Chapter Board

During the annual meeting of the Chapter in Zutphen,
 September  2007
 the Board was constituted as follows:

Chairman -- Robert-Jan van der Lugt
Vice-chairman -- Ane Stam
Secretary -- Eilert de Jong
Treasurer -- Jan ter Vrugt
Member-cum-webmaster-- Herman van Wersch

News Items

2012 Reunion

Middelburg

August 30 - September 1, 2012

The thirteenth annual reunion of the Dutch chapter will take place in the capital of the province of Zeeland in the southwestern part of the Netherlands.  We will stay at the modern Van der Valk hotel.  The program will include an exploration of the city and its historic abbey, followed by a visit to the Roosevelt Institute.  In the evening we will enjoy a pub meal in the center of town.  The next day we will explore Zeeland by boat and bus, focusing on its historic past as a seafaring province of the Netherlands and the continuing battle against storms and floods.  Keep an eye out for further information on this site or in the 1818 Society's Bulletin.  In the meantime you may contact jtervrugt@planet.nl or rj@laovan.demon.nl
 

Dates of future reunions

At its last meeting in Harderwijk, the chapter decided that future reunions would be held in the first weekend of September.  Normally they will start on the Thursday preceding the first weekend of September and end on the following Saturday.  Please note that the first weekend starts on a Saturday September 1; therefore Sunday September 1 is not on the first weekend.

Hence reunions in the future will be as follows:

2012:  August 30 - September 1

2013:  September 5 - 7

2014:  September 4 - 6

2015:  September 3 - 5

Harderwijk  Reunion 2011

The 2011 reunion was held in the historical harbor town of Harderwijk, September 8-10. Fifty people signed up this year, which is a record.

It's always a gamble with the weather when you organize an event in Holland, especially when it includes outdoor activities. Looking back, we can conclude that overall we were pretty lucky. Only when participants trickled in during the day on Thursday, Sept. 8, did we have a few sprinkles. By the time we were heading out for dinner that night it was dry.

Despite the rain on Thursday, many of those who arrived early enough made use of a "menu of options" for spending their time in Harderwijk. These ranged from eating eel at a well-known eel smokery, to attending a dolphin show at Dolfinarium and a visit of the small but interesting City Museum which relates the history of Harderwijk as an old trading center (member of the Hanseatic trading league of Northern European cities in the middle ages), as a fishing town, a university town and as a military center.  A small group made it to the old fortified city of Elburg, which is not too far from Harderwijk.

During Happy Hour at the hotel, participants were encouraged to share stories and anecdotes about their work in the Bank and their lives after retirement. These were not only interesting but often amusing, such that 1818 Society president, Shiva Shivakumar - whom we were fortunate to welcome again this year as a reunion participant - suggested that some of these be put on the 1818 web site which includes a section for this purpose.

After Happy Hour, people gathered in smaller groups to go out for dinner at one of the nearby restaurants on which we had done some reconnaissance beforehand. The most popular one turned out to be an Italian restaurant at the old Fish Market. These folks were a little overwhelmed when 22 of us descended on them. However, while waiting for our tables, we drank good Italian wine to pass the time. It was well worth it, as we enjoyed the dinner they served us.

Fortunately, on Friday morning it was not raining. After a good night's rest and breakfast in our pleasant hotel in the old center of Harderwijk, next to the "great church," three experienced city guides took us to various historical sites. These included the medieval city wall and its two remaining town gates; and several pictoresk squares. We ended our stroll at noon in the Catharina Chapel with its beautiful Gothic stained glass windows. It was formerly part of a monastery (there were five monasteries in the small town of Harderwijk, before the Reformation!). In the 1648, the Chapel became part of Harderwijk university and served as a lecture hall including the defense of PhD theses. (It is now used for meetings and weddings.) 

We had been able to engage an expert on Linnaeus - the famous Swedish botanist - who gave an interesting presentation right in the Chapel. We learned that Linnaeus actually spent only 6 days at the university of Harderwijk, just enough time to defend his dissertation (written in Latin, the lingua franca at the time), which, it turns out, had nothing to do with botany but was about "intermittent fever." Thus, Linnaeus became a "doctor of medicine" in the Netherlands, in 1735.

Napoleon, when Holland was under French rule in the early 1800s, shut down Harderwijk university in 1812. Napoleon's judgment was that Holland already had too many universities.

Later in the afternoon, after a 10-minute walk to the harbor of Harderwijk, we boarded m/s Isis. The next four hours, we had a smooth sail on two lakes - connected by an aquaduct. These lakes were created in the 1950s and 60s, when Dutch civil engineers managed a large-scale project to reclaim land from the former Southern Sea and created two polders. People now living in these polders on the former bottom of the sea, dwell at about 3m below sea level.

As behooves descendents of sailors which most of us are - or claim to be - there was plenty to drink on board. Equally important, we were served an excellent buffet-style dinner while the captain informed us from time to time over the ship's sound system, about the sights we passed. A cup of coffee just before we disembarked at 9pm, enabled our happy group to walk safely back to the hotel. For many the evening was not over until much later.....

On Saturday morning, the Chapter held its annual meeting under the chairmanship of Robert-Jan van der Lugt. Among the topics we discussed were developments at the Bank (we listened with great interest to Shiva's presentation) and pension plan issues. It was decided to leave it to the 1818 Society in Washington to inventory the various concerns and develop a broadly based response to Bank management. Other topics included Dutch taxation policy re Bank pensions; medical insurance, as well as more mundane subjects. For example, we decided where the 2012 reunion will be held and at what dates (see above). A consensus emerged quickly: to avoid in future the situation of simultaneous Dutch and German-speakers reunions, we would advance ours by one week, i.e., the first weekend in September (in lieu of the second). Among the participants, there was little interest in larger-scale reunions (a la Bruges), primarily because of the organizational challenges it would involve.

The reunion closed after a very nice luncheon at the hotel, around 2pm. From the feedback received, we may conclude that everyone had a wonderful time - including several newcomers we had been pleased to welcome at this year's event. It sounded like everyone was planning on coming to Middelburg in 2012.....

Henk Groen (hggroen@aol.com)

Slideshow

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          Past Reunions

2011     Harderwijk
2010     Den Haag
2009     Noordwijk
2008     Rhenen-Wageningen
2007     Zutphen
2006     Rotterdam
2005     Vaals
2004    Groningen
2003     Den Bosch
2002     Zwolle
2001     Nijmegen
2000     Brugge (Millennium Event)
1999     Noordwijk