Boerhaavelaan 6: A brief history of the building and the people who lived there
Boerhaavelaan 6, the new home of the Textile Research Centre.In early April, the Textile Research Centre (TRC) moved from its older address along the Hogewoerd in the centre of Leiden, into a new 'home'. It is an early-twentieth century urban villa just behind the main Leiden railway station (Fig. 1). The house, at Boerhaavelaan 6, was occupied by the same family for more than one hundred years.
The last resident, Mrs Hélène Nauta-Barge, lived there for her entire life until she died in 2023, aged 99. Since then it has become the property of the national Stichting Monumentenbezit, which now rents it out to the TRC upon the recommendation of Leiden City Council, The house has a fascinating background and reflects the rich, and sometimes turbulent history of Leiden.
At the TRC we are very fortunate to work in this beautiful building, and we are also very pleased with the help of the Nauta-Barge family when writing about the history of the building and its occupants. We especially want to thank Mrs Jolande Calkoen, a daughter of the late Mrs Nauta-Barge, for her assistance and personal recollections.
Fig. 2. The statue of Herman Boerhaave, unveiled in 1872 at the entrance to the Academic Hospital in Leiden. When the hospital was replaced after the First World War, the statue was replaced to the beginning of the Oegstgeesterlaan, opposite the new hospital. The Oegstgeesterlaan was renamed the Boerhaavelaan.Herman Boerhaave
The area where the house was built used to be part of the municipality of Oegstgeest until 1896, when it was added to Leiden. This explains the original name of the street, laid out in 1906, namely the Oegstgeesterlaan, which allegedly was given to the new street in recognition of the area's history.
The street received its current name in 1931, after a statue of Professor Herman Boerhaave, a famous eighteenth-century botanist and medical doctor at Leiden University, was placed at the beginning of the street, opposite the new academic hospital (which had opened in 1928). Previously, the statue had stood at the entrance to the former academic hospital (opened in 1873; Fig. 2), the same building which in 1937 opened its doors again as the Rijks Ethnografisch Museum, now known as the Wereldmuseum.
Photograph of Boerhaave's statue at the beginning of the Boerhaavelaan, ca. 1950.Early occupants
The villa at Boerhaavelaan 6 was designed around 1909 by the architect Willem Fontein (1864-1949) for Mr. P.J. van Hoeken, a wealthy timber merchant. However, his wife apparently did not like the house and its location.
They moved out, and in 1920 the property was purchased by the young Professor Joannes Antonius James (Ton) Barge (1884-1952), who the previous year had been appointed as Professor in Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University.
In the same year that he accepted his new position at Leiden University, he married Thérèse Antoinetta Maria (Trees) Dreesmann (1893-1991), daughter of Anton Dreesmann (1854-1934), the co-founder of the Vroom & Dreesmann chain of department stores (V&D). Shortly after buying the property he commissioned the architect Hendrik Jesse (1860-1943) to considerably enlarge the house (Fig. 3). This work was completed in 1926.
Fig. 3. The house being expanded, 1926.The house
Mrs Calkoen, a grand-daughter of Ton Barge and Trees Dreesmann and a daughter of Mrs Hélène Nauta-Barge, the last member of the Barge family to live in the house, told us that before the war the interior of the house at Boerhaavelaan 6 was very classic, featuring many antiques and presenting a distinguished appearance.
The house was well-organised and spaciously laid out. At that time, the kitchen and utility room were the domain of the kitchen maid and chambermaid. Until the 1950s, a central bell board indicated in which room a bell had been rung. In the post-war period however, things changed, the number of people living in the house increased andq the kitchen increasingly became the centre of family life.
The housed still has a large garden, and at the back there still is a garden pavilion (Fig. 4). This charming little, wooden construction originates from Amsterdam, where it stood until about 1900 on a bridge across the Singel, between de Leidsestraat and Heiligeweg (near the Koningsplein). The owners sold waffles under the canopy and slept in the tiny attic. When the bridge was widened, the pavilion was taken down and it ended up with Anton Dreesmann at his villa ('Looverhof') in Bussum. After the war it was moved to Leiden where it still stands.
Fig. 4. The garden pavilion, originally from Amsterdam, now in the garden of Boerhaavelaan 6.Life at Boerhaavelaan 6
Prof. Ton Barge (Fig. 5), according to his granddaughter Jolande, was an amiable and remarkable man. With four of his university friends, he founded a walking club, ‘de Beentjes’, which met each week. Actually, the club is still active. Ton was successful in his field and also socially active at university, the Catholic church, and in politics. He served as the Rector Magnificus (Chancellor) of Leiden University (1937-1938) and as a member of Parliament. The couple had four children: Suus, Jim, Hélène, and Fred.
He was an outspoken opponent of the racial theories of the German Nazis who occupied The Netherlands in 1940-1945, and he did not hide his views, and he did so openly during a lecture on 26 November 1940. A plaque to the right of the front door of Boerhaave 6 (Fig. 6) commemorates his speech.
Similar plaques were placed elsewhere in Leiden to mark two comparable lectures read at the same day, namely by Prof. Rudolph Cleveringa (1894-1980), who lived nearby, at Rijnsburgerweg 29, and by Prof. Lambertus van Holk (1893-1982; Plantage 26). All three were subsequently arrested by the German authorities. Prof. Barge was kept as a hostage in Sint Michelsgestel, Noord-Brabant, for six months. but he and the two other Leiden professors survived the war.
Fig. 5. Prof. Joannes Antonius James (Ton) Barge (1884-1952).Prof. Barge's house along the Boerhaavelaan was confiscated by the German authorities and in 1943-1944 it served as the Ortskommandantur of the German Wehrmacht. They also confiscated the house next door (Boerhaavelaan 4). The rooms in Boerhaavelaan 6 were numbered (the numbers survive) and the Germans built an airraid shelter.
The cellar sometimes served as a prison. It was only after 45 years that Pieter R. from Leiden came to tell about his experiences during the war as a 16-year old. He had been imprisoned in the cellar. For all those years he did not dare to walk down the street and look at the house. Afterwards, Pieter would occasionally visit the family for a coffee at the coffee table in the kitchen.
But the new German residents perhaps had no idea of the link that the house and the Barge family had with Dutch resistance. Barge's house still has a small hiding room on the second floor. Several people could be accommodated there behind the bed, where Hélène would pretend to have diphtheria.
After the war
After the Second World War, in 1949, Hélène married Jan Nauta (1922-2013), who trained as a heart surgeon in Leiden and subsequently became co-founder of the medical faculty and the Thorax Centre in Rotterdam. During the Second World War, Jan had been active in the resistance. He was betrayed and ended up in a German concentration camp.
Hélène also held her own during that period. She once brought an Allied pilot to safety on her bicycle after an emergency landing near Leimuiden, close to Leiden. Jan and Hélène met after the war when the NBBS (the travel agency for students) was re-established in Leiden and they were both working there. Hélène and Jan had five children. Sadly, one daughter died very young, aged of 23.
Fig. 6. The plaque attached next to the front door, commemorating Prof. Barte's protest speech, 26 November 1940.After the war, the house was returned to the family, and Prof. Barge also returned to Leiden. Fascinating is the film *Zes Jaren* (see Youtube) released in 1946 as a tribute to student resistance in Leiden against the German occupation. The name of Hélène Barge appears in the credits. In the same film, it so happens, we also see a chair (or one of the two identical chairs), placed inside the house, which was used by Winston Churchill on 10 May 1946 when he received an honorary doctorate in Leiden. This chair was borrowed from among the furniture of Boerhaave 6. Two identical chairs, with beautiful embroidery, still form part of the house's furniture.
The Nauta-Barges
After the war and due to a housing shortage, the house became very crowded. Besides the parents—Ton and Trees—there was the still unmarried Fred and the growing families of Jim and Hélène. The fourth child, Suus, soon moved out. Ton Barge passed away in 1952, and his widow, Thérèse, moved out in 1956. She was a spirited woman who had always been active as a volunteer helping the poor and the blind. After her husband's death she left for Tanzania for a year, where she worked as a nurse under challenging conditions.
Jan NautaThe rooms in the house acquired ever-different purposes and occupants. For instance, the large en-suite room on the first floor was split into two bedrooms. On the ground floor, the en-suite space has always been divided into a sitting room at the front and a dining room with a conservatory at the rear. The sitting room was used for receptions and festivities, such as Sinterklaas evenings. In the dining room stood an imposing cabinet with Chinese porcelain. Before the war, dinners were held there with white tablecloths, lots of silver, and table service. Later, space was created for table tennis and a TV corner. After Barge's death in 1952, his study at the back of the ground floor first became a family room for the Nautas and later the study for Jan Nauta.
The room next to the front door served for a time as a bedroom for grandmother Thérèse, featuring a life-sized painting of the Virgin Mary with Child. Later it became a ‘playroom’, sewing room, junk room, and medical library. This space was eventually used for many years by Jan Nauta, by then a grandfather and retired, as a workspace for the family archive that he kept at the very top of the house.
Hélène always gave a lot of attention to the back garden, with its flower borders all around the large lawn. There was the garden pavilion, but also two gas lanterns that came from along the Rapenburg canal in the centre of Leiden The sunken central section of the garden was once an ideal ice rink for the children (alhough not so very good for the grass). In later years, Hélène would feed the seagulls in the garden. She rfeally liked them, and they liked her. Eventually, all those seagulls would nest on the roof. The resulting disturbance (and filth) in the adjoining street was full-page news in the NRC, but although the journalist lived across the street, he never fopund out why the gulls were so much attracted to the area.
Jolande Calkoen, Hélène's daughter, adds: Ultimately, the house was intensively inhabited by the Nautas for over 70 years, ever since they got married in 1949. Because of the many memories—including, for example, ice skating in the garden, romantic dinners in the garden pavilion, and the many Sinterklaas evenings—saying goodbye was not easy for the four ‘children’ and twelve grandchildren of the Nautas. They searched for a long time for a dedicated new owner with an eye for the historical character of the property. The combination of Stichting Monumentenbezit and the TRC fully met that wish.
The move to Boerhaavelaan 6 is nearly finished, just a few more weeks and all the rebuilding, painting, furnishing, packing and putting away of boxes will be over! A great relief to all.
