a story from a former resident of the machinist’s house

In mid-2020, we received a nice email from Eric Biesmeijer about his time in the machinist’s house and the Boiler House. His father was the machinist and the family lived in the adjoining house.

1952 – 1968

Engineer’s house, the smell of steam

On the early Sunday morning of February 1, 1953, just a few days 10 years old, only then do I really become aware that we had moved a few months earlier. From Piet Heinstraat 2 to the machinist’s house, Kanaalweg 2b. The canal looks very different this morning, this is not how I know it yet. The storm is howling. The waves are very large and moving very fast. An ominous atmosphere. In the course of the day, reports of the Watershed Disaster come out. The high waves in the canal must have been minuscule compared to those of the sea.

Why did the Biesmeijer family, with two sons, move? My father was already working in the Ketelhuis, but in 1952 Meilink retired and my father succeeded him. So the Ketelhuis is not new to me. I go there regularly, often on weekends when my father is on duty. Shoveling coal into the steam boilers, after all, the fire has to keep burning. Moreover, we come there every Saturday afternoon for the weekly wash, because in the Ketelhuis there is a large shower with a very large boiler, and the Piet Heinstraat 2 – without a shower – is a stone’s throw away from the Ketelhuis. At the pipe you go in through a set of stairs and then immediately on the right there is the shower.

The new house is a feast. Bigger with an attic and a nicer view – the Sebastiaan bridge was still there for a long time – a cellar for food and for the potatoes that a farmer from Strijen comes to replenish by the mud. And there is central heating, more than chic in those days. Besides, the Boiler House to me is part of the machinist’s house. At times, so is the whole neo-Gothic building of the Electrical Engineering Department. There are television sets from Philips for research and teaching. We see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II life with staff members, students and pros. The soccer games are more exciting. Unique to see for that time are the matches of the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland. Germany becomes Weltmeister by beating Hungary – with the legendary Puscás – 3-2, after first trailing 0-2. There is little enthusiasm about the German win.

Guus (Guustaaf) Biesmeijer (b. 1911) attended technical school. He then became an apprentice engineer with the Bataafsche Petroleummaatschappij. He regularly sailed between the Netherlands and India, but more so in the Far East itself: Sumatra, Singapore, Tokyo, Yokohama or Vladiwostok. He tells little or nothing about it. No stories of what it was like, in those times in those distant lands. Very occasionally he notes that the native crew members were treated disgracefully. In the early 1930s, sailing is over; the crisis means resignation. Through mediation, he becomes a machinist in the Boiler House. Civil service status, especially after the war, gives economic security which reassures him greatly. He is republican and sometimes anarchist, and he is athletic. His sport is volleyball which he plays until old age, then he is a wayward referee.

There are 4 steam boilers in the Boiler House, in front of each boiler is a mobile coal cart, about a cubic meter in size. These are supplied from the coal bunker behind the Ketelhuis. Oliemans, Delft’s coal merchant, visits regularly with a new load. In the last winter of the war, Broekman, the Electrical Engineering company engineer, arranges for coal to go – illegally – to the hospital on the Koornmarkt. The main function of the Boiler House is to heat the Electrical Engineering, Physics and Mining Engineering buildings. In addition – for educational purposes – the generation of electricity.

About four people run the Boiler House. Coal from the bunker into the coal cars, from the coal cars into the fire hallway. When the door opens, the red-and-yellow heat hits you in the face. The boiler room is cosy. It is always and everywhere nice and warm, it smells of coal, but above all there is the smell of steam. Especially when the steam pressure is a bit too high and steam is blown off.

The work is not always clean. My father wears overalls – he’s not ashamed of it – and he has calluses on his hands. You wash your hands with sand soap, which scrubs the dirt off well. When my father threw the coals in the fire, I think he was very tough. In winter, the days are long for him. Work starts at five-thirty. He does finish at two, but in the evening he still has to blow off steam.

In the summer, there is the annual maintenance. Parts of the boilers come apart or are replaced. Cleaning and painting are also part of it. And every year the boiler binkers come, real Brabanders from Breda who are difficult to understand. They scrape the metal walls of the boilers clean of corrosion. Dirty and hard work, they look like miners. They drink a lot of milk and coffee in the kitchen of the machinist’s house. Soccer, that’s what the conversation is about, not only the 1954 World Cup, but also whether NAC is better than DHC, or vice versa, of course.

During the summer, partly during regular working hours, there is also other maintenance at the Boiler House. All the family bikes and also friends’ bikes go completely apart and back together again, generously lubricated with oil and grease. We also make chairs, a copy of a Wim Rietveld chair. At a large workbench we bend rebar and there is someone in the building who welds the parts together. Later I make wooden Scandinavian furniture for myself. The Ketelhuis a creative workshop avant la lettre.

Time moves on. Coal disappears, oil replaces it. No longer the smell of coal, but the foul penetrance of fuel oil. Canal Street next to the Ketelhuis disappears and we see the Sebastian Bridge being built. Not such a sturdy bridge it turns out later. Through the Kanaalstraat Queen Elizabeth once drove on a state visit to the then world-famous hydrological lab. What a monument that woman, just survives a concrete bridge.

In 1976 Guus Biesmeijer retires and thus has to leave the machinist’s house. No new driver moves in. The house and the boiler house slowly but surely rotted away. Thanks to Vakwerk, however, the complex regains steam.

Eric Biesmeijer

June 2020

Around 1970 for Electrical Engineering, from left to right Guus Biesmeijer, Giel Langeveld, Johanna Biesmeijer-Langeveld and Clarence Biesmeijer, eldest son