³Twenty Men at Their Benches

On one of the last days of 1906 a man from a Dutch trade weekly walked into the furniture works at Rochussenstraat 169 and, for once, someone wrote down what was inside. His article appeared a few weeks later, in January 1907: four illustrated pages carrying the only known photographs of this factory at work¹. Almost everything else the firm left behind is a printed line, and this section is written mostly from that visit. It is the only time the building opens its doors.

Here the chronology pauses, because the works are easiest to grasp all at once, as the visitor saw them. He was taken first down to the basement and its mechanical sawmill, with stacks of raw mahogany, oak and cedar on the open ground behind. An almost silent thirteen-horsepower gas engine, he was told, had driven every tool in the building for seven years without a day's stoppage². Above the showroom and the first-floor sample room, on the second floor, he found the cabinet-making, and took the photograph that gives this chapter its title: about twenty men at as many benches, in a room the caption simply calls the meubelmakerswerkplaats.

The upholstery shop was a floor higher still, on the third floor, alongside the timber store. On the next page the visitor printed two photographs of finished pieces, a living-room suite and a complete bedroom suite, each captioned a specimen of work carried out here in this city³. They are the only photographs of the firm's furniture from its own time. No labelled Van Duffelen & Pelt object has turned up in the Dutch museum collections searched⁴, but the furniture itself is not entirely gone. Descendants of the founder Cornelis Pelt keep two chairs that the family remembers as made in the factory, and they have let them be photographed for this site; they are shown in the gallery of the firm's premises.

Did the works run on steam? The interview does not quite say, and the directories say so only once. In 1905, and in no other year between 1901 and 1923, the Rotterdam address book called the plant a stoommeubelfabriek, a steam furniture factory. That most likely points to powered machinery, though it is a single printed word, not a survey of the premises⁵.

The interview shows a factory busy at its own benches, yet the work also went out of the door. In 1907 the firm made the interior joinery for G. Brunott's new watchmaker-and-jeweller's shop on the Binnenweg, fitting the panelling alongside the architect Verhaer and the builders Gebr. Overweel⁶. It was a small, ordinary job, and worth keeping for that reason. The corner did not only make suites for its own showroom; it fitted out other people's premises across the city. The four photographed pages tell what the firm was in the trade registers, joiners one year and dealers the next. Whether it ever held a mark or a medal is taken up in a question with a careful no.

The corner made it possible for the firm to keep a shop in the middle of town. On 26 November 1902 Van Duffelen & Pelt opened a downtown magazijn at the Coolvest¹, on the corner of the St. Laurensstraat, while the factory and warehouse stayed out on the Rochussenstraat. The notice announcing the shop also lists work beyond furniture: the firm laid parquet floors and fitted office and room panelling². The works at the corner were as much a joinery as a furniture shop.

The downtown shop moved before it settled. The 1906 address book already listed a warehouse at Witte de Withstraat 57, three years before the firm's own advertisements began to give that address³. By January 1909 the firm's notices showed the pair side by side: the factory at Rochussenstraat 169 on telephone 47, the warehouse at Witte de Withstraat 57 on telephone 3341⁴. In the fuller version the firm called itself furniture manufacturers and upholsterers offering the complete fitting-out of homes, shops and offices. The interview's own downtown showroom matches it, a double hall and upper rooms stocked to furnish a house from cellar to attic:

In the same years the firm reached a little above its trade. From 1909 it advertised a line of Dutch art pottery, Faience Amphora, at factory prices alongside the furniture, first in an Amsterdam art daily and then in the Rotterdam press⁵. By 30 January 1911 the formula had set: complete home furnishing at the two addresses, and Amphora faience at factory prices⁶.

The works had become a fixed point in the neighbourhood. In October 1906 a household advertisement placed number 171 as the second house from the 's-Gravendijkwal, beside the Van Duffelen & Pelt furniture factory⁷. By 1906 strangers used the corner to find their way to other places. The firm's other addresses hang together in a gallery of its streets. How it advertised across all of them, with the same maker-claim and the same telephone block, is followed in the house style of the corner.

In the summer of 1909 the firm took in a partner who was not a cabinet-maker. The deed was executed on 12 June 1909 before the Rotterdam notary Willem van Traa, and the government gazette published its notice three days later¹. Where there had been two men, it names three: the founders, van Duffelen and Pelt, now entered as furniture manufacturers, and August Frans Antoon Maria Wille, a man of private means².

The notice gives furniture manufacturing as the firm's object and calls the new partnership a continuation of the old, running to the last day of 1920³. One clause let it outlive that term: unless a partner gave six months' notice, the partnership renewed itself from year to year until someone stopped it⁴. That small legal hinge has a large consequence for the story. The firm never had to be formally wound up, and as far as the record shows, it never was.

Wille is the odd figure in the deed. Amsterdam-born in 1887, of German-Catholic descent, he put capital into the works without joining the trade⁵. He married in Rotterdam and his daughters were born there⁶. About 1919 he left the city for a furniture venture of his own in Apeldoorn⁷, and the corner did not hear from him again. When he died at Apeldoorn in 1965, his death notice was signed by a wife who was not the one named in his 1913 marriage record⁸.

The man, and the open question of that second wife, have his own deep dive. The two deeds that made and remade the firm, one preserved and one lost, are set side by side in a note on what survives. The firm's whole life, from its informal start about 1890 to the day it left the corner, fills its own company file.

The firm left the corner without a sound. Its last traced advertisement from Rochussenstraat 169, on 20 March 1916, asked for a cabinet-maker's improver and a boy at the factory¹.

There is no closing sale, no dissolution notice, no farewell in the record. The firm did not die. It most likely changed shape, from a works making furniture at the industrial corner into a furnishing business downtown². Its customer-facing half had moved to the city centre years before, and by 1922 the firm was trading from the Coolsingel as one of the constituent houses of a larger furnishing company³.

The firm had gone, and the address books went on printing it at the corner anyway. Their street lists carried Van Duffelen & Pelt as furniture manufacturers at 169a–c through 1918 and at plain 169 through 1923. That is seven years after the last advertisement, and for the last two of them while the firm was demonstrably trading from the Coolsingel⁴.

The same address shows plainly that this was print, not life. From January 1921 the new firm Beens was advertising for a loopknecht, an errand-man, at its factory at Rochussenstraat 169⁵. By 1920 the directory had listed Beens at the works, so for four years it carried both firms at once, one that had left and one that had arrived.

This is the clearest warning that a directory should not be read as if it were a lease. A printed line can outlast the thing it describes by the better part of a decade. A method note looks at how to read such a record and what a silence in it means. Who was actually inside the building, year by year, is followed in the register of everyone recorded here. The firm downstairs was leaving and a new one was moving into the works, but the families in the flats above the benches stayed.