WW2 | 2. Boissevain and van Hall Pre-Nazi-Era Homes

Charles Boissevain with his daughter Nella Hissink in front
 of Drafna. Notation by Anne Boissevain, Robert's second
wife, in the album she kept.

November 11, 2015 – The large clan of Boissevains and their in-laws lived and worked in beautiful homes by the Amsterdam canals and later in homes to the east and west of Amsterdam.

Suburban Boissevain homes in the 1920s and 1930s were clustered in the Amsterdam area – especially in Naarden and Haarlem.

In the summer many of them went to their beach houses in Zandvoort (recently renamed "Amsterdam Beach") on the North Sea – at the same longitude as Amsterdam.

The extended Boissevain and van Hall families would gather as a single family at celebrations such as a wedding (bruiloft), or a wedding anniversary (huwelijksverjaardag) of the family patriarch and matriarch.

Map 1. The Boissevain houses went from Zandvoort on
the coast to Haarlem and Amsterdam, then east to Naarden.

The most famous homes were Drafna in Naarden, home of Charles and Emily Boissevain; or Astra and the Kolkhuis (which I visited several times) in Hattem, homes of Jan and Hester van Hall. 

Families related closely to the Boissevains, all of them I think with more than one intermarriage among cousins, include the den Texes, van Halls, van Lenneps and van Tienhovens.

My mother's Aunt Hester Boissevain van Hall ("Tante
Hessie") lived in "Het Kolkhuis" in Hattem.

With Charles Boissevain in February 2015, I visited many places where members of the family lived or worshipped in the 20th Century, and even some homes where relatives still lived and welcomed us.

Homes are concentrated in a line from Zandvoort on the west coast to Haarlem, Amsterdam and Naarden (see Map 1).

The line continued east from Amersfoort, where Teau Boissevain de Beaufort, lived, to Hattem and Zwolle. The van Halls moved to Zwolle for health reasons, because the higher ground to the east makes it drier than areas closer to Amsterdam. The van Halls lived first in Zwolle and then at the Kolkhuis in Hattem (see Map 2).

Relatives who lived off the Zandvoort-to-Zwolle band include Nella Boissevain Hissink, who lived in the capital of Friesland, Leeuwarden.

Amsterdam

The house at Corellistraat 6 was the home of Jan "Canada" Boissevain and Mies van Lennep Boissevain. Their two eldest children were Gijs ("Gi") and Jan Karel ("Janka") Boissevain.

(Postscript, June 6, 2021: Many Boissevains had homes and offices along the canals in central Amsterdam. Some of these areas are suffering from the deterioration of the pilings that support the canal-side buildings. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/world/europe/amsterdam-crumbling-infrastructure-canals.html.)

Eindhoven

Engelien de Booy lived here - I visited her at her home before she died.

Haarlem

Emmaplein 2, where Robert and Sonia 
lived until 1936.

In the Bentveldsweg, within 100 meters of each other, live or have lived four families with van Hall descendants:

• Zonnehof was built for Charles's great-uncle Aat van Hall (father of Gijs and Wally van Hall), who raised ten children there between 1897 and about 1915. When I visited in 2015 it was inhabited by their daughter Hester van Hall Dufour and Raimond Dufour. 

• De Popelhof was the home of great-aunt Han van Hall Vening Meinesz, youngest sister of Jan and Aat and Suze van Hall van Tienhoven, mother of Corrie.

• Sparrenhof was formerly inhabited by Maurits and Elsa van Hall and after his death by his daughter Ellen van Hall Wurpel, who is secretary of the van Hall Foundation. She invited us in for a visit. 

• Biekaer after the war was where Charles's mother, Sonia, went with her six children.  

Charles brought me first to the large house at Emmaplein 2 where his family lived until 1936, when the Nazis engaged in economic warfare and dispossessed those like his father Bob who had invested in I. G. Farben and other companies.

The family then moved to Zandvoort, by the seashore, where the war began.

We went nearby, to Beelslaan 3 in Haarlem, to pay a visit to Mary-Ann van Hall Boon, daughter of Wally van Hall, and her husband.

Hattem

Hattem is near Zwolle, quite a distance from Amsterdam. Hester van Hall's Kolkhuis was here. I attended several celebrations of birthdays during our summer visits to Holland after World War II. The young visitors were roped into participating in skits for the enjoyment of older family members.

Naarden


Drafna was built on an enormous farm that is an hour southeast of Amsterdam,  in Naarden, near the Naarden-Bussum train station. It was on the Zuyder Zee, but much of the land there was reclaimed. Naarden is a former coastal fortress town with buildings dating back to the 16th century. Charles and Emily moved there in 1897.

The house is legendary because so many children (eleven) grew up there and so many grandchildren (50), including my mother, went there for many visits.

Drafna, Naarden, in 1933. The 14-room two-story
 Norwegian chalet was home to Charles and Emily 
Boissevain and their 11 children.

My mother remembers the Golden Wedding Anniversary of her grandparents Charles and Emily in 1916, when she was 8 years old.

Large tents were set up to accommodate the crowds. She was struck by the importance of her grandparents and the importance of a Golden Wedding. She told me in 1982, the year of her own Golden Wedding:

  

Everyone sat at long tables under the tent awnings. I was given an ice cream cone with a photo of my grandparents stuck in it. I don't know whether all 50 grandchildren got this special treat. During the afternoon events, I remember the smell of hay everywhere. The afternoon ended with skits and performances, but I don't remember them and maybe they were only for grownups.

Theo(dora) Boissevain, who married Willem Sillem, in
front of the Drafna barn. My mother well remembered
the donkey, and also the gardener, Hena, in the background.
He acted as a security guard when the children were around.

My mother also told me that the grandchildren would often, on arrival at Drafna, make a bee-line to their library where many wonders could be found.

I earned a scolding from my Granny for doing so: "The first thing you do when you visit anywhere, is to present yourself to your hostess and greet her. I didn’t even know you had arrived." So in future I did as she told me. Since the drawing room was next door to the library, not too much time was wasted. But I have to confess I was not the most popular guest. Those who had not learned to read yet fared much better.

The late Engelien de Booy told me before she died that there was a dark side to Drafna. It was full of gaiety and fun partly because that is what Emily wanted to see. Emily liked to know that her children were successful. She positively disliked introspective children – like Engelien, who went on to earn her doctorate – or, even worse, children who seemed slow or stupid.

Hilda was too Dutch-looking and introspective for Emily. Emily preferred the grandchildren who looked the most Irish, like the six children of Robert with his first wife, Irishwoman Rosie Phibbs - or Teautie de Beaufort, who looked (as her mother Teau did) Irish.

But Hilda was a favorite of her grandfather Charles, because she was a writer like him, and was precociously clever at drawing. Hilda's first publisher was in fact her grandfather, in his newspaper, the Algemeen Handelsblad.

Polly Barker, Drafna's Resident English
Nurse-Governess (Mary Poppins).

Mary ("Polly") Barker, an English nurse, served the family from 1873 until her death in 1929. All of the eleven children and their 50 grandchildren were very fond of Polly, which suggests that Polly looked after all of the children, including those who did not measure up to Emily's expectations. My mother said she preferred Polly to Emily.

The 40-acre property outside was full of wonders One side of the driveway at Drafna was lined with lime trees. Elsewhere were many chestnut trees, which yielded edible chestnuts. Hilda got her taste there for marrons glacées, candied chestnuts, which reminded her of Drafna. The lawn was deep in clover. The property included a tennis court.

The farm included a pond and a stable and an array of animals beloved by the grandchildren - a donkey, a goat, a white horse (which had its own carriage to pull), fish and birds. The gardener was named Hein and Hilda remembers him forever having complaints about the young visitors like her.

As the children of Charles and Emily formed families of their own, they were sold or allowed to use pieces of the farm, so that five of the eleven Boissevain children, and their children, have lived in the area. The six exceptions were:

• Hester and Jan van Hall, who moved to Zwolle and then Hattem to be on higher ground and therefore in a drier climate. The van Hall homes in Zwolle were called Astra and Little Astra, where my mother's family lived for a few years. Hester van Hall later moved to the Kolkhuis (Lake House) in Hattem, where the family came several times to parties, and I visited her alone in 1959. She would put on her cap and come out to see her guests with tea.

• Nella and Theodor Hissink, moved to Leeuwarden in Friesland. This is the town that is drawn by my mother in A Day on Skates. A Dutch edition of this book is needed! It should have the name A Day on Skates in Friesland.

• Teau and Fik de Beaufort, who moved to Amersfoort. Fik de Beaufort had a ducal title in France but preferred to live in Holland. Teau was the youngest of the 11 children of Charles and Emily and died first, tragically, in 1922.

• The three youngest Boissevain boys - who found Holland constraining and married American women. Robert was the first to leave - he remarried (he left his wife Rosie and their six children in Holland, which was a scandal, but my mother said there were extenuating circumstances) an American woman who was the assistant to philanthropist Alva Vanderbilt Belmont; they lived on a chicken farm in upstate New York. Eugen followed Robert and married two truly great American Bohemian women - Inez Milholland and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Jan went to Java to work for Robert in 1914 and eventually married another Bohemian, an American actress, Charlotte Ives, and they lived in the Cap d'Antibes, where I visited her in July 1962 – she took me on an excursion into Cannes to visit a local car dealer so she could buy a new car.

When Charles Boissevain died in 1927, Emily at first stayed at Drafna with Polly. They lived in different parts of the house and entertained separately. After Polly's death, Emily moved to the home of Charles E. H. Boissevain, her eldest son, until her own death in 1931. Drafna was sold to a Theosophical School, was used as a rugby team center, and was broken down before World War II (some say it burned down) to be replaced by a stone house. In the 1970s it was sold to a Dutch company and as of 1982 was a retreat and training center.

Zandvoort

On the South Boulevard in Zandvoort, Charles showed me the place where his family house De Duinhut formerly was. The houses are not there any more because they were were knocked down to make way for coastal fortifications. According to Joseph Goebbels in his Diaries, Hitler was sure that the invasion of Europe by the Allies would come via the beaches of Holland.

Along a 10-km. route (the shortest way) Bob, Marit and Son Boissevain had to go on their bike every day to their school in Overveen, the Lycée Kemmerer. By the end of the war most of the schools were closed.

WW2 | 1.The Boissevain Clan (Updated July 9, 2016)

"No regret for the past.
No fear of the future."

The following is the first chapter of a book on the Boissevains before 1940 and During WW2.

My grandmother Olga Boissevain's family were Huguenots – French Protestants who followed John Calvin's doctrine of predestination, changing the status of business people from one of toleration to one of divine grace.

This was naturally an attractive religion for business people in France, who had been pilloried by the Catholic Church for having become too rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Boissevains originally lived in Bergerac in the Dordogne, France but had to leave because the Catholic king Louis XIV became uneasy at the growth of Huguenot power.

The Boissevains Escape and Some Go to Holland

No one, of course, would leave the gorgeous Dordogne area voluntarily. They had to be ejected. The Boissevains were booted out, a minority within France that was no longer welcomed.

The name Boissevain comes from the boxwood tree (Buxus) that is common in the Dordogne. In that part of the world, one tree means in front of the house means "Go Away”. Two trees means “Come and Go as You Please”. Three trees together means “Welcome”.

The first of the Boissevain clan was Lucas Bouyssavy (1660-1705), who made his Roman name into a more French name by changing it to Boissevain. He was a French Calvinist, who were called Huguenots because of an early leader named Hugues.

 After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, Lucas escaped to Holland in 1688, hiding among wine barrels in the hold of a ship from Bordeaux to Amsterdam. He began his life as an immigrant by teaching subjects like bookkeeping, French and architectural drafting. He kept the faith, attending the Walloon (francophone) church in Amsterdam.

Calvin went beyond Martin Luther in objecting to an anti-business bias in Roman Catholic doctrine. He built on preachings of St. Augustine to develop a doctrine of predestination, in which worldly wealth is a sign of divine favor. For from being an obstacle to entering the Kingdom of Heaven, wealth was a sign of the elect.

With this wind in their sails, the Huguenots were successful in France, and at their height they accounted for half of the nobility and half of the artisans. But the Catholic Church fought back:

• In 1534, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was created by Spaniard St. Ignatius of Loyola, as a counter-Reformation group with a military-style organization, reporting directly to the Pope.
• In 1572, to end a French civil war between Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots, Catherine de' Medici, wife of Henry II, called Huguenot leaders to Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day, ostensibly for peace negotiations. She then had all of these leaders massacred in their beds during the night.
• In 1685, Louis XIV became impatient with the Huguenots' mobilizing an "armed political party" (William Langer, Encyclopedia of World History, 1948, p. 386) under the protection of a promise of religious freedom by Henry IV. Louis revoked  this promise, the Edict of Nantes. 

After the Revocation of the Edict, the Huguenots fled France. This damaged the country's economy and contributed to the unrest that erupted into the French Revolution. The New Catholic Dictionary (1929, p. 321) says it all:

The results of the Edict's being revoked were disastrous for France.

The Boissevain family well remembers its history of religious persecution, not least and the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. This has meant - as in many other families that have faced persecution - the family retains a core value of fighting for justice, and a consciousness of the cost of this value. The Huguenot religious beliefs have been diluted and modified through shifts to a more secular society as well as  conversions and marriages (my mother, for example, converted to Catholicism). The core family value is expressed in the Boissevain motto

Ni regret du passé, Ni peur de l’avenir.  No regret for the past, because its costs are the price we must pay. No fear of the future, because we are here to face forward.

The Boissevain Family in Holland

Charles and Emily Boissevain proudly pose with their six
daughters, at Drafna c. 1910, before the wood was painted white.
Back row (L to R): Olga, Emily, Charles, Hester.
Front row: Mary, Hilda, Nella, Teau.

The Boissevains in Holland begin with Lucas Bouyssavy (1660-1705), who made his Roman name into a more French name by changing it to Boissevain.

After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, Lucas escaped to Holland in 1688, hiding among wine barrels in the hold of a ship from Bordeaux to Amsterdam. He began his life as an immigrant by teaching subjects like bookkeeping, French and architectural drafting. He kept the faith, attending the Walloon (francophone) church in Amsterdam.

Through the church he met Marthe Roux, who escaped with her mother and sister in a hay wagon in 1686. Marthe Roux's mother kept her daughters quiet even when soldiers at the border stuck their bayonets into the hay. Marthe's mother was stuck in the leg but was soundless, even having the presence of mind to wipe her blood off the bayonet with her skirt. Of such stuff were the Boissevain women made. No wonder they were leaders in the woman suffrage movement in Holland.

She and Lucas married in 1700 and had a son Jeremie Boissevain (1702-1762), who continued his father's business of teaching drafting and English, and worked as a bookkeeper. He had a son Gideon Jeremie Boissevain (1741-1802), who was a merchant and accountant (bookhoeder). He had a son Daniel Boissevain (1772-1834), who became a ship-owner, living in the middle of Amsterdam on the Herengracht. He married a socially prominent woman and they had 14 children, including five males from whom most of the other Boissevains in the world appear to be descended (the others descend from Daniel's brother Henri Jean Boissevain).

The Boissevains in Holland did well with their Huguenot appetite for commerce. They were involved in seagoing activities - Dutch Navy admirals, shipping magnates, sea rescue directors, shipbuilding, and banking. The family was extremely musical and creative, and generated not only Bankers and Boaters, but Bohemians as well. The Boissevains were a major force for the creation of the concert hall (Concertgebouw) in Amsterdam. I heard this from my mother and from a Dutch relative who was close to her, the late Sacha Boissevain (see February 2010 post).

Emily Heloise MacDonnell Boissevain and her five sons, c 1910.
L to R, seated, front row: Charles E. H., Emily, and Alfred.
Standing: Jan Maurits, Eugen and Robert (all three went to USA).

The eldest of the five children of Daniel Boissevain was Gideon Jeremie Boissevain (1796-1875). He married three times, the second time to a van Lennep. All of his eight children who survived infancy were by his third wife Maria van Heukelom. Of the eight, the three most prolific were:

The Jantjes - Boaters and Bankers

Jan Boissevain (1836-1904, NP p. 52) was  the fifth child of Gedeon and was a Boater and Banker. My mother used to call his nine children and their descendants the Jantjes (little Jans). The term is formally identified in the Dutch Boissevain Foundation Bulletin. The Jantjes were very important in the Dutch Resistance in World War II.

• His third child Charles Daniel Walrave Boissevain was a Boater, going from the Dutch Navy to serve as Consul-General to Canada (1866-1944, NP p. 55); his son Jan "Canada" Boissevain was born in Montreal, hence the nickname; Jan Canada's sons Gi and Janka were leaders of the armed resistance. 
• His seventh child, Petronella Johanna Boissevain, married Adriaan Floris ("Aat") van Hall (1870-1959, NP p. 54), and their children included the Dutch Resistance leader Walraven van Hall. Aat van Hall's twin brother Floris Adriaan ("Floor") van Hall died during the early part of World War II,  and Aat was named as his executor.

The Charletjes

http://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2015/02/who-were-emily-helose-macdonnell-and.html

Charles Boissevain (1842-1927, NP p. 67), sixth child of Gedeon, was a Bohemian, publisher of the leading Dutch newspaper and, for some years, the most popular journalist in Holland, writing a column called Van Dag Tot Dag ("From Day to Day"). He married an Anglo-Irish woman, Emily Heloise MacDonnell, in 1867. His original first name was Karel, the Dutch version of Charles. But since he married an Irish girl, Emily Heloise MacDonnell (1844-1931), whom he met when covering the International Exhibition of 1865, he anglicized his name to Charles. He got sick while at the Exhibition, and Emily's parents brought him home to recover. Emily looked after him and they fell in love.

The MacDonnells came from Scotland in the 15th century. Colla MacDonnell settled in Tynekill Castle and was provided with gallowglasses (government soldiers) to keep order. They were powerful people in the county. My nephew Christ Oakley has visited what is left of Tynekill. James MacDonnell unfortunately forfeited the property and privileged position that Colla had acquired by rebelling against the British King in 1641. After that the MacDonnells had to have a profession or a government appointment. Richard MacDonnell (1787-1867) was Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1852 until his death. He married Jane Graves, daughter of the Very Rev. Richard Graves who was descended from Duc Henri de Montmorency, executed in France in 1652. One of Richard MacDonnell's sons, Hercules Henry Graves MacDonnell (1819-1900) married Emily Anne Moylan in 1842, eloping to be wed by the blacksmith of Gretna Green - their second child was Emily MacDonnell. Emily Moylan (1852-1883) was the only child of Denis Creagh Moylan (1794-1849) and Mary Morrison King, who was the out-of-wedlock daughter of George, Third Earl of Kingston, who can be traced back to John of Gaunt and Edward III.

Charles was outspoken and liberal. He took the side of the Boers against British aggression in a book-length "Letter to the Duke of Devonshire" and upset his wife's relatives in Ireland. When Emily tried to defend the British, her daughters called her a Rooinek ("Redneck"), which is what the Boers called the British soldiers. Charles never seemed to have enough money, certainly not enough to match his vanity, but with he help of occasional inheritances they brought up eleven children in style. The Bohemians among the Boissevains never seemed to match the affluence of the Banker-Boaters like Jan, and the women among the Bankers were occasionally scandalized by the behavior of the Bohemians.

Charles and Emily had 11 children and they and their descendants are called the Kareltjes or Charletjes (little Charleses). The Boissevain Foundation Bulletin spells it Charles-tjes, but the English language avoids having three consonants in a row and I am spelling it the way my mother did, without the hyphen:

• His eldest son, Charles Ernest Henri Boissevain (1868-1940, NP p. 69) married a famous Dutch suffragist Maria Barbera Pijnappel (one of many suffragists in the family); they had ten children of whom the third was Robert Lucas Boissevain, who was bankrupted by the Nazis and became a Dutch Resistance leader. In a house in Haarlem owned by his wife's recently deceased uncle Aat (Floris Adriaan van Hall), he lodged himself, his wife, six children (including one hiding from the forced-labor razzia), plus four Jewish hideaways. 
• The third daughter, Olga Emily Boissevain (my grandmother), married a naval officer, Bram van Stockum.  They had a daughter, Hilda van Stockum, and two sons. The middle son, Willem van Stockum, worked with Einstein, volunteered to be a bomber pilot, and was killed in his sixth bombing mission over France during the week of D-Day (a book was written about him in 2014, Time Bomber, by Robert Wack, a U.S. Army major and pediatrician).
• The fourth daughter, Hilda Boissevain was born July 12, 1877. She was the younger of the middle two girls among the Charletjes.  The first two of Charles’ daughters, Mary and Hester (Hessie) made conventional marriages, with no interest in higher education. The second two–Hilda and Olga–were interested in higher education but had to fight for it. The third set of two, Nella and Teau, both went on to university without thinking twice about it. Hilda married Hendrik (“Han”) de Booy, from a long line of Dutch naval officers, including some vice-admirals, bonding with the Boaters among the Boissevains. In 1929-31, when Hilda van Stockum was in Amsterdam studying art, she stayed with the de Booy family and painted the portrait of their daughter Engelien. Han became the head of the Dutch Lifeboat Company, a sea-rescue organization. He also worked for the Amsterdam Concertgebouw as an officer, during which time his brother-in-law Charles E. H. Boissevain stepped off the Board to avoid a conflict of interest. The de Booys had four children: (1) Hendrik Thomas (Tom) de Booy, b. December 26, 1898, who married Ottoline Gooszen and followed his father as Secretary, then Director of the Dutch Lifeboat Company. (2) Alfred de Booy, b. May 29, 1901, married Sonja van Benckendorff, from Byelarus, the daughter of a landowner near Bakou. (3) Olga Emily de Booy, b. March 14, 1905, married John Gottlieb van Marle and they had three children (some cousins of the van Marles were active in the Resistance). (4) Engelina ("Engelien") Petronella de Booy, b. June 17, 1917 as mentioned was a friend of my mother Hilda van Stockum; she married Dr. Marcus Frans Polak at the beginning of the war and thereby saved his life because he was Jewish and would have been deported if not married to her. After the war they were divorced because he couldn’t carry the burden of knowing she saved his life. But, Engelien says, they remained very good friends to the end of their lives. [See also https://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-first-year-of-dutch-occupation.html.]

Hester and the den Texes

Hester Boissevain den Tex (1842-1914, NP p. 49), twin of Charles, married Nicolaas Jacob den Tex in 1866. They had ten children, one of whom married a Boissevain cousin!

References

Benoit, Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes (5 vols., Delft, 1693);

Browning, History of the Huguenots (London, 1840); PUAUX, Histoire de la Reformation francaise (7 vols., Paris, 1859);

Coignet, L'evolution du protestantisme francais au XIX siecle (Paris, 1908);

Encyclopedie des sciences religieuses, ed.

de Beze, Histoire ecclesiastique des eglises reformees au royaume de France (2 vols., Toulouse, 1882).

de la Tour, Les Origines de la Reforme (2 vols. already issued, Paris, 1905-9).

Dégert, Antoine. (1910). "Huguenots."  The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Co. Retrieved Dec. 14, 2015 from New Advent: www.newadvent.org/cathen/07527b.htm

Encyclopedia Bitannica, 11th ed., 1910. "Huguenots. http://www.britannica.com/topic/Huguenot.

Laval, Compendious History of the Reformation in France (7 vols., London, 1737);

Lichtenberger, Paris, 1877-82), s.v.; HAAG, La France protestante (10 vols., Paris, 1846; 2nd ed. begun in 1877); Bulletin de l'histoire du protestantisme francais; Revue chretienne;

Smedley, History of the Reformed Religion in France (3 vols., London, 1832);

Other Chapters

The above post is a draft of Chapter 1 of a book. The other chapters are listed with links in The Boissevain Family in the Dutch Resistance, 1940-45. 

My Irish Granny - by Hilda van Stockum

Emily Heloise MacDonnell
Boissevain (1844-1931) as a
young woman.

The following is a guest (ghost?) post by my late mother, Hilda van Stockum (1908-2006), who left a description of her grandmother Emily MacDonnell Boissevain and also her grandfather Charles Boissevain, which I transcribed and have lightly annotated. A book is planned that will include this following excerpt.  (c) Copyright by Boissevain Books LLC for the estate of Hilda van Stockum.  

To me she was always a little, but formidable old lady, who was the heart of her family, adored by husband and children, but a little daunting to the grandchildren, all 50 of them. Maybe the older ones knew her as a younger woman; I came at the end of the family.

Luckily my grandmother lived long enough [at Drafna, near Amsterdam] for me to get to know and love her, but when I was a child we were always at odds. I wasn’t Irish looking; I took after my father. I had few “feminine” qualities. My grandmother liked to see girls doing needlework, but for me the needles never did anything but prick. I was a bookworm, which in those days was frowned on, because girls were supposed to be playing and exercising in the fresh air to get nice complexions.

But I was too fascinated by the bound volumes of the “children’s corner” of my grandfather’s newspaper [the Algemeen Handelsblad, then Holland's leading newspaper], and could not wait to read the next installment of the current adventure story. I was introverted in those days, and found it difficult to make conversation with my Granny, who spoke Dutch with an accent.

Charles Boissevain (1842-1927), my
grandfather, publisher of the leading
newspaper in Holland.

My grandfather wrote a daily column in the Algemeen Handelsblad, the most successful daily paper in Holland, and wrote a feature called “From Day to Day” in the most frivolous part of the paper, which also included a children’s section. We grandchildren often, on arrival at their grandparents’ house, made a bee-line to their library where all these wonders could be found.

I earned a scolding from my Granny for doing so:

The first thing you do when you visit anywhere, is to present yourself to your hostess and greet her. I didn’t even know you had arrived.

So in future I did as she told me, and as the drawing room was next door to the library not too much time was wasted. But I have to confess I was not the most popular guest. Those who had not learned to read yet fared much better

I was my grandfather’s favorite, and was placed beside him at table. So I was the one who witnessed the first time he lost a tooth. He was very unhappy about it because he had kept all his teeth till he was 80. I sympathized very much because going to the dentist was one of my phobias and no doubt my grandfather appreciated my heart-felt sympathy.

My grandfather told me I had a talent for making up verses and he said I inherited this talent from him.  He had also written books, mostly on his travels. I have an article reviewing his literary output by some literary bigwig of his time - although it was a very superficial criticism.

The great attraction I felt for my grandfather was his naughtiness. He was always doing forbidden things: putting marmalade and cheese on the same piece of bread and then declaring with a naughty twinkle and a sigh of satisfaction, after consuming this concoction: “It was just as if an angel peed on my tongue.” That’s the sort of thing I loved Grandfather for.

Granny wasn’t angry. She laughed... but we weren’t allowed to imitate him.

I don’t think my Grandfather ever knew that my Granny ruled him. She was so full of deference and respect! He met her in Ireland where he had gone as a young and handsome reporter for the little commercial paper that employed him - as he worked his way up he made it into the most important Dutch daily newspaper.

Charles went to Dublin to report on some trade event, on the lines of the modern expos, and probably it included the annual Dublin horse show [which had started up three years earlier, in 1864]. Hercules MacDonnell invited him to stay at his home, Sorrento Cottage, in Dalkey, where he met the numerous MacDonnell family. The oldest girl, Emily Héloïse, was strikingly beautiful. As it happened, my grandfather got ill, and he was nursed by my great-grandmother and her daughter Emily. Perhaps it was not surprising that my grandfather fell in love with the charming young nurse. At any rate, married they were.

I asked my Granny once what made her marry a foreigner like that. Wasn’t it a big step for her to take?

“Oh,” she said, “he made me laugh so much I hadn’t the breath to say ‘no’.”

My grandmother had had a glorious youth in Ireland. My grandfather wrote a poem about her, in which he describes how she jumped from the rocks into the sea and rode bareback on her pony. [She was one of the inspirations for HvS's book Pegeen.]

She herself wrote my mother about her teen years and all her admirers. With one she went for walks, with another she practiced archery. One she always met accidentally on her way to church and with one she went to visit the poor. But she did not like that much [visiting the poor], she added. She must have missed all that freedom later.

They were married in London and there is a legend that they quarreled after they left the church, because my grandfather claimed her arm, as was his right as a husband in Holland. But Granny acknowledged no such right and refused to allow anything so immodest.

So the Irish rose was transplanted among the stiff Dutch tulips, and not without friction. She did everything wrong... and as the Boissevain family consisted of endless cousins, aunts, uncles and great-aunts, their disapproval made a big noise.

In those days the activities in Holland of a proper lady were greatly restricted. You could not go out in the mornings because then the domestic servants did the shopping and it would be awkward to meet them. You can imagine the horror the family felt when they saw Charles’s wild Irish wife out at eleven in the morning, skating on the canals arm in arm with her cook.

However, nature soon put an end to these exploits. My Granny presented my grandfather with eleven children: five boys and six girls, one more clever and handsome than the other. She acquired a Yorkshire nanny called Polly, who became such a member of the family that she stayed with them till her death. And she made the clothes of the children and grandchildren out of the then so-popular Liberty cottons.

There must have been lean years, but my grandfather describes his home life in these words:

I am always struck anew by the intimacy of our family life: I see the family sitting by lamplight, in the room with red drapes, grouped around their mother, who is their spring of action, their source of love. 

It’s a vivid picture by a fond family man. He was so proud of his family he kept their photographs in his pocket to show at the drop of a hat. He was nicknamed “The Kangaroo”.

Once he visited a Turkish Emir and boasted of his eleven children. “That’s nothing”, said the Amir, “I have 26.”

“Ah, that is a large number,” said my grandfather, impressed, “but I have only one wife!”

It was the Emir’s turn to be very impressed.

There are charming letters of my grandmother to my grandfather, which tell of her difficulty with such a large family. One problem was the noise at table when they all talked at once, and the dreadful stillness when no one talked. She tried to let them talk one by one, but only Mary, the oldest girl, responded and in the end she gave up - rather the noise than the silence.

On another occasion she had to punish her second son Alfred for teasing the little girls, and she locked him in a room. He kicked and kicked at the door till he kicked out a panel. Then he stuck his handsome head through the opening and cried:

“I didn’t do it, Mother, I didn’t do it!”

She writes that it was difficult for her not to laugh. Yes, we get the feeling of an Irish household rather than a staid Dutch one.

Once my uncle Alfred had a serious quarrel with his wife. He had been given a little inheritance and he proposed to give his wife half for new slipcovers and with the other half they would go to Paris and have fun. Aunt Mies was aghast. To spend money for fun when they needed new sheets as well was wicked.

She went and complained to her friend, my mother.  Her response shows the influence of my Granny.

“You are suffering from different religions,” said my mother.

Aunt Mies was puzzled - “What do you mean?” They both belonged to the Walloon church (very proper, rather like the Anglican church).

“Yes,” said my mother, “you were brought up to feel that in order to be a virtuous spouse and housewife you must think first of the necessities of your home, and last of all of your own enjoyment.”

“That is truth,” said aunt Mies seriously.

“So my brother is very fair,” said my mother. “He gives you half for your religion. But he, on the other hand, was brought up to think that the one thing we must do is to enjoy ourselves in the beautiful world God has created for us, and that the last thing we should do is to bore ourselves with necessities.”

Aunt Mies looked at my Granny and thought, and then agreed: “That is true too,” she said.

“Therefore,” said my mother, “aren’t you a little mean not to enter into his religion while he generously enters into yours?”

They had a wonderful time in Paris.

My Granny was always ready for a lark. She went to football matches to see her boys play, and later, when they were young men, she’d sit up with them talking and drinking whisky till late at night. Her husband’s numerous admiring females did not bother her at all.

“Isn’t it time you wrote to your Scottish Thistle?” she’d ask.

“Who was that?” grandfather would ask.

“Oh, how shameful of you Charlie, have you already forgotten her?”

Her morals were very broad too. She wanted my grandfather to smuggle wine to her relatives in London and Ireland. My grandfather said he could not do it. He was known everywhere to be an honest man. He could not compromise his principles.

“Nonsense,” said my Granny. It’s just because they trust you that you can smuggle so easily”.

My grandfather remained adamant. But the next time he crossed the North Sea and was bowed past the customs with by deferential officials, he opened his suitcase in his hotel room and right on top, without any attempt to hide them, lay a row of bottles.

I don’t know what happened to my Granny after that, but she survived.

My Granny did not believe in illness. If her children chose to succumb to such an indignity, she did not cosset them, because that would only encourage them to be ill again. Many a weary day did my mother once lie in bed, unattended, with a raging appendicitis.

My mother, born Olga Emily Boissevain, later Mrs. Bram van Stockum, was the middle one of eleven children -- five brothers and sisters above her in age and five below.

The oldest child of Charles was a son called Charles E H [“Charles Eh Hah” in Dutch]. Charles EH was the wealthiest of the 11 “Careltjes” He married a woman who was became the first female member of the Dutch Parliament – Marie Pijnapple; they had ten children. So it was not surprising that my grandparents ended up with 125 grandchildren, all of whom were welcome to visit them.

If creativity and complexity go hand in hand, then large families lend themselves to being creative. The Boissevain family is a large and creative one and its components were focused on houses.

The 11 children of Charles and Emily Boissevain and called the Charletjes. They lived in a semi-circle stretching from the seaside resort town of Zandvoort to the west, then 20 miles east through Haarlem to Amsterdam, another 15 miles east to Naarden-Bussum (served by a single train stop), Baarn, and Blaricum, and finally 45 miles northeast to Hattem, near Zwolle, where the van Halls lived. The center was at Bussum, where Drafna was located.

Drafna was described by Tom de Booy as having “a special atmosphere [as] the throbbing center of the Boissevain clan.” The De Booys built a house called De Sparren near Tante Trot’s house. In Hattem were Astra, built by the van Halls, and Kleine Astra, where the van Halls stayed while they were building their house. The de Beauforts (the family Teau married into) also lived near Hattem.

The importance of houses may be conveyed by the fact that Teau de Beaufort composed a play about
houses. Each character was given a house to play. They had to memorize their lines. I remember it being very embarrassing. I was 10 years old and was given the part of a seaside resort house (probably the one at Zandvoort). But my father was there and he took the liberty of changing some of Teau’s lines. I thought her father’s changes were good (he had a good ear for meter), but Teau and her fellow authors did not want to recognize any line changes. As a result, I never learned the changed lines properly and I was prompted with the original text, which I hadn’t studied. It was a disaster.