Kebumen, past and present

The Mexolie factory in 1933/4

In 1933 Kebumen was a small kampong in the south of Java. My parents came to live and work there at the age of 29 (Oscar) and 26 yrs (Nelly). It will not have been easy for a swiss girl who didn't speak dutch nor malaysian, to adapt to colonial Netherlands-Indies and to Asian people she had never met. But, from the letters she writes to her parents (see Blog posthume), the newlyweds were full of energy, enthusiasm and hope for their new life together.

They drew for their parents and friends the map below. Indicated with numbers are:their house (1), houses of director and other staff (2-4, 9), station (7), tennis court (8), central park (alun alun, 29), mosque (27), palace of the Prince (26), prison (31), hospital (14), ice factory (16), a Japanese shop (18) and a Chinese shop (19), market (pasar, 21), post office (23), hotel Juliana (24), and the Mexolie factory (6, 10).

 

  

Map of Kebumen, drawn by my parents in April 1934. As indicated by the compass, North points downward.

Immediately after their arrival my father started to work in the Mexolie factory close to their house. He had to do administrations but, knowing some chemistry,he was also involved in checking the quality of the oil and in producing by-products.

  

Notebook with protocols (e.g. for saponification of butyl alcohol) and a drawing of a reducing valve.  How did this little booklet (10x16 cm) survive the Japanese camps?  We will never know....

Batak intermezzo

My aunt Vivian Woldringh-Coster (born 11 December 1927 in Bandung) lived until about her fifth year in Parapat and later in Tarutung near lake Toba in Sumatra. A year ago she told me what she remembered while showing me an album with photographs. When I showed these pictures to Julia Tampubolon, who was born and raised there, she could recognize most of the locations!

Pictures from the album of Vivian Woldringh-Coster. Left: Vivian (~4 yrs) with a governess from Suriname. Right a kampong near Banuarea; the tree could be from the Durian.

On September 3, 2015, I went with Hilbert van der Meer and his visitor, Julia Tampubolon, to the University Library of Leiden. Julia was looking for the book of a german missionary, Friedrich Eigenbrod. He wrote a story about the conversion to christianity of her great-grandfather, Sarbut Tampubolon; however the story was written in or had been translated to the "Batak-Toba" language. So, Julia had to tell us what Eigenbrod had been writing about.

The book about Sarbut Tampubolon, written by F. Eigenbrod in Batak language, found in the University Library Leiden.

She told us that the book described how the father of her great-grandfather, Guru Sumillam Tampubolon, had dreamed about his newborn son: that he would become someone to be respected and well-known with great influence towards other people because he would have charisma and power. So Sarbut became spoiled by his proud father in his very early age, even as a gambler and when he made “trouble”. Later, Sarbut became a leader, fighting with his Aceh comrades against the Dutch, burning churches  and  dutch army posts in the area of Toba. He was exiled to Padang and Aceh by the Dutch. He had to go into hiding in a cave on the shore of lake Toba. He fought together with Sisingamangaraja against the Dutch

{From Wikipedia: "Sisingamangaraja XII (1849 – 17 June 1907; "raja" means king), was the last priest-king of the Batak peoples of north Sumatra. In the course of fighting a lengthy guerrilla war against the Dutch colonisation of Sumatra from 1878 onwards, he was killed in a skirmish with Dutch troops in 1907. He was declared a National Hero of Indonesia in 1961 for his resistance to Dutch colonialism."}

During his wanderings Sarbut met the famous Lutheran missionary Ludwig Ingwer Nommensen, who "adopted him as a son".

Sarbut died on 11 September 1905; he had a son named Pamilang Tampubolon; his son was Guru Tiodorus Tampubolon, who married Lena Sitinjak. They had four sons and four daughters, of whom Julia is the youngest. They represent the 17th generation of the Tampubolon family.

Julia was born in a village called Harianboho on the western shore of lake Toba.

Houses and rice fields (2012) near Harianboho, the birth place of Julia Tampubolon.

Modern Kebumen

Kebumen is now a town with more than 1 million inhabitants. I found a web site about modern Kebumen and Julis helped me to translate it.

Left: Ravie Ananda's web site: http://kebumen2013.com/pdf-materi-sejarah-singkat-pmk-sarinabati-panjer-kebumen/. Right: Julia Tampubolon, helping me with the translation of the web site of Ravie Ananda, written in Bahasa Indonesia.

Photographs of the Copra factory in Kebumen (1860-1930) from the Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam. Many of these prints were also in my father's archive. Web site Ravie Ananda: http://kebumen2013.com/foto-pabrik-mexolie-kebumen/

On his web site Ravie Ananda describes how the Copra-factory in Kebumen developed from ~1860 to the 1920s. In the 1930s there were 3 classes of houses for those who worked in the factory. The houses were built in a classic european style. For the core staff they were located west of the factory. For ordinary employees 25 units were built, each containing a well. There were also public lavatories with wells. For covering the roofs, tiles were made with tile-press machines imported from Germany. Besides these houses many other buildings have been built as indicated on hand-drawn map of my parents.

Left: With the help of a picture of 1933, we found the house of my parents when we visited Kebumen in 2000. It had become a military post. Right: The buildings, the drying fields for the copra and the electricity poles have not changed much....

From 1961 to 1972 the production of copra-oil increased again, giving more work to local people. The factory also produced ice blocks. However, in 1986 the Mexolie (now called "Sari Nabati", meaning pollen oil) went bankrupt. Machines, steel frames and lorries were removed and sold. The factory was used for the storage of, for instance, sugar products. It was neglected for about 25 years.

In the past years, reconstruction plans are being carried out for the development of the factory area. There are plans to make an amusement park, but also a library and a museum, a recreation place for children, a sports center, swimming pool and a hotel. On the picture below a section of the drawing from 1934 is being compared with a section of the GoogleEarth map of April 11, 2013 from Kebumen as posted by Ravie Ananda. The green area belongs to a military post, the red area to the former Mexolie/Sarinabati factory.

Comparison of the drawing of 1934 with the map from GoogleEarth, slightly tilted to a similar position. The North now points upward.

When all the building plans become realized, it remains to be seen what will remain of the old buildings and houses of the Mexolie/Sarinabati factory. According to some people these buildings can be considered to represent the historical and cultural heritage of modern Kebumen.

New buildings (a hotel?) are being constructed at the factory site.

This picture was taken in April 2015, when Channoch M. visited the town where he was born in 1940.

"Oh...Keboemen"

When clearing up my mother's belongings after her death (1984) in Switzerland, my fatherfound her camp diary and letters in a wooden box. This led him to document their experiences during and after the Japanese camps in the dutch colony from 1942 to 1946.

Father, Oscar, transcribing my mother's diary and letters from the camp, found in the wooden box; 1984.

But who was my father, who broke up his study of civil engineering in Delft to study the chemistry of oil and soap in Groningen and Berlin and who brought his Swiss wife in 1933 to Keboemen in the Dutch East Indies? Was he longing for the land of his childhood or was he sent by his rich father, director general of the "Nederlands-Indische Handelsbank" (NIHB) in Amsterdam?

Thirty years later (2013), my Swiss cousin, Catherine Marchand, transcribed the letters sent by my mother to her parents in Switzerland, as described in my previous blog, written in dutch: http://woldringh-naarden.blogspot.nl/2015/07/op-reis-naar-wo-ii.html

The weekly letters of my mother are written in french. The "Blog posthume" starts with a letter written on November 14th, 1932 from Laren (Holland) describing how she had to convince one of the directors (G.A.Dunlop) to let them go together to the Netherlands-Indies:

http://java1933.blogspot.nl/2015/06/larenhollande-14-novembre-1932-comment.html

In October 1933 they settle in their house in Keboemen:

http://java1933.blogspot.nl/2015/07/15-octobre-1933-keboemenkebumen-hotel.html

On December 11th, 1933 she writes to her father in Switzerland: "The next day Mr and Mrs Röhwer absolutely wanted to lead us to a large underground cave, a curiosity in the country. So starting at 7 am in the morning, we visited the cave and had breakfast at 9 am. Then, on the way back, we went to the coast. My dear! such a spectacle, no, I could not believe my eyes and could not realize that it was me who had the chance to see such a sight, coming from fairy tales. Heat at least 45°C, true, but what does that matter. First we walked through rice fields separated by bamboo forests, Papali, bamboo forests, so beautiful, so beautiful, then sand dunes from where we saw the sea at our feet.

Blue sea, blue sky, in the horizon mountains in a purple haze, almost out of sight a grey sand bank on which tidal waves of 2 meters high come to die, making clouds of white foam while flowing back. The tidal waves are very strong on the south coast and do not allow swimming. Throughout this landscape were natives fishing for crabs, shrimps and women with large, brightly colored jars for making salt. Oscar took pictures, but they are not yet ready."

Father's photograph of the south coast of Java.

On December 15th, 1933 she writes to her mother that for the first time she felt homesickness: "...a longing for the cold, the rain, the snow, the wet streets shining in the glow of street lamps, the shops in town decorated and illuminated. But it only lasted a short moment...."

Note: "Oh...Keboemen" refers to a sighing of my mother when she remembered the first happy years in the Netherlands-Indies.

The copra factory "Mexolie"

Copra is the dried meat of the coconut harvested from the coconut palm. These trees were in every kampong; the coconuts were collected and transported (by the Chineses) to the factory, where they were first split and dried before pressing out and extracting the oil.

The drying field of the Mexolie factory in Keboemen in 1933.

In the 1910's and1920's there were many oil factories combined into the "OFI" (N.V. Oliefabrieken Insulinde in Nederlands-Indië). In that period dr. Albert Jan Kluyver spent several years (1916-1919) on Java as scientific consultant; later he became head of the laboratory of OFI in Bandung. He then heavily critisized the manifacturing of by-products. (Back in Holland Kluyver became the 3rd professor - after Beijerinck and G. van Iterson - of the "Delft School of Microbiology", and famous for his contention about the "unity in biochemistry". During the war Kluyver offered a job to Mrs. Woutera van Iterson in Delft. She met there Jan B. le Poole, who had just built the first electron microscope in the Netherlands, the "EM100". Later, in 1952, she became head of the Laboratory of Electron Microscopy) at the University of Amsterdam, where she was my promotor in 1974.)

Cover of a book by dr. R.N.J. Kamerling, a study describing the decline of the "OFI".

On the level of management, the OFI was critisized in 1918 by a principal agent of the NIHB ("Nederlands-Indische Handelsbank) in Batavia, Conradus Woldringh (my grandfather). He warned that the administrators of OFI were incompetent and too autocratic (p.74 of the book of R.N.J. Kamerling about the OFI; T. Wever bv, Francker, 1982). Although the directors in Amsterdam were annoyed and told him to mind his own business, it appeared that he was right: In 1923 the OFI had to be liquidated which resulted in the foundation by the NIHB of "Mexolie" (Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Oliefabrieken). Conradus Woldringh went to Amsterdam where he became director from 1921 to 1935 (documented in the book of W.L. Korthals Altes, "Tussen cultures en kredieten", Amsterdam 2004). But he must have known how difficult the future of Mexolie in the dutch colony would be. Why then did he allow his eldest son, my father, to go to the factory in Keboemen? And what became of the factory in present-day Kebumen?