The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy

by John Zubrzycki

  Both explanations were probably equally true. Jacob was still obsessed by the glitter and the gold of Hyderabad. Restoring his role as the chief jeweller to the Nizam would turn his financial situation around. Nor had he lost his appetite for hustling and political intrigue. Despite being in his early 50s and on the verge of bankruptcy, the thrill of meddling in the affairs of a royal court and the prospect of making an enormous profit were so strong that he had been willing to waste four precious months waiting to see the Rana. It turned out to be a costly mistake. On January 5, 1900, the Foreign Department recommended against Mr Jacob’s receiving assistance from the Government of India ‘in respect of his claim against the Dholpore chief.’6

  Ironically, the next time the two men crossed paths was in Simla two years later. On September 10, 1892, the Times of India reported that the collection of the Maharaj Rana of Dholpur featuring ‘silver ware, china, carvings and carpets’ was to be sold at an auction followed ‘by a collection of curiosities’ at Belvedere, the residence of ‘Mr A.M. Jacob, the well-known art dealer’.7

  The auction marked the end of an era for Jacob. Belvedere had been sold earlier that year and the new owners wanted him out. In May, they had served him with an eviction order which he had successfully challenged in court as insufficient notice had been given, but now, that extension was coming to a close. He owed the Alliance Bank in Simla more than 80,000 rupees which he insisted was money the Nizam had promised to pay him for jewellery he had bought in 1898 but not paid for. When queried by the Bank, Mahboob Ali Khan categorically denied having had any dealings with Jacob since the Imperial Diamond Case.

  Jacob was no longer the ‘uncrowned king of Simla’. The Times of India now described him as a figure who had been well known ‘in former days’.8 His seances and sleights of hand no longer drew the curious and the cynical. He also had, for the first time, a real competitor in the jewellery and antique trade.

  Imre Schwaiger had arrived in India from Hungary as a twenty-seven-year-old in 1895. Unlike Jacob—whose reputation had been tarnished by the Imperial Diamond Case and his occasonal erratic behavior—Schwaiger was the epitome of European smoothness and sophistication. Though he joined the Himalayan Brotherhood Lodge, he never dabbled in the occult, he steered clear of palace intrigues and spying. He was a serious art historian, not just a collector. In 1903, he assembled the first-ever exhibition of Nepalese art at the Calcutta Art Gallery. Following his death in 1940, a large part of his collection ended up at the Ferenc Hopp Museum of East Asian Art in Budapest.

  Schwaiger’s modus operandi was similar to Jacob’s: establishing contacts with itinerant traders who brought their wares to him. ‘He was the first person to deal with the art of Nepal,’ Zoltan Takacs of the Hopp Museum noted. ‘He made friends with Himalayan natives; he had them stay at his house, and they in return took all their valuable works of art to him … Splendid artifacts in the Indian, Tibetan and Nepalese sections of British and American museums derive from him.’9

  Like many Europeans, Schwaiger spent the summer months in Simla where he mixed easily with the hill station’s élite. Sporting his trademark blue cornflower in the button hole of his jacket, he became a regular fixture on the Simla social scene. He helped to organize the annual dinner dance of the Knights of BlackHeart, supplying and ‘perfectly arranging … costly ornaments, decorations and carpets’ as well as electric lights that ‘added greatly to the brilliancy of the scene’.10

  When Jacob’s collection at Belvedere was slated to go under the hammer, Schwaiger saw an opportunity not only to acquire some valuable pieces at bargain prices but also to take over his role as the pre-eminent art dealer in Simla and Delhi. So numerous were the chattels of Jacob’s estate, that the auction took five days. Newspaper reports commented that many of the more valuable pieces were sold cheaply because of the glut of sales that season. The final amount realized was a paltry 30,000 rupees for the remnants of a collection that had been valued at 20 times than a decade earlier.

  The undoubted bargain, it was generally agreed, was the steel peacock which Schwaiger picked up for just £6 6s 8d, or 95 rupees. According to the Simla Times, Jacob had once been offered £200 for the piece but refused. He had also reportedly refused an offer of £2000 from the South Kensington Museum. ‘Whatever the real value of the bird may eventually turn out to be, all those who attended the Belvedere Auction are now wishing they had purchased this particular peacock,’ the newspaper added.11

  Schwaiger also believed he had made a good deal. He was convinced the peacock was an image of Malik-i-Tawus. According to Schwaiger, the statue made its way to India after a Kurdish chieftain attacked the town of Dahoodia and plundered the Yezidi temple.

  That was the history ascribed to the statue after Schwaiger donated it to the British Museum in 1912. Unfortunately, the peacock’s provenance was a myth. Within a week of its going on display, the explorer Athelstan Riley, who had travelled extensively among the Yezidis in the 1880s and was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the sect, confirmed the statue on display was, as the British Museum labels it today, a votary piece from nineteenth-century Iran used to decorate the cross-bar of an alam, a standard carried during Shia festivals. The figures which decorate the tail were not representations of Malik-i-Tawus, but ordinary illustrations from the great Persian epic, the Shah-nama. ‘If somebody paid thousands of pounds for this impudent bird he was grievously swindled,’ Riley wrote in the Times. He doubted ‘a dealer would give $50 for it’.12

  Riley wasn’t far off the mark. Jacob had bought it for £6 10s from Haji Salih, a trader from Isfahan in Persia who had taken it to his curio shop on the Mall in Simla in 1881. Determined to restore at least some of his reputation, Jacob wrote a long letter to the Illustrated London News where he sought to correct Schwaiger’s ‘misleading’ statements. ‘This peacock is no more Malik-i-Tawus than I am. It is a coarsely constructed piece of common iron, except the body, which is of old steel, but the legs, neck, head, and the tail are all made of iron.’ He said he could get ‘as many as the British Museum would like at £6 10s each if I were now engaged in that class of business’. Had Schwaiger been able to read Oriental languages, he would have seen an inscription on the bird proving that it had no connection with the Yezidis and hence, ‘would have thought twice before explaining it to the world as he has’.13

  The bitterness and irony in Jacob’s letter reflected his jealousy of the Hungarian’s meteoric rise in the trade he had once dominated. The fact that the Queen had visited what was once his shop would have particularly galled him. A pair of engravings from the early 1910s shows both the Simla and Delhi showrooms looking prosperous and stocked to the ceiling with rare objets d’art.

  He would have also been irritated at the description of Schwaiger’s shop in Delhi given by the author and Theosophist Mary Walter Tibbits in her memoir, The Voice of the Orient. According to Tibbits, it was nothing other than the most wonderful shop in the world—‘a place from which the heir to the richest empire turned away with envious regrets’. Schwaiger, she noted, had inherited it from ‘that mysterious Simla merchant who combined an astute eye to business in the things of this world with an extensive dealing on the other side of the veil’.14

  Her description of the shop’s contents read like a passage from Kim or Mr Isaacs. One of the most valuable pieces was the shrine of Sakya Tubpa, taken from a Buddhist Nunnery at Dongtze, near Lhasa. Over the head of the Buddha, she wrote, was the tree of knowledge, guarded by dragons and surrounded by smaller images of monsters in lapis lazuli, turquoise, agate, cornelian, mother-of-pearl, and ivory. Tibbits noted jade ornaments from China, a miniature mountain made of blue turquoise from a yellow-cap monastery in eastern Tibet, a box of old Lucknow enamel on silver and an oval cup of rock crystal of sixteenth-century Italian design that was probably presented to one of the Great Mughals by a European traveller. There were Buddhas from Kathmandu, a statue of Ganesh, the Hindu God of luck and wisdom, and an image of Shiva’s
bull carved from a gigantic pearl. Nearby, was an ivory cobra coiled round a skull, also in ivory, ‘whose slimy scales seem to glisten and glide with healthy motion’. Finally, there was the ‘frivolous head-dress of a fair Manchurian Princess’ made of real kingfisher’s feathers and gold, and decorated with jade, coral, and amber.15

  Schwaiger’s business thrived until the outbreak of World War One. As a Hungarian national, he was interned and his collection, which still comprised many pieces that had once belonged to Jacob, was auctioned off by the Government. After the war, he started building up his business again and travelled every year to Europe, eventually opening a showroom on Bond Street in London.

  ‘If an Indian Prince wished to complete some rare adornment in precious stones or to acquire famous gems coming on the market, he knew that Schwaiger with his worldwide connections would be the best and most trustworthy agent,’ the Times of London wrote in his obituary on June 15, 1940. ‘His resourcefulness was evidenced when the Nizam of Hyderabad suddenly decided to pay a visit to his palace in New Delhi. In a few hours, Schwaiger completed the furnishing and filled the rooms with artistic treasures bought or lent for the purpose.’16

  Despite being the heir to Jacob’s legacy, there is only one instance of Schwaiger’s referring to him. He was a ‘remarkable man’, he told the psychic researcher Nandor Fodor. ‘Extremely vain, extremely clever, extremely eccentric. He could hate as virulently as he could be generous … If he disliked someone he would not rest until he had ruined him. He lived on the pinnacle of extravagance from which it was very sad to see him tumble down.’17

  When Jacob was having his spat with Schwaiger over the sacred peacock, he was residing at No. 9, Waterloo Mansions, in Bombay. He was not yet the wizened old man scratching a living by selling old crockery on the pavement as described by one of his contemporaries. Back then, the two-bedroom flat across the road from the Prince of Wales Museum, was a prime piece of real estate.

  Jacob moved to Bombay in 1903, choosing the city because it was the most cosmopolitan in India and the departure point for steamships sailing for Europe. Waterloo Mansions is today known as the Mercantile Insurance Company building. An old post-card from the early 1900s shows, on the towers at either end, two gabled roofs, which have since been removed. Otherwise, the building and its surroundings have hardly changed. What was then the ground-floor showroom of Messrs Connor Gerrard & Co., purveyors of decorative glass items, is now the premises of Phillips Antiques.

  Jacob may have lost most of his wealth and most of his clients, but he was hardly living in poverty. His flat consisted of a large lounge and a drawing room with two bedrooms and twin verandah, overlooking the Wellington Fountain Circle and the Majestic Hotel. His servants would have lived on the top floor of the building. It was possible that the building’s owner, the Raja of Moulvi, let him have the flat rent-free in return for a past favour.

  Jacob continued to attract a steady stream of visitors from around the world, many of them early twentieth-century New Agers like Lady Maud Warrender, who passed through Bombay in 1910. I could imagine Jacob sending out scouts to the Oriental, the Taj and Watsons Hotel, where most well-heeled tourists stayed, picking out middle-aged women clutching copies of Mr Isaacs and luring them back to Jacob’s flat for a palm reading or the promise of a cheap pearl necklace. When Warrender saw Jacob she was devastated to find a ‘ruined man’, living in the dull hope that the Nizam would pay the money he owed, and earning a living of sorts selling curios. ‘It was tragic to see him so broken, though his philosophy kept him cheerful. He gave me one or two tips before the Bombay Race Meeting, but they did not come off!’ she wrote in her memoir, My First Sixty Years.18

  Age was catching up with Jacob. His eyesight was deteriorating and his health was failing. On October 12, 1910, he wrote a letter to his brother John saying that he was gravely ill and that doctors had given him only three days to live.

  Jacob recovered from his unnamed illness and in December of the same year held what was probably the last of his famous ‘antique and curio’ sales. Jacob’s skills as a trader were not over yet, if the goods on sale were any indication. Collectors were told they would find ‘rare pieces of brass, bronze, carved wood and porcelain’. The oldest pieces dated from the fifteenth century and included plaques taken from the Temple of Heaven at Peking, ‘representing the “The Four Seasons” with health, wealth, happiness and longevity, the four points of the compass and also the four elements’. The pieces featured ‘precious stones of suitable colours and are most artistically inlaid in the plaque’.19

  In 1911, Jacob’s solitary existence was interrupted by the arrival from England of Frederick Heath. A publisher, critic and journalist, Heath stayed with Jacob for several months in Waterloo Mansions. He found that the former ‘idol of Anglo-Indian society, sought after and flattered’, was now an ‘old and disappointed man with nothing but memories to bear him company in the dark and dismal evening of his life’.20

  After listening to the many stories Jacob read from the diaries he had kept for thirty-five years, Heath was convinced that ‘this remarkable man of the East’ had powers that were ‘beyond the comprehensions of ordinary men’. Francis Marion Crawford’s Mr Isaacs, though based on Jacob’s life, gave only a ‘faint idea’ of Jacob’s remarkable character. Crawford ‘failed to present a single incident that for wonder and interest cannot be easily eclipsed by an authenticated fact of Mr Jacob’s life, for, in the case of Mr Jacob, the actual incidents of his life are more remarkable than any fiction that could be written about them’. His real story, when it came to be written, would be invested with more wonder and mystery than ‘even in our strangest dreams we never imaged it could possess’.21

  Heath was clearly spellbound by Jacob who, he said, had an uncanny knack of ‘taking the words out of my mouth, when the thought expressed in them had only just formed in my mind’. During his stay, Jacob read his horoscope and predicted that he would lose a limb in an accident. Unlike many of his other prophesies, this one, unfortunately, came true.22 When World War One broke out, Heath enlisted as a private and rose to the rank of officer. On May 27, 1918, he was badly wounded by a shell near Boulogne and had his left arm amputated, but not before he nearly died from loss of blood and shock.

  In 1912, based on the months he spent with him in Bombay, Heath published in the Occult Review what he said was a ‘clear and faithful account’ of Jacob’s rise and fall.23 His account, however, was disappointing. At the ripe old age of sixty-two, Jacob had long since mastered the art of telling his listener what he or she wanted to hear and Heath, writing for an audience that hungered after the esoteric, heavily skewered his tale.

  Moved by Jacob’s now well-rehearsed hard-luck story about how his savings of twenty-eight years had ‘vanished like smoke’ to pay his legal costs during the Imperial Diamond Case and how the Nizam still owed him money, Heath suggested petitioning King George V, who was coming to India for the Delhi Durbar. It didn’t matter that Mahboob Ali Khan had drunk himself to death after a row with one of his many wives in September 1911, the government owed it to him to take up his cause.

  On January 3, 1912, the ‘Humble Petition of ALEXANDER MALCOLM JACOB, a Naturalized British Subject, resident at Waterloo Mansions in the City of Bombay, formerly a Dealer in Precious Stones and Bijouterie’24 arrived at the King-Emperor’s vast canvastented camp at the Durbar grounds in front of the Red Fort.

  The petition would be his last chance of redressal of the perceived injustices he had spent the last two decades fighting to get corrected. Attached were two appendices, one detailing the role he had played in bringing cases of injustice by British officers in the Princely states to the attention of the Viceroy; and the other taking credit for convincing the Nizam to hand over 6 million rupees to the Government of India for the Imperial Defence. He then outlined his case against the Nizam for the money he owed him and against the Rana of Dholpur.

  ‘A man of good reputation and respectable status in soci
ety, commercial as well as social’, he had exhausted every channel, including the submission of memorials to successive Viceroys. He had always believed that Britain stood for ‘just and honest legislation’, yet, the rights of its subjects were ignored in the name of non-interference in the affairs of the native states.

  Despite all he had done he had ‘never received any recognition of his services’ and had been treated ‘unjustly and inconsiderately’ by officials of the Government of India. ‘Having lived on the flotsam and jetsam of past opulence’, he was forced ‘to earn his living by dealing in china ware’. This ‘wretched condition’ had lasted seven years despite the Nizam and the Rana ‘legally and morally’ owing him 2.1 million rupees.

  He now craved ‘for mercy and justice’, he added. ‘The only other appeal open to the Petitioner is God, whom he has no means of approaching on a matter so purely mundane; and he, therefore, most humbly appeals to Your Gracious Majesty, as the Protector under God of the rich and poor alike, and humbly prays that Your Imperial Majesty, having honoured this country by your sacred presence and made all Your Imperial Majesty’s subjects happy and contented, may be graciously pleased to extend that Sunshine to your humble and devoted subject, who will ever pray for Your Imperial Majesty and Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen Empress.’25

  The memorial was rejected. After being forwarded to the Foreign Department in Calcutta, the official who reviewed it noted correctly that the Imperial Diamond Case had been settled out of court and in any case, the memorial could not be accepted as it was time-barred.

  In March 7, 1912, Jacob wrote to the Foreign Department, asking how the matter could be time-barred when the Government had refused to sanction any legal processes. The ‘distressed and penurious circumstances’ which he had suffered all these years as a result, were now affecting him more acutely than ever. He begged the Government of India to ‘give these facts their generous consideration’.26