What became of the Beens brothers

The company was liquidated across 1927 and 1928, but the two men who ran it were then in their thirties, with decades ahead of them¹. Their later lives went opposite ways. One was restless and public, the other quiet to the point of disappearing. Both died a long way from a furniture works on the Rochussenstraat, one at Voorburg², the other at Heemstede³.

They were brothers, both born at Haarlem: Hermanus Petrus Beens in 1895, and Fredericus Johannes Beens two years earlier⁴. Their parents were Fredericus Cornelis Carolus Nicanor Beens and Alida van Cittert⁵. It was a household of modest clerkly trades⁶. The acts enter the father as a city messenger and later a warehouse-keeper and office clerk, never a merchant⁷.

The two married at Haarlem within a year of each other, and each stood witness at the other's wedding⁸.

In the firm the elder, Fredericus Johannes, signed for the works⁹, while the younger, Hermanus Petrus, was a director downtown¹⁰. The company file sets out those roles.

Hermanus Petrus: the corner to Teddington

H. P. Beens did not leave furnishing when the firm went under. While the old company was being liquidated he was already directing a new one from the same corner, the Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company¹¹. In the 1929 directory the corner's telephone number, 30047, stands against the Continental company¹². That is its first attested holder there, years before the number passed to J. A. van Duyn¹³, and it belongs to a story of the premises rather than the firms. He was still living at Rochussenstraat 169 when the 1929 telephone book listed him there as director of the Continental company¹⁴.

On 3 August 1931 he left the country. The family's population-register card records the household deregistered ambtshalve, struck off by the authorities, to Teddington in south-west London¹⁵. With him went his wife, Jantiena Aaldertina de Vries, and their two sons, born in 1917 and 1921¹⁶.

The card lists the household's Rotterdam addresses in a single column. First comes Schiedamschesingel 9a in 1918, the old Kam & Van Rhijn showhouse address, then Coolsingel 103b in 1926, then 169b in 1927 and 169c in 1929, at the corner¹⁷. At the foot stands the removal abroad, to Meadowbank, Fairfax Road, Teddington¹⁸. Alongside the addresses the occupation column climbs from winkelbediende to Directeur to fabrikant: shop-clerk, director, manufacturer¹⁹. The card also records a family passport taken out in June 1928 and renewed in February 1931, and his own identity card, issued on 16 December 1929²⁰. The move shows on the corporate side too. A 1931 company notice enters him as a supervisory director of the Continental company, with his address given simply as Londen²¹.

The company later traded publicly as Furnishco. That name, and the unresolved question of who legally directed the firm after Beens, are followed in the Furnishco open-question file.

He had a record of public gestures. In 1922 he raised relief money for Vienna by lottery, with the prizes on show in the firm's Coolsingel rooms²². The lottery under-sold, yet it sent ten thousand guilders east before the draw²³. The chapter this deep dive belongs to tells that charity in full.

The National Archives at Kew hold a Home Office aliens' file for him²⁴. A search of London Gazette records found no British naturalisation notice for him, so he very probably stayed Dutch²⁵, though that negative search does not prove he was never naturalised. The aliens' file is a case record, not a grant of citizenship, and we have not seen its contents²⁶. It may hold his passport portrait, and so a possible likeness of him, but it has not been opened²⁷.

Return, and a new trade

He came back. By the mid-1940s H. P. Beens was in the Netherlands again, and a series of official notices picks him up²⁸. Two gazette notices deal with the end of his first marriage²⁹. An Amsterdam court granted a divorce by default in 1946, and a court at The Hague recorded a 1948 decree on the same marriage³⁰. The notices do not explain how the two proceedings related³¹.

By 1951 he was back in Rotterdam, in a wholly different line³². That August a hotel company was incorporated at Enschede, N.V. Hotel Parkzicht te Enschede, with f200,000 in capital³³. Among its five founders the incorporation names Hermanus Petrus Beens, textielfabrikant te Rotterdam³⁴.

The furniture man had become a carpet director, then a textile manufacturer and a founder of a hotel company.

The first motel

His most striking later venture rests on a reading, not a proof. Between July 1955 and 1956 the press probably named him as operator of Motel Hoornwijck near Ypenburg³⁵. The motel opened on 1 May 1956 with forty-seven apartments on the highway between The Hague and Rotterdam, and it is likely the Netherlands' first³⁶. In July 1955 Het Binnenhof introduced him plainly, most likely as the same man³⁷, and called him the operator who expected a reasonable business summer and winter through³⁸.

A second paper went further. In December 1955 Het vaderland put him in the motel's directie, its management, and named him among the initiators of a proposed European motel organisation³⁹.

A third notice, in the Nieuwe Haarlemsche Courant as the motel prepared to open, gave him the title outright and ended on the wait for custom⁴⁰:

That this operator is our H. P. Beens is probable, not certain⁴¹. The press names him only by initials, and none of the three notices gives an address that would pin down the identity⁴². The career probably fits, from carpets and textiles to hotels and a roadside motel⁴³.

Press photographs of the motel survive from around its opening in the spring of 1956⁴⁴. They show low ranges of rooms along the highway, saplings staked in raw ground and a large American flag at full stretch on the central pole; in the opening-day frame a woman stands with a motor scooter on a ground-floor terrace⁴⁵. They show the building, not the man. Nothing in them fixes who ran it, and the identification of the operator as our H. P. Beens stays probable.

His life is documented to its end. Hermanus Petrus Beens died at Voorburg at a quarter to midnight on 27 December 1966, aged seventy-one⁴⁶.

The death act was drawn up on a chauffeur's declaration⁴⁷. It enters him as fabrikant, manufacturer, and names his long-dead parents⁴⁸. It records that he had once been married to de Vries and was married again at his death⁴⁹. It gives his residence as Rijswijk in South Holland⁵⁰. That was the motel's own municipality, ten years after it opened, and it is the nearest the record comes to placing our man at the Hoornbrug⁵¹. So the act closes a life that began in Haarlem and passed through a Rotterdam furniture works, a London suburb and, on the reading the press supports, a motel on the Rijksweg⁵².

Fredericus Johannes: the firm, and the long silence

The elder brother stayed in the trade and in the country, and he is far harder to follow. He too had lived at the corner: the name-list census puts him at 169a in 1926 and 169c in 1927, so both brothers passed through the building the firm worked⁵³. In 1929, after the 1928 liquidation, F. J. Beens floated a furnishing company of his own⁵⁴. N.V. Woninginrichting Maatschappij Fred. J. Beens traded from the Coolsingel in Rotterdam, with a capital of f50,000 in a hundred shares of f500, of which twenty-two were placed and fully paid⁵⁵.

The 1929 telephone book catches the two brothers in separate firms⁵⁶. H. P. Beens directs the Continental company from the corner, while F. J. Beens appears both privately and as director of his own new firm⁵⁷.

His firm's board also appears in the 1929 trade periodical De Naamlooze Vennootschap, an index of Staatscourant company notices, but that listing is probably read from a summary rather than the deed⁵⁸. There, entry number 2047 seats the company at Rotterdam, with f11,000 of the f50,000 placed and fully paid in registered shares⁵⁹. It probably names F. J. Beens as director and, as supervisors, J. J. W. van Delden and F. van Loon of The Hague: a board of a director and two commissarissen, given here as the probable reading it is⁶⁰.

He did not go quiet at once. The firm traded on through the early 1930s, from Coolsingel 75c in 1930 and then a rebuilt shop at Coolsingel 79 in 1931, with toonkamers, showrooms, at Hartmansstraat 26 and Witte de Withstraat 80⁶¹. Into the mid-1930s it presented itself as a high-end contract furnisher⁶². Only then does he fall silent. The national death-index searches recorded for this dossier found no entry for F. J. Beens⁶³. His death turned up instead in the regional press of Kennemerland, in a family notice and a civil-register column. Fredericus Johannes Beens died at Heemstede on 3 January 1980, aged eighty-six⁶⁴.

The regional press identified his death, where the recorded national-index searches did not⁶⁵. Two details fix his identity: his furnishing-trade address in the Heemstede directory and his widow's name in the notice⁶⁶.

The family around them

A few threads close the household. F. J. Beens and his wife had at least two daughters, born in Rotterdam in 1919 and 1920⁶⁷. H. P. Beens and his first wife had two known sons: Herman, born in December 1917, and Albert, born in June 1921⁶⁸. That first wife, Jantiena de Vries, died at Haarlem in 1957⁶⁹. The brothers' mother, Alida van Cittert, outlived her sons' firm by more than twenty years⁷⁰. She died at Rotterdam-Overschie in the summer of 1950, a widow of eighty-three, and the silent elder brother signed her death notice uit aller naam, on behalf of them all⁷¹. With her went the parents' generation of the two men who had run the works.