⁴Families Above the Benches

One of the two families who lived over the workshop survives in a single photograph. It most likely dates to late 1899, and shows both parents and all eight of the Pelt children¹.

An annotated key works out who is who, face by face.

An AI restoration has cleaned and colourised the same photograph, bringing the faces closer.

Open the Rotterdam address book for 1911 at the Rochussenstraat page and run a finger down the column, past schoolmasters and a police inspector. The corner comes in three consecutive lines: G. J. van Duffelen at 169a, the firm at 169b, C. Pelt at 169c².

The corner never looks tidier in print: one founder, the firm, the other founder, each with his own letter. Both the tidiness and the year mislead a little. Five years earlier, the 1906 book already prints Cornelis Pelt at a plain "169" with no letter, and names both partners among its firms³. The letters came afterwards, and 1911 is not where they settled. In that year the elder van Duffelen stands at 169a and the firm at 169b⁴, but by 1915 the firm is printed at 169a and both van Duffelens at 169b⁵. The neat three lines of 1911 catch a lettering that was still being rearranged.

In the years that follow, the letters wander. The range printed against the firm will not hold still. In 1916 the book gives Van Duffelen & Pelt the whole span, 169a-c, as though the works had swelled to fill all three flats.

The next year it prints 169a-b, the year after 169a-c again. Nobody had moved: from 1915 to 1918 the two van Duffelens sat at 169b and Cornelis Pelt at 169c. So in 1916, and again in 1918, the directory hands the firm all three units while listing one of its partners as living in one of them⁶. The wandering belongs to the directory, and anyone dating the works' expansion from those letters would be reading a typesetting habit as a history of walls.

The page also holds a stranger silence. Walk up the street from the corner and three house numbers are simply missing: no 165, no 167, no 173. The sequence steps from 119b straight to the 169 block and on to 171⁷. That gap need not be a hole in the record. The corner's high number most likely reflects its planned position on the street rather than the order in which the houses went up, and the low-numbered plots beside it belonged to an estate not yet built over⁸.

The directory follows rules, and it prints them. The 1917 volume carries the standing note that the upper flats of weekly-rent dwellings, and the cheapest dwellings of all, are not listed⁹. The corner's households are named every year, and the people who cleaned for them are not. The occupancy register reads the flats year by year, and the years we cannot fill shows where the record can and cannot be completed.

To understand the Pelts at the corner, we have to go back a little and follow them to it. Cornelis Pelt was a cabinet-maker, born in Rotterdam in 1856. Before he had a corner of his own he had a family and a string of rented rooms across the north-east of the city. His household card lists them in order, down a column: Crispijnlaan first, then the Nieuwe Molenstraat, the Crooswijkscheweg, a Spiegelnisser address and Erasmusstraat. The last entry before the corner is the corner itself, written under the name the street briefly carried on its Coolhaven side. When the naming settled, it became Rochussenstraat 169, later lettered 169c¹.

He moved to the corner when the works were new, and he stayed. His flat was the one the address book later lettered 169c. The same column that brings him in records the day he left, some twenty years after he arrived: 22 March 1921, for Snellinckstraat 10a². In between, the Pelts were the household behind the side-street door: a cabinet-maker, his wife Jacoba Anna Muijser and a long row of children. One of those children already had a small public part in the building. The six-year-old Cornelis who laid the first stone in 1899³ grew up at the corner his father half-owned.

A group photograph of the Pelt family survives from just before their move to the corner. Taken about the end of 1899, it shows both parents and all eight of their then-living children together, the father at top right and two small boys in sailor suits among them. The date, and the family's identification of Cees, the first-stone boy, as one of those two, came down with the picture and are not written on it. Both are best held as probable⁴. The photograph still belongs to the family and is shown here with their permission. The family portrait looks at it and at the reading of who is who, and the Pelt family before the corner follows the household card and the whole route in from Crooswijk.

The children grew up and married out of the flat. Cornelis, the first-stone boy, was by then a young office clerk, and on 12 September 1918 he married Maria Welman of Hellevoetsluis at Rotterdam⁵. Three years later the household card closes on the corner and opens on the Snellinckstraat, and the top flat behind the side-street door was somebody else's.

The other founding household filled the other flats, and it was a larger and older story. Gijsbert Johannes van Duffelen and Hendrika Maria Petronella Mathlener had married in Rotterdam in 1876¹, and over the next thirteen years they had eight children, all born in the city². Three were sons, and two of those died as infants. So Gerrit, the painter, born in 1889, grew up the only surviving son among five sisters³. In the years this chapter covers the parents were still at the corner, and Gerrit is listed at 169b, above the works, as a kunstschilder and a drawing-teacher⁴.

Then the household emptied in the ordinary way, from the outside in. Four of the daughters married in Rotterdam between 1906 and 1911, and the family began to scatter⁵. One married a nurseryman and settled near Cleveland, Ohio⁶. Another married by proxy and made her life on a tobacco estate on the Deli coast of Sumatra⁷. Two more married and stayed in the city, and a fifth daughter also reached Cleveland⁸. On 4 May 1921, six weeks after Cornelis Pelt left, the last of the van Duffelens went too: the parents moved out to Zeist. Their household card marks the day. The Rochussenstraat line is struck through and the new town written after it⁹.

Seven years later the family the corner had produced appeared once, whole, in a single column of print. Gijsbert Johannes van Duffelen died in November 1928, and his death notice listed the survivors by the towns they had scattered to: the widow at Zeist, the married daughters at Rotterdam, Cleveland and Medan, the one son, the painter, at Amsterdam¹⁰.

Those few lines of small type trace a Rotterdam furniture family, from a marriage of 1876 to a scattering that reached Ohio and Sumatra. The van Duffelen line goes further back and further out, to the grandparents, the sea-captain the family remembered, the emigrant daughters and the founder's own last address.

The people the corner's households leaned on most are the ones the record leaves almost blank. There was always a household to keep going at the corner, and the households advertised. In June 1921, within weeks of Cornelis Pelt's departure, a notice in the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad came from the very flat he had vacated: a day-girl wanted at Rochussenstraat 169c, six guilders a week, to start at once.

The notice is small, and a new name placed it. Mevrouw Beens belonged to the firm that was moving into the works as the founders moved out¹. Hers is the first of a long line of advertisements from this address: a day-girl here, a living-in maid there. Decades later another household at the address was asking for less, from a living-in servant in 1939 to three mornings a week in 1960². None of the notices ever gives a name. The wage is sometimes printed, six guilders a week in 1921, thirty-five guilders a month with board in 1928³, but the servant never is. These are the least visible people who passed through the building, and they show at all only because the household that wanted them had to say so in the paper⁴.

That silence is built into the sources. The directory names every household at the corner. By its own printed rule it leaves out exactly the class these advertisements were hiring: the upper flats of weekly-rent dwellings never appear, nor do the cheapest weekly dwellings below the rent the book recorded⁵. The household's servants follows the whole line of domestic advertisements and a household asking for less help across a generation. every job the corner advertised covers the working life of the building as a whole.

The Beens notice shows the corner already changing hands. By the time a day-girl answered it, the firm downstairs was no longer quite Van Duffelen & Pelt. The founders had gone up to Zeist and out to the Snellinckstraat, and a larger company had its name on the works and its mistress in one of the flats, advertising for a maid. The next chapter follows what became of the firm as it was taken over.