⁵The Works Stop

In the eighteen months at the end of the war, a Rotterdam furniture firm turned itself into a group. N.V. Beens' Woninginrichting-Maatschappij was incorporated in 1918¹, with a single director, H. P. Beens, a merchant, and three supervisory directors above him². Its authorised capital of half a million guilders came in ten series, and only the first three were placed and paid up³. That April it opened a showroom on the Coolsingel⁴. The Catholic daily De Maasbode did not call it an ordinary furniture warehouse but a modelhuis van fijne kunstzinnige woninginrichting, a showhouse of fine, artistic home furnishing⁵. Persian carpets and complete furnished rooms filled it, with paintings set inside the settings⁶.

This was the first of several Coolsingel showrooms the firm kept as it grew⁷. By June it was advertising a bovenzaal, an upper room⁸, where it showed some fifty paintings by named Dutch masters, an episode that is its own short story⁹.

By late 1918 Beens had also joined forces with Kam & Van Rhijn of Schiedam¹⁰. That firm's surviving partner, Marius Adrianus van Rhijn, had just died at forty-four¹¹. The two firms placed a joint death notice, and H. P. Beens called him a colleague and friend¹². On 1 January 1920 the Schiedam shop closed and moved to Beens's Coolsingel address¹³. One object from the Schiedam firm says more than its legal history. Its Exportkist, which it called its own invention, was a packing crate that also formed the base of a bed¹⁴. Measuring 1.85 by 0.85 by 0.80 metres, it held a whole one-person room folded into its own case¹⁵. The trade press reported one shipped to a Dutch correspondent in the East Indies and another asked for by a customer in Stockholm¹⁶.

The crate suits what Beens was becoming: a firm big enough to furnish a whole life at once, and big enough to take in the houses that had furnished lives before it. The Schiedam firm's deep dive traces the later fortunes of the maker.

Only one volume of the city directory catches the group taking over the works. Its 1920 street list prints the newcomer and the old firm one under the other: first Beens' Woninginricht. Mij., N.V. at 169a-c¹, then Duffelen & Pelt, fa. van at 169², then the two founders, still living above the factory³, G. J. van Duffelen at 169b and Cornelis Pelt at 169c⁴. The page lists the new tenant, the old firm and the two men who built the place⁵. A year later Beens had the fourth sub-unit, 169d⁶. A year after that, Cornelis Pelt's line is gone, and it never comes back⁷. For who lived and worked in each sub-unit, year by year, see the occupant register.

The firm that built the house did not so much vanish as become one of the names the group traded under. By September 1922 Van Duffelen & Pelt was trading as part of the Beens group⁸, listed in the joint showroom at Coolsingel 49 alongside Kam & Van Rhijn⁹.

A telephone number shows the thread. Van Duffelen & Pelt's old Rochussenstraat line, 47, was printed in that Coolsingel showroom's entry¹⁰: the builders' number had followed them into the group that took their works¹¹. How a number could pass from one firm to the next is a deep dive of its own.

To the group, the corner was the factory. Its 1926 advertisement in the city directory, the picture at the head of this chapter, lists three premises¹: showrooms on the Coolsingel, an office on the Nieuwe Kerkstraat, and Fabrieken: Rochussenstraat 169, the works². The same entries show how the family split the work. H. P. Beens was directeur at the showrooms downtown³, while his brother F. J. Beens was procuratiehouder, the authorised signatory, at the works⁴. The younger brother ran the showrooms; the elder signed for the factory. The corner's firms carried the same maker's claim under one name after another, and the house style of the corner follows it.

For the first half of the decade the works ran as a going furniture factory, documented from January 1921 to at least April 1925^5 6. The earliest dated notice is addressed straight to the Fabriek Rochussenstraat 169.

It made more than stock furniture. For a few years the Rotterdam press named Beens among the interior contractors on the city's better jobs⁷. First came Restaurant Hasenkamp in 1919, in carved oak⁸. Then, in 1921, the Cinema Palace, modernised to designs by the architect S. C. van der Vlugt with the decorative artists Jaap and Jan Gidding⁹; Beens supplied the new furnishing¹⁰. The rebuilt Tivoli theatre followed in 1926, in teak and red moquette¹¹.

One private order survives outside the newspapers, in a Zeeland family's archive¹². Its catalogue describes a 1926 letter from Beens, said to confirm an order for five armchairs and a table, with a drawing¹³. The letter itself has not been read¹⁴. The company that owned all of this has its own company file.

On business trips to Vienna in the early 1920s, H. P. Beens had been struck by the destitution of the city's intellectuals and pensioners¹. On 11 December 1922 Het Vaderland reported that he had founded a relief committee for them², Beens' Comité voor noodlijdend Weenen, which would raise money by lottery³. The plan was large: twenty-five thousand tickets at five guilders, for a hoped-for f125,000⁴. Against that stood fifty thousand guilders of prizes, bought cheaply on the collapsed Austrian exchange and shown in the firm's Coolsingel rooms⁵.

Tickets sold badly. The draw slipped from before Christmas to the afternoon of 22 January 1923, at the Notarishuis in Rotterdam⁶. Only about seven thousand of the twenty-five thousand tickets had been placed⁷, so two hundred and fifty prizes were drawn instead of the full list⁸. The prize list reads like the firm's own showroom: a walnut dining suite at the top, then a canteen of table silver and a Hupfeld Phonola player-piano⁹, and further down the paintings, among them a Koekkoek¹⁰.

It missed its target, but it drew and it delivered. Ten thousand guilders had already reached Vienna before the draw¹¹. Seven weeks later the men at the works walked out. The firm whose Coolsingel rooms and stock stood behind the lottery has its own company file, and the director's later life is a deep dive of its own.

On the morning of 12 March 1923 Rotterdam's furniture-makers and upholsterers went on strike, on the advice of the three cooperating unions, and the trade lay almost entirely still¹. N.V. Beens' Woninginrichting was named among some fifteen employers struck², and its only factory was the works at Rochussenstraat 169³.

More than two hundred and fifty hands were out across the trade that morning⁴. The next day the employers offered terms⁵: a ten per cent wage cut for three months and another ten for the three after, with the working week lengthened from forty-five hours to forty-eight⁶. The strikers refused⁷, and for five weeks the works stood idle. On 11 April separate meetings of strikers voted by written ballot to accept new terms⁸, and work resumed on Monday 16 April⁹. The settlement kept a single ten per cent cut and the forty-eight-hour week, added a twenty per cent overtime premium, and fixed the contract for a year with no reprisals¹⁰.

Two smaller records, both from before the firm reached this corner, set the stoppage in context: a works holiday it kept in 1918¹¹, and an evening in 1920 when its upholsterers were found working until eleven at night¹². Both are in the labour deep dive, and every job the address ever advertised is listed in its own register.

The end came as three signs in the same twelve months, all pointing one way¹. First the company moved to wind itself up. A liquidatievoorstel, a motion to liquidate, went to an extraordinary shareholders' meeting announced in November 1926², and closing-down sales ran through the winter and spring³. Then the showroom itself was going. In mid-April 1927 the Rotterdam press reported that Coolsingel 103 would be rebuilt as a café-restaurant⁴: the shop where the firm was at present still housed⁵.

Last, H. P. Beens himself dropped out of the city's directory. In 1926 the firm's entry had carried a director's line, his home address and his advertisement⁶. In the 1927 volume all three vanish at once⁷, while his brother F. J. Beens stays on at the corner as signatory⁸. It is an absence, not a recorded departure, but it probably marks his exit from the firm⁹.

The same year the company was in court. A judgment printed in the Nederlandsche Staatscourant of 28 November 1927 records it fighting the Berlin firm Markgraf & Tau¹⁰ over a German-mark debt from 1922¹¹. Could it be paid off in collapsed post-inflation marks, or did it have to be met at the mark's old gold value¹²?

Through all of it the Beens name stayed on the address. The name lists for the previously blank years put F. J. Beens, as procuratiehouder, at 169a in 1925¹³ and 1926, and at 169c in 1927¹⁴, while the factory sat at 169d and then 169b¹⁵. From 12 August 1927 H. P. Beens's own household was registered at 169b, as the company came apart¹⁶. The liquidation ran on into 1928, with an auction of the firm's own stock; that and the sale of its paintings make up the company file's last page¹⁷.

Briefly, and past the end of the era, here is where the two men went. The works did not fall silent with the company. While the old firm was being liquidated, H. P. Beens was already directing a carpet concern from the same corner¹, and within eighteen months F. J. Beens had floated a furnishing successor of his own². The company's works had stopped; the corner had not.

H. P. Beens left in 1931. On 3 August that year the household was struck from the Rotterdam register, gone to Teddington, a London suburb, with his wife and two sons³. He came back and tried the textile trade, then hotels⁴. An H. P. Beens was named between 1955 and 1956 as operator of Motel Hoornwijck near Ypenburg, most likely the same man, though the press gives only the initials⁵. The motel was probably the Netherlands' first⁶. He died at Voorburg on 27 December 1966, aged seventy-one, entered on the act as fabrikant⁷.

His brother took longest of all to find. F. J. Beens outlived the firm by half a century⁸, dying at Heemstede on 3 January 1980, aged eighty-six and unrecorded in the national death register⁹. The rest of the two men's story closes their deep dive.

The works themselves were still wanted. The rooms would fill again with a carpet company under a familiar director, and for another half-century cabinet-makers, upholsterers and ship outfitters would be advertised for at this address. The collapse ended the company, and the corner went on. First, though, the era closes with one of the two boys who laid the building's first stone, now grown into a painter, in the next chapter.