headed people would have laughed at the idea of electricity running tram cars.’27

  Today, however, the verdict is still out on whether D’Onston’s account was a figment of his perverse imagination based loosely on what he or anyone could have gleaned from the popular press about Jacob’s reputation as a magician and some of tricks attributed to Indian conjurors. Growing grapes from a walking-stick sounded like the mango trick adapted to a Simla dinner party setting. Among those who have made it their life’s obsession to study Ripperology and post their findings on web-based chat rooms—like the Jack the Ripper Forum—there are many who strongly doubt that D’Onston went to India at all.

  D’Onston’s supporters, however, point to a letter in the July 1896 edition of Borderland from the magazine’s editor, W.T. Stead. He stated that Jacob had confirmed his meeting with D’Onston to the magazine’s ‘correspondent’ in India. He told him ‘that the narrative as to what passed on that occasion is substantially right although, in various points of detail, he thinks he could make corrections with advantage.’ It was true he had made ‘a rod to bud and blossom’, but he denied that he had taken a stick from a guest. He had taken a prepared stick with which it was easier to work the apparent miracle. ‘In fact, he asserted that I or any one else could do the trick as soon as we were shown how. Further, he admitted the truth of the fact that he had thrust your contributor through with a naked sword.’ Jacob explained this away as another ‘mere trick, which is frequently performed by the natives.’ To do it successfully, it was necessary to make certain preparations, such as, pinching the flesh so that the blood is driven away. It was also necessary to take precautions to avoid any vital organs and to make sure no air entered the wound.

  He disputed D’Onston’s account of his walking on water, saying that the pond in question was not in his garden but about seven miles away and had now dried up. In any case, he could not repeat the trick. ‘I did not walk on water, as the article says, although I appeared to do so, but I was supported in the air by my friend, who was invisible to others.’ This invisible friend was a man who had died 150 years ago, and had acted as his guardian throughout his life. According to Jacob, the man was introduced to him when, as a young boy, he had been initiated into a sect by his great-uncle who was then over ninety years old. The reason he was unable to reproduce that incredible feat, Stead explained, ‘was because he had been deserted by his spirit guardian four months earlier’.28

  The letter ended by saying that the next issue of Borderland would carry all Jacob’s annotations to D’Onston’s original story. For some unexplained reason, it didn’t.

  The evidence that Stead’s letter offers for D’Onston’s meeting with Jacob is quite thin, though it did include a tantalizing clue. When Stead’s correspondent called on Jacob, he found him ‘busy disposing of his effects, in order that he might wind up his business and depart for China.’29 Jacob never went to China but, in 1896, had begun auctioning off many of his possessions, something that it is unlikely Stead would have known about unless he did indeed have a ‘correspondent’ in Simla.

  Whatever the truth of D’Onston’s claims, the stories of Jacob’s powers grew more apocryphal, as his fame increased. In early 1897, the Lahore-based newspaper Akhbar-i-Am carried a description from a B.M. Jhingan, ‘a Professor of Hindoo Magic’, who claimed that, on meeting Jacob in Simla and asking him to demonstrate his skills, he had seen the jeweller’s double ‘suspended in the air, unmovable’. Continued Jhingan: ‘He likes to remain in a veiled position and few people know about his real powers. Those who know him aver to his mysteriousness. The police have also some experience of his magical powers. He mixes freely in picnic parties and female societies. He is extremely rich and deals in precious stones.’30

  Jacob liked to tell tales of long-dead philosophers and their teachings, of the wisdom of the East and how to divine its secrets, of magic spells and how to break them. He was a firm believer in the supernatural and he believed that his actions were guided by a mysterious spirit who rewarded his good deeds and punished his transgressions. But his powers were probably closer to Kipling’s Lurgan Sahib, a magician and mesmerist, whose talents included the secret of healing sick pearls, than to Borderland’s wand-waving master of the occult. Nor was he a Houdini-like showman performing feats of incredible daring.

  In the late 1890s, his friend Alice Elizabeth Dracott described seeing him take a black pigeon and a white pigeon and place them on a tray, before expressing regret for what he was about to do next. Holding the tray, he turned around and muttered some incantations. When he showed it to his audience again, the two pigeons had their heads cut off. He then tied the two dead birds in a large handkerchief and waved a wand over them. There was movement in the handkerchief and as he undid the knot, the pigeons reappeared alive but with their heads swapped. Apologizing for his mistake, he put them back in the handkerchief and again waved his wand. This time, they reappeared as the same black and white birds he had started with.31

  Not everyone believed Dracott’s account. The wave of spiritualism that gripped the West in the second half of the nineteenth century sparked an equally strong undercurrent of scepticism for all things paranormal. The American and British branches of the Society for Psychical Research specialized in debunking claims made by charlatans, such as, Fraulein Margarete Schmidt-Leutenberg, whose Great Dane could supposedly recite the alphabet by tapping its right and left paws, and barking.

  Jacob had his own challenge prepared for anyone who dared dispute his powers, writing in Borderland that if he ever went to London he would put on a performance that would satisfy ‘the Society for Psychical Research or anyone else who would like to see it’.32

  The most damaging denunciations, however, would come after Jacob’s death. In 1937, Hungarian-born psychical researcher and journalist Nandor Fodor wrote an article for the Society’s journal, in which he concluded that Jacob’s miracle work
ings were one ‘gigantic hoax’. He had encouraged belief in his supernatural powers because it was good for business. ‘Mr Jacob was clever enough to pretend to no miracle working powers in the presence of his friends. They did not even suspect that he was said to be a magician.’33

  John Maiden, owner of the Maidens Hotel in Delhi, told Fodor that Jacob had stayed in his house as a guest for six months. ‘I never heard that he could work miracles. It is impossible that I should not have heard of them. He was a weak specimen of humanity. He could never have kept a secret if he had performed anything of an occult nature. It is very likely, however, that he would have encouraged people to write miraculous stories about him and he would even pay for them. That is just what he would have done.’34

  Fodor was convinced that Jacob was born a Jew who had been sold into slavery and tattooed with a slave mark. He also believed he was a eunuch. ‘These facts are quite consistent with his behaviour. Only a former slave could squander money as he did, and only a man suffering from loss of manhood would go to such extremes to create a mystery around himself.’35 Concluded Fodor: ‘Like the morning mist before the sun, the miracles of Jacob of Simla vanish into thin air. Stripped of its false trappings, the limitlessness of his own credulity is the only miracle which his life reveals.’36 Unfortunately, Fodor’s findings were undermined by his own credulity. In his book The Haunted Mind, where most of his debunking occurs, he claimed to have communicated telepathically with, among others, Czar Nicholas II of Russia.

  Had Jacob had the powers which D’Onston and others attributed to him, he would have transported himself from Simla to Hyderabad with a wave of his magic wand. Instead, he was beholden to a bureaucrat in the Foreign Department who steadfastly refused to grant him permission to travel to the city. His patience, however, was wearing thin. In March 1895, the Imperial Diamond was finally taken out of its safe box at the Bank of Bengal and taken under armed guard to the palace of the Nizam. Incredibly, having once fallen victim to Hyderabad’s web of intrigue, he was about to risk it all over again.

  For years, Jacob’s objective had been to get back into favour with his former patron. So great was his belief in his personal magnetism that he declared that if he could be brought ‘within fifty feet of His Highness, outside Hyderabad territory, where his life was not worth a rush, he would manage his own resurrection within ten minutes’.37

  On a bitterly cold day in November 1897, Jacob mounted his pony and rode up to the Alliance Bank in Simla. His dealings with the bank manager, Arthur Ker, were not as frequent as they used to be, but he was still considered a good customer. A year earlier, the bank had given him an advance on the deposit of some jewellery. Jacob was now asking to withdraw some of that jewellery to sell. An agreement was drawn up committing Jacob to repay the bank with the proceeds of that sale within six months, or return the jewellery.

  On the morning of January 6, 1898, Jacob boarded a train at Delhi station arriving in Hyderabad a day later. He had not sought the Government of India’s permission and kept a low profile. Within hours of his arrival, however, Special Branch officers were keeping a watch on his movements. With Abid no longer employed at the palace, Jacob attempted to arrange an audience with the Nizam through Nawab Afzal Daula, one of the most senior nobles in the state. When that failed, he went directly to the ruler.

  Based on the accounts of the Resident’s informants in the palace, the meeting was a tense affair. The two men had not met since July 1891 when Jacob had unveiled the Imperial Diamond and the Nizam had uttered the fateful words na passand, not approved. Nevertheless, Mahboob Ali Khan had not lost his weakness for baubles and Jacob managed to sell him some if not all the jewellery he had brought down from Simla. He then handed him a petition proposing to buy back the diamond for 3 million rupees. According to the account that reached the British Residency, this angered the Nizam so much that it was ‘flung back to him by a chobdar (attendant)’.38 Jacob then abruptly left the chambers, but not before promising to come back in nine days’ time.

  Short of some kind of suicidal desire to put his head back between the lion’s jaws, Jacob’s offer to buy the diamond didn’t make sense, particularly as he no longer had the means to raise that kind of money. A hurriedly scribbled note from a Residency official to Cuningham in the Foreign Office provided at least part of the answer. According to its author—whose signature is illegible—the whole episode had been staged as part of a plot to get rid of Asman Jah. Jacob had been invited by the Nizam to come to Hyderabad after he had convinced him that he had enough influence in the Foreign Office to have the meddlesome minister sacked, the note explained. For a fee of 400,000 rupees Jacob had offered to lobby Simla and Calcutta on the Nizam’s behalf.

  Although the information about the plot had come from Asman Jah, the note’s author considered it credible enough to inform Calcutta in case Jacob turned up and made good the threat to see the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, on the Nizam’s behalf. So sensitive was the information that Jacob might be trying to drag the British into engineering a palace coup, that it was decided not to send a telegram in case its contents were leaked and created ‘the wrong impression’. Scribbles in the margins of the note suggest the alleged plot was taken seriously enough to have Special Branch officers scrambled to be on the alert for Jacob.39

  The plot—if there ever was one—never happened: the Nizam kept the diamond, and Jacob came up with his own, more innocent, version of the affair. In a letter to Steuart Bayley, the Assistant Secretary in the Foreign Department, written in July 1899, Jacob explained that he had gone to Hyderabad on the advice of a senior official who told him: ‘Try, and if the Resident orders you out, which I don’t think he will (it being against English dignity), but if he does, you can then appeal against his order to a higher authority.’40

  Jacob made no mention of seeing the Nizam but said that after his arrival he had been advised to obtain permission officially. After spending only three days in Hyderabad, he left for Calcutta where he said he had unsuccessfully tried to arrange an appointment with Cuningham. He then referred obliquely to the coup rumours, pointing out that the British had heard only one side of the story. The real facts, he wrote, would never come to light unless thoroughly investigated by officials who had ‘no connection with Hyderabad state’. Without confirming or denying any of the allegations, Cuningham wrote back saying the government no longer had any objections to his travelling to Hyderabad. Jacob’s persistence had finally paid off.

  In the meantime, Jacob had again applied for a passport, which was granted on May 1, 1899. It stated that he was ‘proceeding to Constantinople for the purpose of visiting his mother’. On the file copy of the passport, his nationality—Italian—was crossed out. A note at the bottom read: ‘According to Mr Jacob’s attachment, he was born in Turkey of Italian parents.’ The passport gave his place of residence as Simla, his occupation as ‘jeweller’ and his age as fifty years.41

  The passport does not solve the perennial question of Jacob’s true ancestry. During the Simla jewellery trial in 1881, he had told the court he was from Syria. In his summing up at the Imperial Diamond Case, John Inverarity at one point had referred to his client as a ‘native of Baghdad’.

  The name Bierry, which Jacob also used, could have referred to the Italian port of Bari. But in his biography of John Louis Sabunji, ‘Mr Frost the Englishman’ gave the family name as al-Birri which, in Arabic, means ‘pure of sin’. Frost traced the family back to Urfa in southern Turkey and referred to them as Syrian Catholics. Jacob’s insistence on claiming Italian ancestry may have had its roots in the geopolitics of the day. Posing as an Italian was better than being a Turk in the late nineteenth century because of tensions between Britain and the Ottoman Empire.

  On this visit to Turkey, Jacob left no paper trail. Though his brother was still working at the court of the Sultan, the British embassy’s network of informants in the Topkapi Palace reported nothing untoward.

  One of Jacob’s favourite stories told of lea
ving the family home in Diyarbakir, never to return, on the pretext of going to the market to buy a head of lettuce. When he was finally reunited with his mother after a gap of almost forty years, he brought her a whole basket of lettuce with him by way of an apology. She never scolded him for leaving without saying goodbye. Whether the tale was true or not, it was the last time he saw his mother. Six months later, on December 10, 1891, she died, aged 85.

  Between his trips to Turkey and lobbying the British Government to allow him back into Hyderabad, Jacob struggled to keep his business alive. In December 1896, newspapers reported that Jacob was ‘dispensing with his famous collection’. Owing to the diamond case, he could no longer carry on business with Maharajas and ‘has resolved to retire upon his laurels’.42

  The report of Jacob’s imminent financial ruin was somewhat premature. He still had Belvedere and his shops in Simla and Delhi. Though he was distrusted by many of his regular customers, he was still a rich man, as attested to by memoirs of William Stone, the eccentric British Parliamentarian who died in 1958, aged 101. Because his memoirs were not written in a chronological order, it is difficult to put a precise date on when Stone went to India, but it was some time after the Imperial Diamond Case.

  In The Squire of Piccadilly, Stone wrote that, after forwarding his letter of introduction to Jacob’s shop in Delhi, four or five servants ‘in gorgeous raiment’ came and took his luggage to his house. Jacob then took Stone to his strongroom which he described as being full of ‘thousands and thousands of diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds galore—it was like an Aladdin’s cave’.

  Jacob was ‘a regular cosmopolitan’, Stone continued, ‘a mixture of the Balkan State, a bit of Austro-German, maybe, and a bit of Russian. Yet, he spoke very good English, not in the way Indians speak it.’43