Protection saves Dutch windmills

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33675, 26 October 1974, Page 12

Protection saves Dutch windmills

(By

DAVID GUNSTON)

I once had a Dutch lady-friend who had long settled in England. She had a man-sized revolving windmill standing in her front garden, a beautifullydetailed wooden working model of one in her living-room, and several smaller ones dotted about her house on mantelpieces and shelves and tables. She said that in an alien country they reminded her of home. Certainly windmills are an important element in the unique Dutch landscape with its green polders, sturdy dykes, wide horizons, glittering waters and big white clouds floating overhead. They have always played a great part in the life of the Dutch people, too, planted foursquare on the flat earth, sober, simple, realistic in purpose. In fact, windmills have for so long come to symbolise the Netherlands that it comes as something of a shock to realise that they are by no means what they were. For out of the 10,000 or so windmills that once dotted the country — in the eighteenth century — the latest official count gives only about 955 remaining today. Of these, only some 3QP are still in use — and then not regularly. 900 working In the Dutch countryside today one still seems to see quite a lot of well-pre-served mills, but then comes the realisation of what the landscape must once have looked like. In the Zaan district alone, north of Amsterdam, 900 windmills were working day and night not only

keeping the soil' drained but powering all the industries of those days, forerunners of the big food plants, paper works and saw-mills yards there today. The much photographed scene on the road from Rotterdam to Gorinchem, where a group of sixteen to eighteenth-century windmills are still in full working order, must have been commonplace all over the country. Every city also had its fortification ramparts studded with mills. The trouble was that when steam power became general for water pumping, milling and sawing in the early years of the last century, the old-fashioned windmill was not merely doomed, but considered an outdated nuisance. As time went on, owners who did not replace their windmills by mechanical pumping stations were considered to be out of touch with reality. Preservationists The fact that we see any windmills at ail in the Netherlands today is due solely to the ceaseless efforts of a small group of preservationists, who from about 1920 on have taken the initiative in fighting against their neglect or destruction. These enthusiasts formed themselves into the Dutch Windmill Society, and after years of effort and campaigning they have succeeded in impressing on their ever-realistic countrymen the value — aesthetic, cultural, technical — of preserving the Netherlands surviving legacy of mills. It has been an uphill struggle, but today’s array of 900-odd preserved specimens bear handsome testimony to the campaign, and the Dutch national symbol remains for everyone to enjoy.