The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy

by John Zubrzycki

  In late 1897, the American writer, Delight Sweetser Prentiss, met Jacob in Agra where he showed her a sample of what he had for sale. Prentiss wrote she was ‘dazzled and delighted by the display’ of gems that stood out more for their size than water. The stones included a pigeon’s-blood ruby set among diamonds valued at 50,000 rupees, and a diamond valued at 30,000 rupees. There was also a resplendent head band that had belonged to a Maharaja: a row of half a dozen huge emeralds set in gold, centred around a richly jewelled clasp below which hung the most beautiful sparkling diamond she had ever seen. ‘It was about the size of a pecan nut, and was cut with facets on all sides.’ She also described seeing rubies—some as large as the end of her thumb; piles of unset stones, strings of huge pearls, shining rows of topaz as well as less precious stones, such as a magnificent cat’s-eye and a heavy arm band set with varicoloured gems—‘all the barbaric gorgeousness that you can imagine’.44

  Prentiss was enthralled by Jacob who had the ability to talk ‘entertainingly of anything and everything’. She described him as the soul of generosity and kindness. ‘There is a remarkable magnetism about the man and when he speaks his wonderful dark eyes flash and glow with intelligence and feeling.’

  It was a different man who met the Boston-born heiress and author Isabel Anderson in Calcutta one year later. In her memoir Odd Corners she wrote that she had expected Jacob to walk straight out of the pages of Mr Isaacs: ‘A tall, slight man, no longer young, perhaps, but handsome still, and living in great luxury. I imagined he would receive us in the evening, clad in some rich costume, and show us handfuls of gems.’ To her great disappointment, he turned out to be ‘a fat, bald little man with store clothes. His only redeeming feature was his fine eyes. My general impression was of a shrewd common dealer and a typical Jew.’ She assumed that he was originally from Armenia.

  Jacob asked Anderson to see him at 3 p.m. in his hotel foyer, part of which he had rented as a temporary showroom. He made her sit at a small table where he displayed a collection of gem stones. ‘None of them remarkable—not nearly so fine as some we saw in Madras,’ she wrote.45

  As with Stone and Prentiss and anyone else who cared to listen, he repeated his sad tale of treachery at the hands of the Nizam, how his enemies in the court had conspired against him, of the losses he had suffered and of how the Nizam still owed him 150,000 rupees for the Imperial Diamond.

  In July 1900, Jacob’s deeply-felt sense of injustice took him back to Hyderabad for the second time since the deal that had sealed his fate. No sooner had he checked into the Cosmopolitan Hotel than news of his arrival reached the office of the British Resident, David Barr. Unsure about Jacob’s status, he sent a confidential cable to William Cuningham in Calcutta who, by now, had spent the best part of a decade and the over-stretched resources of the Foreign Department trying unsuccessfully to keep one step ahead of the Simla jeweller. Cuningham referred Barr’s inquiry to the Intelligence Branch who wrote back saying that permission for Jacob to visit Hyderabad had been granted the previous June, and he should be left alone unless he ‘makes himself objectionable’.46

  Barr also wrote that Jacob was carrying a large stock of jewellery which he was hoping to sell to the Nizam before proceeding to Simla to see the Viceroy in connection with what was known as ‘the Templeton Case’.47

  Arthur Napoleon Templeton was an agent with the trading house, Henry S. King & Co. in Hyderabad. In 1896, he had an affair with Marion Whittaker, who was staying at his house. Whittaker was taken ill on December 6 and died eleven days later. According to the staff surgeon Patrick Hehir, the cause of death was a botched abortion. Templeton was charged with causing the pregnancy, conspiring to procure an abortion that had resulted in a death, and giving false evidence.

  The India Office file on the case gives no mention of when or why Jacob took up Templeton’s cause. There was no pecuniary interest as Templeton was virtually broke, having been sacked from his job when the charges were laid. Partly to attack those who, he believed, were out to get him, he started the Hyderabad Chronicle which was published three times a week and had a circulation of just 150 copies. Fighting the case had so far cost him 75,000 rupees and he had mortgaged his house, property, jewellery, furniture and horses to pay his expenses.

  In early 1899, Templeton sent a memorial to Lord Curzon spelling out what he claimed was the ‘very unsavoury medical history of the case and of its legal aspects’. He also insisted there were ‘secret political motives’ behind the charges and demanded an inquiry. Templeton claimed that the Resident and the Nizam’s brother-in-law, Vicar-ul-Umra, wanted him out of the way because of his close friendship with another nobleman, Sarwar Jung, whom they saw as a threat to their power base. Jung was also disliked by Edward Lawrie, the chief surgeon, because the former didn’t want him appointed as the director of the Nizam’s civil medical department.

  Templeton claimed no independent doctor had been allowed at the post-mortem, that there were discrepancies in Hehir’s death certificate and that his servants had been beaten by the police to obtain evidence against him. After being charged, Templeton had been refused bail and forced to spend months in a Secunderabad jail, subjected to the ‘gaze of the natives’, and other indignities. He also asserted that an attempt had been made to bribe him to disclose the names of others involved in the case.48

  Jacob’s most likely motivation for getting involved with the Templeton case was to settle old scores with the close associates of his old nemesis, Asman Jah. Unfortunately, he backed the wrong horse. According to the Foreign Department’s file, Templeton’s attempts to introduce ‘political dislike’ of Jung as the motive for his prosecution rested on ‘very slender foundations’. Both Templeton’s butler and ayah stated in evidence that Whittaker ‘used to receive visits at unusual times in her bedroom from Templeton and from two native gentlemen—Sarwar Jung and Mahboob Yar Jung.’ There was no evidence of any tampering with the post-mortem.49

  Shortly after Jacob’s arrival in Hyderabad, Templeton filed a case in the district court of Secunderabad against Lawrie and Hehir seeking compensation of 250,000 rupees ‘by way of damages for the injuries and loss he has sustained’. The case failed and, despite Jacob’s promise to take the matter up with the Viceroy, Curzon refused to intervene. In March 1903, Templeton was expelled from Hyderabad.

  ‘It is not too much to assert that for many years he has made a dishonest livelihood by levying blackmail from several of the nobles and officials of Hyderabad State by threatening to malign them in the Hyderabad Chronicle if they did not pay him for his silence,’ Barr wrote in the closing note on the affair. Had he known better, he could have also closed his file on Jacob.50 It was the last time he became involved in the affairs of Hyderabad.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SEARCHING FOR JACOB’S SHOP

  IN the sharp, slanting light of a late winter afternoon, the view from the Pelitis Restaurant towards Simla’s Lower Bazaar is an unforgettable sight. Thousands of tiny windows glint in the lowering sun. Shops, houses and the occasional green-coloured dome of a mosque spill down the steep slope that runs below Simla’s Mall. Like a house of cards, there’s a precariousness about the scene. If one of the buildings at the bottom were to collapse, it would trigger an avalanche of rust-coloured corrugated iron, rocks and dusty timber.

  I can just make out the curve of the Mall as it slowly descends downwards from the Ridge, until it comes to the point where I am standing. Somewhere along the lower side of that road, stood Jacob’s ‘house of wonders’.

  For decades, fans of Kipling’s Kim have descended on Simla, trying to locate Lurgan’s School for Spies, unaware of the fact that it was based on an actual establishment on the Mall. The novel tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, an orphan stranded in India. His only friend is Mahbub Ali, by reputation, a tough Pathan horse trader but by profession, a spy. Mahbub Ali and Colonel Creighton, head of the intelligence services, decide to recruit Kim into their ranks but, first, he must go to Lurgan Sahi
b to be initiated into the secrets of the Great Game—the struggle between Russia and Britain for control of Central Asia, ‘that never ceases day and night’.

  All of Simla knows Lurgan’s shop, Mahbub tells Kim, when they arrive at the hill station, before adding, ‘He is one to be obeyed to the last wink of his eyelashes. Men say he does magic, but that should not touch thee. Go up the hill and ask. Here begins the Great Game.’1

  Like the real-life Jacob, Lurgan defies categorization. When ushered into his shop by a small Hindu boy, Kim can see that he is a European because of his clothes, but his Urdu accent and the intonation of his English, show that he was anything but an ‘imported Sahib from England’.2 Kim notices how the pupils of his eyes dilate and close to pinpoints like a fakir he used to see at Lahore’s Taksali Gate, ‘who had just this gift and made money by it, especially when cursing silly women’. What also sets Lurgan apart is the uncanny way he seems to understand what moves in Kim’s mind before the boy opens his mouth.

  Peter Hopkirk, the English historian and author of Quest for Kim, spent several days walking up and down this same stretch of road, consulting local historians, scouring libraries and antique shops, looking in vain for Jacob’s shop.3 Three chapters later, he had drawn a blank. I was determined to have one last try.

  Describing Simla in her autobiography, The Sun in the Morning, the British novelist M.M. Kaye recalled how her brother Bill used to be taken by his father for walks ‘along the road that leads over the Combermere Bridge, and past the shop that had once belonged to Lurgan Sahib—the “Healer of Pearls” in Kipling’s Kim’.4 She remembers seeing the original shop as late as the 1960s. Though her description confirmed that it was located on the Mall between Combermere Bridge—near where I was standing—and the Ridge, that particular stretch of the road was about a kilometre long.

  Kim provides few clues other than describing the shop as having a verandah that was flush with the main road, while the back was built over a sheer hillside and looked down into the neighbour’s chimney ‘as was the custom of Simla’.5 It also had to have been large by Indian standards to accommodate what Kipling described as a steady stream of petty Rajas buying curiosities; ladies in search of jewellery, men in search of ladies; natives from the Princely states whose ostensible business was to repair broken necklaces,’ but whose true end seemed to be to raise money for angry Maharanees or young Rajas’.5

  There would also have been a back room where Lurgan put Kim through the first of several tests to ascertain his readiness to become a spy—his capacity to withstand being hypnotized, his ability to memorize the exact number and features of a handful of jewels thrown randomly on a table, and his skills at being able to recognize the caste, character and dress of the customers who came to the shop every day.

  For many, the search begins at Maria Brothers, Simla’s most famous antiquarian bookseller. It is one of the oldest establishments on the Mall, situated just down the hill from where Lawries Hotel was located. According to Thacker’s New Guide to Simla published in 1924, there was ‘a row of Persian and Kabuli shops where carpets, furs, brasses and curios are sold’, 6 where Maria Brothers now stood—the perfect position for Jacob to have carried on his business.

  Maria Brothers still retained its original blue-coloured wooden façade and hand-painted sign. The interior was crammed with multiple summits of books, old prints and bric-à-brac piled on the table inside. There were old volumes of the Simla Times and Punch magazine as well as numerous gazetteers. An original early eighteenth-century watercolour by Thomas Daniels of the coast near Madras hung on the left above the doorway. Though it was by far the most valuable item, I had to strain my neck to see it. There were abstract oil paintings covered in such thick layers of dust that their original colours had coalesced into various hues of clay. Many of the books looked like they had sat on the shelves since the British left in 1947. There were first editions of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, Gerald Burrard’s Big Game Hunting in the Himalayas and Tibet, and an 1822 edition of Mémoires sur l’Hindoustan ou Empire Mogol by Colonel Jean-Baptiste.

  The shop owner, Rajesh Sud, had heard of Jacob, but was adamant that his cramped establishment was not the original setting for Lurgan’s house of wonders. Careful not to disappoint a potential customer, he took out a book on Simla written by his father. I flipped through the pages, skipping the standard chapters on the town’s history, flora and fauna, before getting to the chapter on local personalities. There were brief vignettes on people, such as Lola Montez, a runaway schoolgirl-turned-local-beauty, who became a burlesque dancer after divorcing her husband. For reasons never clearly explained, she travelled to Australia where she horsewhipped the editor of the Ballarat Times before going to America, where she became a social worker among downtrodden women. There was also a chapter on the American Baptist missionary Samuel Stokes who planted the first apple orchards, abandoned Christianity for Hinduism, changed his name to Satyanand and became a follower of Gandhi.

  Then came the chapter on ‘Jacob—The Mysterious’ with its standard disclaimer of: ‘Who he was and whence he emerged remained a hopeless mystery.’7 The most startling thing about the chapter was not the text but the drawing that accompanied it. There, in simple black pen strokes, was a sketch of Jacob, the first and still the only one I have ever seen. With an upturned collar, and a carefully manicured moustache, he looked unmistakably European. After reading Kim, I had imagined someone much older, a more sage-like character, a wicked magus of the East. Instead, Jacob looked like he had just stepped out of the pages of a nineteenth-century edition of Vanity Fair.

  Rajesh said his father knew a man who had one of Jacob’s signet rings. ‘Jacob would give his favourite clients a ring with a small drawing of him in porcelain. My father wanted to buy that ring and offered him a lot of money but the man would never part with it. The man left many years ago and I never knew his name but my father took a photograph of the ring and that is how he came to make the sketch.’ The only other portrait of Jacob I had heard of was owned by a Colonel Howard Murray. The miniature painting on ivory was part of a collection of Oriental antiques and curios that Murray exhibited in Bombay in 1932. What piqued my interest was a newspaper clipping mentioning that he was emigrating to Australia. But that lead drew a blank when I discovered that he had fallen overboard and disappeared, just as his ship was about to dock in Fremantle.

  There were few establishments left, as old as Maria Brothers, that could qualify as being the original of Jacob’s shop. Edward Buck, who was the Reuters correspondent in the early 1900s and who wrote Simla, Past and Present, the definitive history of the hill station, depicted it as a ‘quaint little shop on the Mall’.8 Buck also wrote that Jacob possessed several volumes of a diary that he refused to part with even for a substantial sum. ‘It was rumoured at one time that his life would be written by the pen of an American lady. But apparently, nothing has been done.’9

  Buck’s book contained another clue: a reprint of an old lithograph, ‘Art in Simla, Show-room at Mr Imre Schwaiger.’ Undated, it showed a large, high-ceilinged room crammed with curios and antiques. Schwaiger took over Jacob’s business in the first decade of the twentieth century and probably operated out of the same premises until the 1920s. There are oriental vases, statues of many-armed Hindu Gods, tables made out of rosewood and inlaid with mother of pearl, brass lamps, Burmese embroideries, and cabinets filled with unknown treasures. At the back, a curtained door leads to another room. Jacob’s ‘Wonder House’ was more crowded but, otherwise, the description given by Kipling in Kim and by other writers matched the scene in the photograph in almost every detail.

  Yet another clue was an intriguing description given by Humphrey Bullock in The Irish Monthly of 1954 which contained enough details to suggest it was based on firsthand experience. Bullock wrote that Jacob’s shop stood between the Mall and the Lower Bazaar. ‘Owners whose properties stand on the steep bank between the two streets can make a handsome livelihood ou
t of both frontages, for these buildings are so devised that their lowest floor provides a boost of small profit but an immense turnover for the teeming thousands of the bazaar, while eight stories higher, the structure attains the level of the more fastidious Mall to house a store catering for the passersby with a considerably longer purse. Mr Jacob’s premises were among those with shops at both extremities.’ Bullock speculated that the lower entrance was leased as a cover to ‘a vendor of sticky fly-infested sweetmeats or delectable fryings in ghee’. It was this entrance that could be used by ‘callers whose errands could not stand up to the broad light of day and curious scrutiny which attended a passage along the highly respectable Mall’.10

  I also had with me a copy of the Kipling Journal of 1919 containing a photograph submitted by a Leonora A. Winn. ‘I have much pleasure in sending you this print of Lurgan Sahib’s place, in the hope that the half-tone engravers may be able to make a fairly good block of it for use in the journal,’ wrote Winn enthusiastically. ‘It shows the very shop that housed the priceless treasures of the great mystic, the late Mr A.M. Jacob, “The Diamond King”—the original of Kipling’s Lurgan Sahib and the “Mr Isaacs” in Marion Crawford’s novel of that title.’11

  The black-and-white photograph showed the premises of the Oxford Book & Stationery Co. The store had timber-framed display windows on either side of a short flight of steps. A doorman sat on a ledge next to the entrance while a customer peered through the window. Winn wrote that when Jacob owned the shop, it had a ‘little lateral balcony’ at the front door and a small room behind the shop, where Kipling set the scene between ‘Lurgan Sahib, Kim and the small, recalcitrant Hindu boy’.

  As I walked down the Mall towards Combermere Bridge, I could see nothing that matched Winn’s photograph. Oxford Book & Stationery Co. had a branch in Simla until Independence in 1947, located on the lower side of the Mall near Combermere Bridge, in other words, approximately the same location mentioned by Kaye. It would also have had that desirable double frontage that Bullock described. Unfortunately, what had once been a block of timber, double-fronted shops where the Oxford store most probably stood, was now a mess of concrete, marble, glass and steel. A new set of shops—probably built a decade or two ago—now occupied the site. Instead of curios and antiques, they sold cheap woollens and the same tacky souvenirs that one can find in any hill station in India. The only one that came close to being exotic was plying cheap Tibetan handicrafts.