A sandwich monkey story or is it really true? Did Queen Wilhelmina forget her fur coat during one of her visits to Drenthe and did it come into the possession of super collector Jan Brands in Nieuw-Dordrecht years later? We will probably never find out because everyone involved is most likely no longer alive. But it is a nice story.
Manager Evelien Wieling of Museum Collection Brands can tell it with taste in the old living room of Jan Brands, which is now part of the museum. “The fur coat always hung here in the stairwell. When Jans received a visit, they were often asked: it was certainly your mother’s. To which Jans reacted, shaking his head and fiercely: no, workers do not wear fur. That fur coat belonged to King Wilhelmina.”
“We can no longer ask Jans how he got the alleged coat from Wilhelmina. But his story was always that the then queen left it in a catering establishment during a visit to Southeast Drenthe and a worker took it with him.” explains Wieling.
Wilhelmina has been to Drenthe several times, but the most likely year that she would have forgotten her coat is 1921. Wilhelmina visited the degrading conditions under which peat workers’ families lived. Peat workers were never well off, but after the First World War, when coal became available again and peat was finally expelled as fuel, most became unemployed.
Families lived in appalling conditions, in poor hygiene and without a future for their children. After Wilhelmina’s visit, help started and Queen’s Commissioner Linthorst-Homan started a social aid program that would later lead to Opbouw Drenthe. Community centers were set up in Southeast Drenthe where there was childcare, girls learned to cook and where you could learn something about hygiene. Wieling: “A newspaper from 1921 states that Wilhelmina took off her fur coat in a catering facility. But whether she forgot him there…?”