Frank Riethmuller

Frank Riethmuller (1884–1965) was an Australian rose breeder.

The last child of poor German immigrant farmers, Francis Lewis Riethmuller (known as Frank) was born on 10 February 1884 in Glenvale, then a village near (now a suburb of) Toowoomba, Queensland. When dealing with Germans, he reverted to writing Riethmüller. In Australia, the first syllable is pronounced Reith but never spelt that way.

Chronically prone to bronchitis and bronchiectasis, Riethmuller had to live mostly outdoors. First educated at Glenvale primary school, he spent two years as a state scholarship pupil at Toowoomba Grammar: every surname in the class was Anglo-Celtic except his. He worked 1899–1905 as a "pupil school teacher" at Gowrie Junction, Glenvale and Charters Towers, a gold-mining town.

Moving to Charters Towers was the start of a life-long search for somewhere to breathe properly. Eventually his bronchitis became so bad that he spent 1906–07 back at his parents', too sick to work. He returned at 23 to Charters Towers and worked 1908–13 as a bookkeeper to a butcher's chain. Bad health brought the job to an end, as it did most of his Queensland jobs. Charters Towers was said to be "good for his asthma"; it also had a big German-speaking population. Writing and speaking German, and devoted to his German inheritance, he may have found the First World War difficult. He was certainly unfit for the army, though he had trained in the CMF. Many people of German descent were persecuted, though Riethmuller was not interned.

From 1914 to 1918 he worked mostly as a Townsville tobacconist–bookmaker's shop assistant, sometimes as a bookkeeper on a sheep and horse-breeding station near Richmond.

In mid-1918 Riethmuller moved to a Brisbane pub successfully to complete private study for the Junior Public Examination in English, French, German, Latin, Arithmetic and Algebra. Eleven hundred 15-year-olds sat the exam that November; Riethmuller was 34 years old.

After his four months of enforced confinement in Brisbane, he moved to Sydney and found a job as a "confidential clerk", code for a bookmaker's penciller. It was open-air work. He was outstandingly good at it and he never looked back.

As well as recording bets, he had to collect losing ones on Monday, settlement day. This was work for which his calm and gentlemanly manner was an asset. Riethmuller was making £1000 a year for working two or three days a week when the average annual salary of a clerk was about £370. He was possibly a silent partner in the bookmaking business as well. It was an income and career he kept up through the depression and the war till he retired in 1945. He allowed people to infer that he was clever with shares, but he made safe investments in land, treasury bonds, banks and in firms as safe as banks.

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