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- [00:01]
William Durrimple
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- [00:22]
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- [00:39]
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- [01:10]
Anita Arden
Empire with me, Anita Ana. Oh, you want to do it?
- [01:13]
William Durrimple
Okay.
- [01:13]
Anita Arden
I thought. I thought you were gonna. Well, hang on. This is a turn up for the books, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, and cue.
- [01:29]
William Durrimple
Hello 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.
- [01:57]
Anita Arden
So let me tell you why you should care about this man Crumbagle, the brilliantly named Krumbegal. 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. He 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 2 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. It will be ancient 23 year old crumbagle. 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, you know, once in a while. And that is why you should know about Crumbagle.
- [03:28]
William Durrimple
So up to now on this mini series on plants and empire, we 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.
- [03:48]
Anita Arden
It'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 Krumbagel, 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, tweety, looks like a. 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. Not only is he behind sort of the greening of Bangalore, the garden city of India, he landscaped Ooty, a hill station favourite of the Raj. I mean, you describe Ooty, the most.
- [04:38]
William Durrimple
Beautiful hill station in the south, which is where Snooka was invented. In the Ooty Club.
- [04:43]
Anita Arden
No way.
- [04:44]
William Durrimple
If you go to the Ooty Club, there is a whole framed history of the invention of Suka 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 vent games in the Ooty Club.
- [05:02]
Anita Arden
So, I mean, UTI still is a destination favourite of honeymoon couples in India. You know, they go and they 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, you know, just out of nothing, which has the sensibility of you know, those kind of beautiful old Shalimar gardens that you love so much with the mountains and the, you know, the different levels. And, you know, he creates this. And that place still gets 2 million visitors a year. It's one of the major tourist attractions in Karnataka, and he's behind that. And he also pretifies the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, which is the equivalent of India's Kew Gardens, if you like. And I think, actually, Willi, you should tell us a little bit about the history of the Lalbad, because it is to do with Tipu Sultan and his father, Hyder Ali.
- [05:57]
William Durrimple
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 India Company than anyone else. But 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 and all these sort of telescopes and globes and important books of scholarship were brought back to his kingdom in Sri Rangapatnam. And 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 Moguls. It's another Islamic tradition, but it's far more closely related to the lost ancient Hindu traditions of gardening. And 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 Hussain's book has brought back from obscurity a whole garden tradition which Tipu embraced and took forward and which the gardens which Krambegal later sort of Victorian and brings into the present. And just before we return to Crumbagle, I just like to talk about some of the lovely Deccan gardening books that Ali Akbar found when he was writing his book.
- [07:53]
Anita Arden
How is Deccan gardening different to Mughal gardening since they're sort of the same stem?
- [07:57]
William Durrimple
Everything in the Deccan was set up in opposition to the Mughals. They 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 Valiatbah Hussain. 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 sort of old wife's tales and Mali's law 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. Isn't that a lovely idea?
- [08:47]
Anita Arden
Oh, it's sweet. I mean, I'm not sure it's true.
- [08:49]
William Durrimple
I'm not sure, but it's lovely.
- [08:50]
Anita Arden
I'm not sure it sounds like.
- [08:52]
William Durrimple
And it says if honey dates, cow's Milton, chopped licorice are dug into the plant's roots, you also get particularly sweet fruit. Bananas, meanwhile, can be encouraged to elongate, become as long and firm as elephant tusks if an iron bar dipped in a steamy mixture mixture of animal waste is used to scorch the tree.
- [09:11]
Anita Arden
Well, I don't know. I wonder if that might be true. I don't know, but I mean, sort of influencing the sweetness.
- [09:16]
William Durrimple
I did love this so much. I'm just going to read one last little thing. There's another gardening book called the Kazan wa Baha 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 Tippu 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 color. And then you move to a different garden at night where you have night flowers.
- [10:05]
Anita Arden
Jasmine, honeysuckle, that kind of stuff. Roses that. Yes, lovely.
- [10:09]
William Durrimple
And the idea is that even a blind man could sniff his way around these Decani night gardens.
- [10:14]
Anita Arden
Well, I mean, that sounds gorgeous. And it is one of these Decani gardens that Crumbagwal will put his stamp on. 200 acres of land. But he's not just a horticulturalist. He is also the man they turn 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 Lalbadu Shastri, Rajiv Gandhi, Atal Dehari Vajpayee, you know, the resting place of the memory. A former prime minister. So that's how important he is and why it is just nuts that no one knows his name. Shall I tell you where it all begins for Gustav Hermann? Well, Lohman, 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 Hermann Krombagel was not plugged into any of that because Lohman 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. It 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. 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 it 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, you know, he's in Pilnitz first of all, and then he goes to Mecklenburg 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 Sangera was talking about, the epicenter, Kew Gardens. The only place that Crumbagle wants to be because it is the best place in the world to learn his craft. Sense a problem there. Little boy from Lohman trying to walk into Kew Gardens and say, get a job. They're going to say, no, bugger off. And so what he does is he goes anyway to 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, you know, 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 enterprise. I look at my 14 year old, oh my God, can't you be more crumb bagel? Seriously, just like, 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. No, 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 Kew was like in those days, because remind us what Satnam said about it. It was the epicentre of empire itself this time.
- [13:33]
William Durrimple
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. And 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. Some are temperate, some are tropical. And the idea is that you can grow in Kew something from any part of the world, and that you will have a seed bank and a scholarly center that can unite the world, but particularly the British Empire in a whole sort of botanical network.
- [14:24]
Anita Arden
So, 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 Crumbagle 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 6 in the morning till 6 in the evening. You know, as long as there was sunlight and maybe a bit longer to put things away. A hard day and working six day weeks where you get one Sunday off each month. So this is not a soft option. It is back breaking 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, you know, don't last very long, apprentices get sort of knackered and wrung out within one year. Crumbagle stays for five years and it's during that time he falls in love with his own English rose. You know, it's very sweet.
- [15:45]
William Durrimple
Katie Clara. Who's she?
- [15:46]
Anita Arden
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 is 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 crumbage live. But you know what you were saying about this centre 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 Lohman, 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, you know, how to get them to survive. And William Goldring notices this kid and.
- [17:01]
William Durrimple
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.
- [17:12]
Anita Arden
He looks like a villain.
- [17:15]
William Durrimple
Or the very dim inspector. What's he called? The Inspector?
- [17:18]
Anita Arden
Lestrade.
- [17:19]
William Durrimple
Lestrade.
- [17:20]
Anita Arden
Lestrade, that's right, Inspector Lestrade. Why don't they.
- [17:23]
William Durrimple
Slightly fierce, prominent forehead, Neanderthal.
- [17:27]
Anita Arden
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. He 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 haha. Who do we turn to to decide where to put the haha? William Goldring. And he's designed the gardens around hospitals, asylums, public parks in England and Wales also.
- [18:04]
William Durrimple
And this is the crucial break in the story for an Indian maharaja. Tell us about this.
- [18:10]
Anita Arden
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 Guy Quad of Baroda during 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.
- [18:33]
William Durrimple
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 Laxmi Villas, which is this enormous Victorian expanse of sort of indict Victoriana, was sort of semi ruinous. And I remember being led in to interview the Maharaja in my early days as a journalist in India. And 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 who 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.
- [19:33]
Anita Arden
But the reason that the Maharaja of Baroda, whose name was Maharaja Sayadji Rao Gaikwad iii, decided to build something as vast as this. And when I say build something as vast as this, it 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 wanted something Bigger by the fact that, you know, even though he was Time magazine put him in 1908 as the sixth richest man in the world. You know, this is a man of great wealth and means. So he wanted something bigger and better. And that's why this 170 room Lakshmi Villas palace is built, as William said, you know, Indo Saracetic style. You know, mixing Islamic, Rajput, Maratha, Bengali, Gujarati, Venetian and Gothic into this car crash style.
- [20:25]
William Durrimple
It's the ultimate. It looks more like a sort of Disney railway station.
- [20:30]
Anita Arden
Yeah, it is. I mean it's lots of domes and spires and things all in a completely.
- [20:33]
William Durrimple
Chaotic jumble as far as one can see.
- [20:35]
Anita Arden
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 guy Quad, you know, he's variously known as the Gaikwad 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 Crumbagle. We haven't forgotten about him. He'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?
- [21:12]
William Durrimple
I don't. I know about lots of naughty maharajas in the Punjab, but I don't know this one. The Patialas were the most naughty ones.
- [21:17]
Anita Arden
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 deli. Darbar takes place. You know, one of these things where a new monarch comes in and you know, 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. Sayajaro Gayakot III was a ruler who just thought, you know what? I've built a palace at 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, he 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, Dabur. And you are not, 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, you know, 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. He comes, he bows once, only a bit, and then he turns around and he walks away, turning his back on the King Emperor.
- [22:53]
William Durrimple
Unforgivable.
- [22:54]
Anita Arden
Absolute hell breaks loose.
- [22:57]
William Durrimple
Is this Curzon's Durbar? His Curzon around at this point?
- [22:59]
Anita Arden
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. And 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 mouth topology, but he does become for a while a bit of a nationalist hero because, you know, 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, Murthilal Nehru, who's a very influential man at the time, goes ballistic over the Maharaja's insult to the British. Like he'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 Durbar 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 marche I had 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. I 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.
- [24:53]
William Durrimple
That's Motilal Nehru writing to his son, Jawaharlal Nehru.
- [24:58]
Anita Arden
Yeah. And, you know, Jawaharlal Nehru writes back saying, I think it's rather silly of the Guy Quad to do what he did, and sillier still to humbly apologise for it. But anyway, so look, this sets up the Guy Quad of Baroda, who goes to William Goldring, who's just designed his gaudy palaces. Granite.
- [25:13]
William Durrimple
I was wondering where we were coming back to.
- [25:15]
Anita Arden
Well, I take these rabbit holes. I know. I love these sort of dog legs and they just are so fascinating. So they're, you know, you've got Crumbagle, who's. 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. I'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 Herman Gustav Grumbagle or Gustav Herman Grumbagle. 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.
- [26:04]
William Durrimple
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- [27:15]
Anita Arden
Hello, welcome back. So just before the break, finally we got back onto Crumb. Just the thing I criticize you for. I do. You did. He did. Like the plants disappeared in the MP episode.
- [27:27]
William Durrimple
We're not being very good at keeping.
- [27:28]
Anita Arden
Track of the plants. 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, is 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 anytime he can in the most spectacular way. So you know, these, these two rebels the maharaja talks to Crumbagle thinks he likes him, brings him over and actually the two get on famously.
- [27:59]
William Durrimple
In what sense is Crumbagle a rebel? So far we've just been seeing him sort of doing the weeding in Kew.
- [28:05]
Anita Arden
Because he doesn't take no for an answer, which is what I love for him. He gets thrown back, thrown back. You know, he leaves Lohman, he ends up at Kew, wherever he wants to go. He kind of realizes his dream and I think you have to be made of some kind of stuff to outgrow the parameters of your birth. You know, he wasn't meant to be this maharaja's gardener. Who from Lohman gets to get a chance for that but Crumbagle does? And also just, you know, growing a queue where people get worn out and booted out crumbage, like, nope, that's not me. I'm not just going to be a mid level gardener. I'm going to stay here for five years and I'm going to do something to transform my life. So they get on really well and they make plans together. The maharajah, the big plans that he wanted a gardener for. He wants to develop hundreds of gardens across Baroda it's already a lush, green place. But he wants so much more.
- [28:55]
William Durrimple
What a break for Krumbagel from doing the weeding in Kew. He's now building sort of botanic gardens.
- [29:02]
Anita Arden
Across the state and with a blank cheque, because this man is rich, he's really rich, and money is no object. But he does want results. So, you know, he hits the ground running. And some of the things that he does in Breeder, he creates something I love this, called a tree census. Now, a tree census eventually will lead to the planting of hundreds of thousands of trees and also mapping where the existing ones are. And this is revolutionary in India, you know, people don't. Why would they map the trees? But it is very good and very modern botanical practice to know where your trees are and what they're doing and to check on them. He starts doing this as soon as he arrives. He also decides, or he suggests, that maybe we should link tree planting to population. Some people do this already. When a boy is born, they plant trees and when a girl is born, they plant fewer trees. Well, I think he convinces the maharaja that, look, if a boy is born, plant 15 trees. If a girl is born, 10 trees, and make it a law. And the Maharaja, who sort of does listen to this little German gardener, says, yeah, it's a good idea. It's a great idea. Let's do this. He sets up India's first great plant nursery. And in the end, you know, he's got 64 gardens around, 64 palaces that he's looking after and he's landscaping and he's restructuring. And the vision of him sort of in his pith helmet riding around in these gardens, and his gift was, so I'm told, is that he manages to sort of merge the gardens of the Maharaja seamlessly with the. The countryside around it. So it just feels like an everlasting garden for somebody in the palaces. And I'm going to tell you one other story before we break with Crumbagle, and I'll tell you more about this because, you know, everything is going so well, so why does it go so terribly wrong? We'll get to that bit in maybe the next episode. But another brilliant thing that Krumbagel does is that Baroda is a green place. It's an agrarian economy, but the farmers there rely on monsoon rains. And if the monsoon rains fail, you're stuffed. What do you do? You know, you can't grow anything. Things dry out. So he decides to build lined ditches around the state in around 8,000 villages.
- [31:11]
William Durrimple
In Baroda I love how the scale he's operating on now, 8,000 villages, massive.
- [31:16]
Anita Arden
Because with a maharaja who backs you, who is one of the richest men in the world. And so what he does is little villages would often have these ditches or little tanks, but he decides to teach them how to line the things. And so when they're lined, when the monsoon comes, it just fills up. So they have these reservoirs that are around. Not only that, but Crombie was so smart and because of, you know, his time at Kew, he says, we've got all these little tanks of water, we've got all these little ditches of water. What if we put fish in the water? That would sort of keep the waters irrigated.
- [31:47]
William Durrimple
This is very much the thing in Bengal, isn't it? The pukkas of Bengal, where every village has little fish pond, right?
- [31:54]
Anita Arden
So he starts introducing fish to the reservoirs and then suddenly Baroda has a thriving fishery economy and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. And he works with the Maharaja Baroda for 14 years. And during this time, you know, he is one of the crown jewels of Baroda. You know, the guy quad boasts about his man Krumbagel. You know, my man, come and look at my gardens. Come and take a promenade around my gardens. This is the work of Crumbagle. And he very proud of what they're doing together. So, you know, he gets loaned out like a special gift. So when Baroda wants to do, you know, favour for a neighboring maharaja, he will send Crumbagle to go and sort out their landscaping issues or give them ideas for parks or how to get boulevards to back on to green spaces and Crumbage basically loaned out as this kind of. Do you want my Krumbagel?
- [32:44]
William Durrimple
Extraordinary story. I'm amazed I've never heard of this guy. And you told me that he gets loaned out as far as Kuch, Bihar, Hyderabad, Traipur. John Paul is designing tea gardens and coffee plantations all from a Q training.
- [32:57]
Anita Arden
It's all ludicrous. And he gets the reputation of being a maharaja's Man Friday. But all of this, being as brilliant as it is, will not be the pinnacle of his success. Join us in the next episode when there's more crumb bagel and I promise you there will be more crumb bagel content. We'll try not to go down such.
- [33:18]
William Durrimple
Dog eggs to crumb bagel with hot buttered crumb bagels.
- [33:21]
Anita Arden
Oh, he's got the best name. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arden.
- [33:25]
William Durrimple
And goodbye from me, William Durrimple.