Experts in genealogy stress the importance, for those exploring the past, of examining and recording the recollections of older family members. I had this in mind when I visited my retired friend Dr Alex King in his home in the Merchiston district of Edinburgh a few years after the second world war.
Dr King, who died in January 1990, had been secretary to the colonial and continental committee of the Church of Scotland and he had many interesting stories to tell about the wartime problems faced by Scots ministers serving abroad. The best known was Dr Donald Caskie, the Tartan Pimpernel.
Caskie had criticised the Nazi regime from the pulpit of his Paris church, which had to close during the Petain years, when he was obliged to flee, eventually reaching Marseilles. Working in the seaman’s mission there he covertly helped many British airmen and others to find means of escape to the free world, often by sea. News of these pending escapes was passed to Dr King and May Slidders, his secretary in Edinburgh, who quietly informed the families concerned that their loved ones would soon be home.
There were two churches in Holland for which the Church of Scotland regularly supplied ministers. One was the Scots kirk at Rotterdam founded in 1643. The cruel and wholly unnecessary bombing by Hitler of that great maritime city in May 1940 irreparably damaged that church, and it became no more than a cleared site, until it was rebuilt in 1952.
The other was the chapel at the Begijnhof, Amsterdam, originally the home of the Catholic sisterhood of the Beguines. When the City of Amsterdam adopted Calvinist principles in 1578 the chapel was closed, but it re-opened when the Scots congregation was founded on 4 February 1607 to provide a place of worship for travellers and for the English speaking residents of Amsterdam.
From 1812 the church building has been the property of the Scots congregation there. In more recent times the church has acquired a reputation for musical excellence, and a baroque chamber orchestra – The Academy of the Begijnhof – has made its home there. The congregation is now more usually described as the English Reformed Church of Amsterdam. The church is approached by an inconspicuous archway and courtyard off Spui, a busy square in Amsterdam.
One of Dr King’s unpublished tales concerned the Scots congregation at the Begijnhof. Following Germany’s unprovoked attack on the Netherlands in 1940 the country was wholly occupied by the invaders, and Seyss-Inquart, a much hated figure, was installed as governor. The Begijnhof’s congregational life was wholly suspended.
Communications between Scotland and the Low Countries had of course been good since at least the 14th century, when travel at home was so difficult. It was said with justification that it was easier to sail from Scotland to Holland than it was to travel on horseback or by stage coach from Edinburgh to London.
From the 1300s Scots mariners and traders regularly crossed the North Sea to Dutch ports, and in the 15th century had established a permanent trading community at the Dutch town of Veere in Zeeland which persisted into and beyond the 17th century.
They even had a conservator appointed who resolved commercial disputes there according to Scots law. Careful records were kept, and although some were destroyed in 1940 by the German bombing of Middleburg town hall where they were stored, much remains and is still being studied by scholars and may yet be published. Both medical and law students regularly attended the Dutch universities of Groningen, Leiden and Utrecht to study medicine and Roman law. Boswell, the advocate and friend of Dr Samuel Johnston, was one of these.
In the 17th century when the Scots Presbyterians were being harassed by King Charles I to accept the English prayer book, numbers of recusant ministers also found refuge with the tolerant Dutch. From 1607 many of these traders, visitors and religious refugees were drawn to the congregation at the Begijnhof in Amsterdam, and indeed a few of these went on to Delftshaven to meet a contingent from Leiden, and so returned to England on the Speedwell to join the Pilgrim fathers who emigrated from Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620 to start a new life in Massachusetts.
During the second world war when Germany overran the Netherlands the Amsterdam congregation, like that at Rotterdam, was dispersed and closed, though the Begijnhof church was declared by the Germans a ‘Standort Kirche’ (a state church) and was sporadically used by their navy for special services. The German pastor, Reverend Lutzen, removed the wall text ‘Create in me a clean heart O God’ and substituted ‘Das Reich Gottes steht nicht in Worten, sondern in Kraft’ (The kingdom of God is not in word but in power). This might illustrate a cultural difference between the Dutch and their invaders.
My interest in the Dutch situation began when I arrived in Holland as a radio operator with the British Second Army in 1944, although of course I did not at that time have opportunity to visit either Amsterdam or Rotterdam.
After the Allied armies crossed the Meuse-Escaut canal into southern Holland and were heavily engaged with the unsuccessful attempts by parachute forces to capture the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem, in the later months of 1944, the northern parts of Holland were deliberately kept by the occupying German forces at almost starvation level.
Eventually a ceasefire arrangement suggested by Churchill and Roosevelt and accepted by General Blaskowitz of the 25th German Army permitted the Allies to begin to drop emergency food supplies by air to the Dutch cities. The First Canadian Army was re-directed southwards, and three days after the German surrender at Wageningen, Canadian troops entered and liberated Amsterdam on 7 May 1945.
Dr King’s account of what followed, as I remember, went like this:
The caretaker of the Begijnhof kirk, who had quickly removed some of the contents of the church before the German armies arrived, had also taken custody of the church funds and the valuable communion plate. On that joyful day of liberation he ran into the street excitedly brandishing the keys of the cellar where these these valuables were still secured, and handed them to a soldier whom he probably took to be a Scotsman. In fact the soldier was from one of the Canadian regiments, and not knowing what to do with the keys he gave them to his superior officer who passed them to his regimental headquarters in Canada. The army authorities there realised what had happened and sent the keys on to the governor of Edinburgh Castle thinking that he would know best how to deal with them. The governor in turn telephoned to Dr King who hastened by taxi to the castle where he received the keys. Thus, it was believed, were the precious contents of the cellar at last re-united with the congregation to whom they belonged.
In an attempt to verify this story I have been allowed to examine the minutes of the late Dr King’s committee at the Church of Scotland headquarters. The minutes (now stored in the National Library of Scotland) briefly record on 12 October 1945 that ‘by the efforts mainly of Mr Dhont the funds of the (Amsterdam) congregation had been saved from confiscation by the Germans’. Whether this laconic statement refers also to the preservation of the communion plate and other items is uncertain.
Mr C J Dhont, if, as I believe he was, the saviour of the valuables, was a deacon in the church and had been arrested by the Germans for a time in 1943 for reasons now unknown. During his absence the treasurer Mr Grooten seems to have held the fort, but in time Mr Dhont was released to resume his watchfulness.
I have seen an excerpt from a letter written after the war by Mr Kreyenbroek (the session clerk) to Dr King in which he describes the arrival of ‘Seyss-Inquart satellites…with a warrant to confiscate the church and its property’. Thanks to Mr Dhont they were disappointed. I have also asked the present governor of Edinburgh Castle whether there is any record there of a communication from the Canadian Army sending the keys, but unsurprisingly none can now be traced. Soldiers were not given to meticulous record-keeping, particularly in war time.
The Reverend John Cowie, the present minister of the Amsterdam congregation does not know of any evidence to support the story of the cellar keys, nor does the archivist Mrs Femmie van Kerkhof who reports that there is no cellar beneath the church, and suggests that Mr Dhont may have removed the archives and valuables to a cellar in his own workplace, and that he had perhaps buried the precious silver plate in his garden (as many Dutchmen did). But he was certainly allowed to retain a key and he did keep an eye on the church itself.
Mrs van Kerkhof’s opinion is that Dr King’s story is ‘a mixture of the things that happened at the time’. She adds that after the war the valuable Swedish silver communion plate was given into the care of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and subsequently lent to the adjacent Historich Museum, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 359, Amsterdam, where Room 10 houses a permanent exhibition of the magnificent work of the Swedish silversmith Johannes Schiotling who practised his skills in Amsterdam around 1771.
This left only two avenues to explore. The first was Dr King’s daughter, Mrs Alex Sparks, who now lives in Staffordshire. She remembers hearing many of her father’s wartime tales as a young girl, though she has difficulty in determining specific details. The account of the treasures belonging to the Begijnhof congregation is however familiar to her, and significantly she remembers her father telling her how on a post-war visit to his sister in Saskatoon he had met another clergyman who claimed to have heard an account from someone of the delivery of the Begijnhof keys to the army authorities.
This encouraged me to write to the regimental headquarters of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, a famous element of the Canadian forces, who were the first troops to liberate Amsterdam. Their archivist and regimental adjutant, Captain Richard Dumas, has conducted widespread inquiries amongst veterans in Canada without result. I have also been in touch with the Canadian Seaforth Highlanders, and had the story mentioned in The Legion, a publication circulating among former servicemen.
It is of course hardly surprising that what must have seemed a trivial event occurring 65 years ago during the excitement of a city’s liberation can not now be recalled. And it is quite likely that the soldier who was given the keys is no longer alive to receive the thanks of the congregation. In a sense Dr King’s story of the travelling keys matters little. If those thrust into the hands of the serviceman were the keys of some secret store, this could have been opened (and perhaps was) by a locksmith when the danger had passed. If the keys were for the church itself, others had copies. But the careful and sensible actions of the unknown Canadian soldier and his military superiors were highly commendable.
What does matter is that by the foresight and bold ingenuity of the deacon Mr Dhont, a loyal servant of his church, the funds and treasures were preserved and survive for the satisfaction and admiration of both present and coming generations. And in the last resort the finest outcome surely resides in the flourishing congregation of English-speaking folk who continue to find fellowship and support within the walls of the ancient church of the Begijnhof in Amsterdam.
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