I thought of the myth of King Midas, who turned all he touched to gold, when standing in a room of a palace in Udaipur, India, a few years ago.
I was in the Fateh Prakash Palace, where the Maharana – king – Sajjan Singh once lived, and which is now a luxury hotel. The building is a part of a complex of palaces, some of them still privately occupied. I was in Fateh Prakash's Crystal Gallery; a space as large as a ballroom.
All around me were a million glittering crystal facets. There were drinking glasses by the thousands, of every conceivable size, displayed in cabinets. There were also, by the hundreds; lamps, candlesticks, plates, fountains, mirrors, ash trays, bowls, decanters, vases, trays, cruets and icebuckets.
The thought of British men in a Victorian factory almost 7,000km from the palace in Udaipur receiving this order for crystal is almost fictional
No banquet could ever be so large as to require all this glassware. In the centre of the gallery hung a chandelier so gigantic that if it fell, it would have had the weight and breadth to take out at least 40 people in one go.
But it was not the glasses and the ashtrays and the bowls that astounded me in this Crystal Gallery. It was the furniture. The many sofas, armchairs, footstools, tables and even a bed, composed entirely of crystal. Full size. I gazed at that crystal bed, which looked like it had been created by a crazed brother of King Midas, whose touch turned everything to glass instead of gold, and wondered at the mind of the person who would want to sleep on such a thing.
All of this crystal was ordered by the Maharana in 1878, when he was just 19-years-old. He had ascended the throne aged 15. As it happens, he died before the order was completed, aged only 25.
If you believe what the texts on the walls of the Crystal Gallery say, they declare that the many, many boxes which arrived containing these astonishing objects remained unopened for over a century.
But the most fantastical thing of all about the thousands of items in the Crystal Gallery is where they were made. The Maharana Sajjan Singh commissioned these glasses and fountains and sofas and bed from the one glassworks. It was the F&C Osler factory, in Birmingham, England.
The thought of British men in a Victorian factory almost 7,000km from the palace in Udaipur receiving this order for crystal is almost fictional. Did they look at the order for crystal sofas and armchairs and laugh? Did they go home and tell their wives about the faraway Indian king who wanted them to make a crystal bed? Did they take turns to lie in the bed on the factory floor before it was packed up to be dispatched for India?
I was so fascinated about the entire thing that when I came back to Ireland, I did some research on the Osler glassworks factory. It had been established in Birmingham in 1807, and specialised in chandeliers. Osler created a gothic fountain as a showpiece for the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, the decade the Maharana was born.
I had the answer to the question in my head as to whether those factory workers had gone home and told their families about a crystal bed. Of course they had
In the latter part of the 19th century, it began to receive a large number of commissions for palaces in India, a country which was then, of course, the shiniest gem in the British colonial crown. The vast majority of its commissions soon came from India, and they supplied more glass to India than any of its European glassworks counterparts.
This continued until the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when the company began to lose its colonial commissions. It ceased trading in 1965, and was bought by Wilkinson, which also acquired some of their designs and continued to make signature pieces such as chandeliers for private clients.
The Wilkinson company is still in existence, and so one day I sat at my computer and wrote an email to David Wilkinson. I wanted to find out if any paper archives still remained of the Udaipur royal commission. David Wilkinson mailed me back the same day.
“I’ve never seen anything written about the order for Maharana Sajjan Singh for his palace in Udaipur, but that is not to say it isn’t recorded somewhere.”
He told me that The Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery had been given some of the best archives, and that perhaps there was something there.
As for his own part in the business, he told me that many other extraordinary objects made by Osler were still in existence, and that he had personally restored several of them.
“I also have a small crystal fountain which I have had for more than 30 years – I’ll get it finished one day.” As for the restoration task Wilkinson was engaged on when he received my email: “a four-poster crystal bed by F&C Osler”.
On receipt of his email, I had the answer to the question in my head as to whether those factory workers had gone home and told their families about a crystal bed. Of course they had. How could they not have?
I printed out the email and told everyone I met for at least a month that I had been in correspondence with a man whose job it was to restore an antique crystal four-poster bed, and watched as they responded in amazement and disbelief.
And then I told them the glorious story of the Crystal Gallery in Udaipur, and the man who had commissioned it all.