Every job advertised at this address
Most of what we know about work at the corner comes from the newspapers, where first a furniture works and then a furnishing shop placed notices when they needed hands. Taken together, the notices show which trades the corner wanted and when, even though they cannot say how many people it employed.
There are two kinds of notice. Most were recruitment for the trade, and the trades ran wider than the two names that stand for them. Besides meubelmakers and stoffeerders, cabinet-makers and upholsterers, the corner asked from 1905 for halfwassen, improvers or part-trained men, and that same year for a machinaal houtbewerker to run the machines. It also wanted boys for the cabinet-shop and the upholstery trade, a loopknecht or errand-man, and stoelenmakers, one of them for krom werk, curved work. In the van Duyn decades came furniture salesmen, office clerks, a van-mate and curtain-seamstresses working from home. The run starts with a call for skilled makers in 1900, the earliest traced, and ends with a van Duyn upholsterer vacancy as late as March 1977, which asked for a driving licence. The second kind was domestic: the corner's households looking for a maid or a charwoman.
Two trade notices, of 27 September 1922 and 18 April 1923, carry no firm name. The 1922 one names the factory at the street, the 1923 one only the street, and both are kept here as printed, unattributed. Reading an address-only notice honestly, without guessing a firm onto it, is . Furniture was also made outside the big firms: in 1950 Van Kleef, an independent cabinet-maker, was still advertising for an apprentice at 169c.
For a quarter of a century before the war, the trade press and the address book show the works asking for hands: a machine-woodworker in 1905, skilled cabinet-makers in 1909, improvers in 1911, makers and improvers in 1913, more makers in 1916:
Under Beens the calls went on: cabinet-makers at 169a in June 1921, then the two unattributed chair-maker notices of September 1922 and April 1923, kept here as printed.
One later notice can stand for many. In a 1968 classified, quoted rather than shown because it is still in copyright, a firm at the corner advertised for a charwoman to clean its furniture warehouse:
Sturdy CHARWOMAN wanted in [the] furniture warehouse, from 8 to 2[?] o'clock. Firm J. A. van Duyn, Rochussenstraat 169a, telephone 25 49 92.
Much of the surviving evidence consists of small workplace notices like this one.
What the record does not give
The notices cannot be added up into a workforce. A call for a cabinet-maker in a given month says nothing about how many stood at the benches, and no source we hold gives a full total for the works. The only glimpse of numbers is a trade-paper visit. In January 1907 the Industrieel Weekblad reported about twenty men working at as many benches in the second-floor cabinet-shop, and printed a photograph of the workshop: one workshop at one moment, which is not a payroll.
Page header: 256 INDUSTRIEEL WEEKBLAD. [Industrial Weekly.] […] — continues from p. 255: ...by strong willpower paired with great modesty. Coming in from the raw outdoors, where the snow whirled down in thick flakes, cloaking the whole flat land in a spotless winter garb, the change to the soothing warmth, mingled with the pungent smell of polish and wax, felt pleasant to us in the showroom. We were, moreover, captivated by the great variety of luxury and comfort items in diverse styles, which were arranged with good taste. Behind the showroom is the office, where we got the impression of busy activity, of restless industry. Guided by one of the partners, we first visited the basement, which is fitted out as a mechanical sawmill. The open ground at the rear serves as a timber storage yard; large stacks of raw beams lie there: mahogany, oak, cedar, etc. The material whistled and creaked merrily under the force of mechanically driven planes, saws and chisels. Among other things one finds there a planing machine; the raw plank is pushed over a horizontal surface, in the middle of which, across its full width, there is an opening, beneath which several adjustable plane-irons, each 60 cm long, rotate at enormous speed. Equally useful is the milling machine, while on the horizontal circular saw — which cuts all the desired grooves and incisions into the wood — chisels can also be fitted. We were shown no fewer than 400 pieces with varying profiles, a collection ample enough to manufacture mouldings of any desired shape. It stands to reason that such a chisel forms the negative of the profile that is produced. We consider the band saw and the drilling machines too generally familiar to describe their operation in further detail. THE CABINETMAKERS' WORKSHOP. (caption beneath the first inset photograph) The automatic sharpening apparatus testifies to ingenious invention. The blunted chisel is set in a clamp before the rotating [grinding] stone, while a combination of gears gradually brings both the clamp and the chisel into a back-and-forth motion, with the peculiar result that the chisel can never be dragged out of true through clumsiness, nor needlessly lose metal. From the sawmill we went into a storage room for the wood that has been sawn into planks, and for the sheets of veneer, which — before they can be further worked — must be perfectly dry. Next to it is a hermetically sealed chamber where, by means of certain processes, the wood receives the desired colour. We note with pleasure that the most extensive safety measures are observed; besides special guards on the milling machines, all drive-belts run through wooden ducts, while the engine room, too, is adequately separated [from the rest]. For seven years, without a single day's interruption, an almost silent 13-HP Trusty gas engine works there, driving all the machinery. From the basement we went up to the first floor, which is fitted out as a store or sample room. As we already noted, one beholds there a great variety of all kinds of furniture in diverse styles, furniture that exerts a certain charm, because it is constructed with a great deal of taste. THE UPHOLSTERY SHOP. (caption beneath the second inset photograph) "Schmücke dein Heim" ["Adorn your home"], says the German; "Où peut on être mieux?" ["Where could one be better off?"] asks the Frenchman; — "My sweet home", sings the Englishman — and we Dutch possess any number of winged phrases to express that "eigen haard, goud waard" is ["one's own hearth is worth gold" — a Dutch proverb]. Indeed: clothes make the man, and furniture makes the home. Whoever agrees with that, and can spare the means to spend his life in a pleasant, cosy setting, will undoubtedly find much to his liking in this showroom. On the second floor we visited the cabinetmaking shop. Here about 20 men work at just as many workbenches, placed regularly one behind another. A guarantee of the soundness of the […] — sentence and article continue onto p. 257 (not part of this crop).
The same article describes the plant where those men worked. A thirteen-horsepower Trusty gas engine drove the machinery, and the article says it had run for seven years without a day's stoppage. The tools included a planing machine with sixty-centimetre blades, a milling machine and a horizontal circular saw that cut grooves and could also be fitted with cutters, which the article calls beitels, chisels. Visitors were shown four hundred of them, in varied profiles, enough to make mouldings of any shape, and an automatic sharpening apparatus for them. The milling machines had guards, and every drive belt was boxed inside a wooden casing. That is the workshop's safety record as the trade paper chose to show it.
There are gaps as well. Nothing links advertised labour to the corner between 1924 and 1938, and the upholsterer vacancy of March 1977 is the latest advertised work traced there. The whole workforce appears together only once, and that is at a death. When the founder Johan Andries van Duijn died in January 1978, his staff signed a notice for him together, as Gezamenlijk Personeel, the joint personnel. It is the only collective trace of the corner's workforce.
Boys worked there from the start. In July 1907 Van Duffelen & Pelt sought a cabinet-maker's boy and an upholsterer's boy, and in January 1910 the factory wanted een jongen voor de meubelmakerij, a boy for the cabinet-shop. The office side appears late, with a 1968 call for someone to handle administration and the telephone. Only one length of service can be linked to a name, and it belongs to a neighbouring firm. In 1961 L. Kret, a woningstoffeerder, marked twenty-five years with P. van Reeuwijk, the firm that had briefly kept showrooms at the corner.
Domestic work, and the only wages on record
The domestic notices give two explicit wage figures. The 1907 hours-and-wages settlement, described in the next section, records hourly wage rises. In June 1921 Mevrouw Beens at 169C wanted a day-girl at six guilders a week. Her household was advertising in the same month and the same newspaper as the firm's works at 169a, which was calling for cabinet-makers. In 1928 a live-in maid at 169b was offered thirty-five guilders a month.
Conditions, and the trade around the work
Twice the sources catch the terms of work directly. In March 1907 Van Duffelen & Pelt was among the Rotterdam masters who granted their workers new terms, and this is the only place pay by the hour at the corner appears. Two furniture-makers' societies, the Christian Helpt Elkander and the Roman Catholic guild St. Jozeph, put the demand to the employers; a third, De Toekomst, had attached a condition the other two found unacceptable. The ten-hour working day ran from six in the morning to six at night in summer and from seven to seven in winter, with set breaks. Men earning more than twelve cents an hour received a rise of two cents an hour, and those earning less than twelve received one cent. Overtime was paid at ten per cent for the first extra hour and twenty for the second, rising to fifty into the small hours and a hundred for Sunday work. Van Duffelen & Pelt granted the terms alongside Allan & Co., Eckhart, Kiessel, Westerhof en Ten Bosch and Godschalk. Four of those names, Allan, Eckhard (as it was spelt in 1923), Westerhof en Ten Bosch and Godschalk, would sit on the 1923 strike list, then on the other side of the bargain.
In March 1923 the Rotterdam furniture trade struck, and Beens was among the firms named. More than two hundred and fifty journeymen stopped work across the city, with no figure for the corner alone. tells the story.
Beyond the corner, the trade was organised. By 1927 the furniture trade had a national collective agreement between five employers' and workers' bodies, though that is background for the sector rather than a document about no. 169. The cabinet-makers had had their own union, the Nederlandsche Meubelmakersbond, since 1871, and in 1908 it merged with the upholsterers' and paperhangers' union into a new joint bond; that was most likely the kind of body behind a settlement like the corner's, though we piece its history together from writing about the unions, not from the union's own records, which we have not read.
The venue years
The corner's last working life was of another kind. In January 2002 the music venue there is recorded with eight subsidised staff posts, most likely paid positions under a jobs scheme rather than advertised vacancies. They belong to a different economy from the benches and the showroom, and they leave a different trace from the newspaper vacancies. The working record begins with a call for skilled cabinet-makers in 1900 and ends, a century later, with what were most likely eight subsidised posts in a concert hall. It runs the length of the corner's trades and stops with them.