SHOW NOTES

This episode took Pete and Ryan to the Netherlands, is a country found in Northwestern Europe and is one of the countries that make up the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the others being Aruba, Curaçao, the Netherlands, and Sint Maarten.
Start here in London all you need to do is go about 300km, 168 miles East and you’re there, although you will have to cross the channel, so bring a swimsuit if that’s the route you’re choosing. It has Germany to the East and Belgium to the South
The Netherlands is 41,543 square kilometres, which is 7.5% the size of a France, or you’d need 13 Netherlands’ to make a France.
Geographically it is flat and it is low, nether-lands means low country and as much as 20% of the Netherlands has been reclaimed from the sea. This is a practice that started as early as the 14th century – so not as modern as you’d think.
And this history of reclamation in turn it explains another classic Netherlands icon – the windmill. This is because it was windmills that provided the power for pumping the sea water out from the reclaimed areas.
The flag is red, white and blue in horizontal bands from top to bottom.
What’s interesting about this is that it doesn’t feature the colour most often associated with the Netherlands. Orange is kind of the national colour – national sports teams wear it and if you’re ever in the country on Kings Day, usually 27th April, you’ll see everyone out partying and it’s a sea of orange.
This liking for orange comes from the Dutch royal family, starting in 1544 with William of Orange, Orange being a principality in France. However, from that time, the colour orange became a symbol of the Dutch Royal family and consequently of the country itself.
The National anthem is a rather lovely one and I think it sounds like a beautiful Christmas carol. Wilhelmus van Nassouwe, commonly known just as "Wilhelmus”.
It is considered the oldest national anthem still in use today if we’re talking about both music and lyrics, and it dates back to at least 1572.
That said it was only recognised as the national anthem in 1932.
In full it has fifteen stanzas and would take about 15 minutes to get through, so at events where we don’t have that kind of time, they sing the first or sometimes first and sixth stanzas.
Unusually it’s sung in the first person, from the point of view of William of Orange – it’s that man again.
Which itself gives rise to a peculiarity of the Dutch anthem, because when singing the dutch national anthem you also sing, “To the king of Spain I've granted, A lifelong loyalty”.
So when singing the Dutch National anthem, you kind of pledge our loyalty to Spain at the same time. But of course you don’t really, because you’re not William of Orange, and you probably didn’t win any great battles either.
Netherlands facts
The Dutch are on average the tallest people in the world and they have been since 1958.
In 2020 the average height of a Dutch man was 182.5cm which is just slightly shy of six feet, with the women clocking in at 168.7cm or just over 5 feet six inches.
And yet their men’s basketball team is ranked by the International Basketball Federation at number 53 in the world, so I’m not sure quite what’s gone wrong there.
Netherlands is famous for a flower - tulips – but they are not originally from the Netherlands. It was imported from Türkiye in the 16th century but it has since then been key to Dutch identity including the 1630s, when tulip mania gripped the Netherlands, and prices rose until bulbs cost a fortune in what is today often cited as an example of a market bubble.
And on the flip side, in terms of real value, you can also eat tulips. During the winter of 1944 when people were starving, they ate tulip bulbs to survive.
It’s still a thriving business today, in 2021, the value of the tulip bulb export was over 250 million euros.
Going back to the subject of orange, the Dutch are the reason carrots today are orange.
It’s believed that a reliably orange carrot was first developed and named the "Long Orange" by Dutch growers in the early 1700s. Some say it was in honour of William of Orange, some say it was an homage to the dutch flag at that time, and others say orange is just a nicer colour for carrots.
But whatever the reason, you can thank your Dutch friends for the orange carrot.
HISTORY
Okay, so we start our history of the Netherlands around 250,000 years ago.

In this Paleolithic world, early man survives by wandering up and down various rivers and coastlines, hunting woolly mammoths, and doing his best to avoid being eaten by Hyenas, Lions and Bears.
Time passes, and after the ice age (around 12,000 years ago), a tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Swifterbant, move north from the frozen tundra of Scandinavia into the frozen tundra of The Netherlands, surviving long enough on the pockets of plants and wild animals to settle down and start farming pigs and making lovely pottery.

By the Bronze Age, we find descendants of the Swifterband trading food, textiles and amber with other local cultures, like the Celts and some Germanic tribes some of which take a fancy to the area and decide to move there permanently – setting themselves up with farms of their own and developing new and distinct cultures.

The Romans arrive around 57 BCE and declare the area part of the Roman Empire, they build roads, forts and towns, and also recruit some of the local warriors to be soldiers in their army.

500 years later, with the Roman Empire gone, new kingdoms emerge, most notably The Franks, a Germanic tribe, who take control for a couple hundred years expanding commerce and trade, introducing laws and administration, and generously spreading Christianity throughout the region.

Powerful medieval cities emerge like Utrecht and Amsterdam, built on money brought in from trade with countries around the Baltic and North Seas.

That money starts to accumulate and the power this brings inevitably catches the attention of several powerful nobles who tussle with each other over who should be in charge.

The winners of this tussle being the Dukes of Burgundy, who in the 15th century take control for about a hundred years until Charles V, the ruler of the Spanish Habsburg Empire, wrestles control for himself.

He’s not a popular Emperor though, introducing taxes and persecuting anyone who doesn’t follow his religion, and so tensions escalate to the point where a fight for independence kicks off in 1568.

The rebels are led by William of Orange who starts a brutal and bloody revolt that lasts for eighty years and sees the deaths of around 100,000 people.

The war ends in 1648 with the Spanish being kicked out and a new Republic taking their place.

Things improve, and The Netherlands enter into what will later be known as their Golden Age - a time when the Dutch East India Company dominates the world in their search for spices, artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer slap some paint on canvasses, the first stock exchange opens, the first pendulum clock is invented, as is the first fire hose, and the first submarine.. it’s time when the first artificial island was built, and of course, the first recorded dissection of a great white shark.

But the good times don’t last forever, and by the 1700s, European power dynamics shift such that England and France become the major players on the global stage, the French Revolutionary Wars leads to the establishment of a Batavian Republic in 1795, and later the French Empire takes over under the leadership of one Monsieur Bonaparte.

But his reign doesn’t last very long, because twenty years later, Napoleon is defeated, and the Congress of Vienna decides to join north and south regions together to create the ‘United Kingdom of the Netherlands’.

King William I becomes the first constitutional monarch, and under his leadership things start to improve again with the country once again expanding its reach into the heart of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, where colonies and plantations are established built on the backs of slaves.

That brings us to the 20th century, where The Netherlands sits out the first world war by declaring themselves neutral, something they were unable to do during world world two, when the Nazis occupy the country and decimate their Jewish population – including, a little Jewish girl called Anne Frank who wrote in a diary about her traumatic experiences hiding in the attic of her family home.

Post-war, The Netherlands becomes a founding member of several international organisations, including the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union.

They close down many of their overseas colonies, and focus on international diplomacy instead, building the International Court of Justice, known as Den Haag or The Hague, after the Dutch town it’s located in, called Hague.

Over the last few decades, The Netherlands have become one of the more progressive nations in the world, being the first country to legalise same sex marriage, regulating sex work, having a humanitarian approach to asylum seekers, introducing assisted-suicide laws, and legalising cannabis.

And today, that is perhaps how The Netherlands is best known, as a cool and trendy country with a modern, relaxed attitude, and a high standard of living.

It’s a place I’ve visited a few times, and always look forward to returning

Statues in the 2nd Millennium
This next story is about how a statue can come to symbolise things quite different to those intended when it was put up.
In the city of Amsterdam there is a square called Het Spui, a lovely little square surrounded by bookshops. And in this square is a statue of a skinny little boy about ten years old with his hands on his hips.
He is Lieverdje which means Sweetie or little darling, something similar. He was created to represent the street kids of Amsterdam allegedly mischievous but with a heart of gold.
The statue was made by sculptor Carel Kneulman and was unveiled in 1959.
As it happens the commission for this cute cheeky chappie was sponsored by a cigarette company, the Hunter Cigarette company.
This fact got the attention of Robert Jasper Grootveld, an artist, magician and anti-smoking activist.
He seized on the idea of the little boy of the sculpture symbolising the addicted consumer of the future and in 1964 he started having ‘happenings’ (because let’s remember this was the swinging sixties so protest was real groovy man) by the statue. He’d dance around the statue chanting nonsense incantations and generally creating a spectacle.
And Grootveld’s charm inspired a few people because people started showing up to the weekly show, and joining in and the whole affair turned into an unofficial youth movement.
In 1965 it became an official movement, or at least a movement with a name, when Grootveld formed Provo, a Dutch anarchist counterculture youth movement intent on changing Dutch society,
And who was part of this thing – well their first magazine declared it was for:
“ anarchists, provos, beatniks, pleiners, scissors-grinders, jailbirds, simple simon stylites, magicians, pacifists, potato-chip chaps, charlatans, philosophers, germ-carriers, grand masters of the queen's horse, happeners, vegetarians, syndicalists, santy clauses, kindergarten teachers, agitators, pyromaniacs, assistant assistants, scratchers and syphilitics, secret police, and other riff-raff.”
This riff raff would get together and have their meetings and happenings at the feet of the statue of the Amsterdam street urchin.
Over time, happenings, pranks and beaknik business gave way to violence and in 1966 protest tipped over into rioting – seeing the first use of tear gas in the country.
The violent response by the authorities was sufficiently shocking that it led to the removal of Provo’s arch-enemies, the police chief of Amsterdam, HJ van der Molen and the mayor Gijsbert van Hall.
After this success against what we might call City Hall, Grootveld and his collaborator declared an end to Provo, saying "Provo has to disappear because all the Great Men that made us big have gone" and so two years after it started, the provo movement was finished.
As for the statue who coalesced all this, he went on to have other adventures.
o He was kidnapped by students in 1966
o In the 1970s he became part of the logo for football club FC Amsterdam
o He was later knocked over by a reversing truck, breaking both ankles
o and he was set on fire during demonstrations in 2015
And yet he still stands there, ranked at the time of writing at #215 of 1,010 things to do in Amsterdam on tripadvisor, with user macedonboy declaring “It's a cute little statue, but I wouldn't go out of the way to see it.”
Gaper Statues
Well, as you were walking through the crowded Amsterdam city centre, down canals and along winding alleyways - did you ever find yourself standing outside of a store, mouth agape at what was being sold inside?

Was there something so shocking that it made you slack-jawed?

Was it a store selling finely crafted artisanal Dutch lace? Was it racks of hand-carved wooden clogs? Was it a drugstore, selling hallucinogenic mushrooms and wacky baccy to baked out tourists?

Well, if you had said the drugstore, then you wouldn't have been very far removed from those visitors to Holland back in the 16th century.

Let’s imagine we’re in the Netherlands in the 16th century. Most of the country is rural flat fields filled with colourful tulips, crisscrossed by canals, and crowned by a horizon of windmills, slowly turning in the breeze.

But as we make our way into the bustling towns and cities, with their tall and narrow brick houses, we find busy markets with merchants flogging goods from around the world — spices from the East Indies, textiles from India, and timber from the Baltic – and we also find permeant stores selling baked goods, cuts of meat, and iron tools.

Nothing very special about that, you might think, but as we walk past these stores, we notice a small crowd of people gathered, mouths open, gawping in unison, at the entrance of another shop.

And what are they staring at in amazement?

It’s a sculpted head, placed above the entrance of a drugstore.

A unique tradition to the Netherlands, these heads, known as ‘Gapers’, were placed above the door of pharmacies and were quite a sight to behold.
But these weren't just any old sculpted heads though - imagine a large, colourful head with wild staring eyes, its mouth wide open and it’s tongue sticking out as if in shock, disgust or yawning.

Each chemist had their own distinct Gaper, often exotic looking, with a headdress, dark skin, red lips and a beard, representing a 'Moor', a 'Turk', a Native American, or a man from Eastern Asia, always with an exaggerated, comical expression.

Now, why did they pharmacies start mounting these heads above the entrance to their stores?

Well, that's where things get a bit murky, because there are a number of theories.

Some researchers point to the literal translation of "gape" meaning to "yawn," suggesting that the heads were sleepy, an side-effect of opium, which was a popular medicine at the time, and so the head was an early form of advertising, visually signalling to those who couldn’t read that they should "Come on in, we've got the good stuff!"

Another more popular belief is that the gaper heads were designed to scare off nosy passersby.

In the 16th century, pharmacists would often set up a stall outside of their stores where they would mix together medicines on the pavement.

The suggestion is that this would cause people to stop and watch the chemist in action. This eventually became so annoying that a chemist grew tired of telling people to move on, and so carved a gaper and placed it above his door as a sign to tell people to stop watching and move on.

Another theory is that the pharmacist would often hire an assistant to put on a show outside the store to drive in business. The ruse being that the assistant would pretend to be deathly ill, pop one of the chemist's miracle pills, and suddenly start dancing a jig, as healthy as the day he was born.

People cottoned on to this eventually, and the gapers were added to the front of the stores instead, a symbol of the health benefits of the medicine inside.

But that’s not all, because some people think that the origin of the gaper heads was to ward off evil spirits – basically, related to a medieval belief that monsters with outstretched tongues could remove evil spirits – so, the giant heads with a gaping mouth were essentially an indication to customers that the store sold demon-free drugs.

Perhaps the most logical theory though is that Gapers were symbols of the origins of the medicines that were sold inside the shop.
Because this was a time when The Netherlands were deep into global trade, bringing mysterious oriental medicines back home from exotic far-flung corners of the world where miracle cures were said to have been discovered.

So the heads simply represented that magical newness of exotic medicine.

Whatever the true origin though, it became something of a tradition for drugstores in the Netherlands to have their own Gaper, each a unique work of art, that was handmade and distinct - basically becoming something of a company logo to help customers identify their favourite drugstore by simply calling it the “grimacing Turk" or the “startled blackamore” or whatever.

Gapers became so popular in fact, that other industries even started getting in on the act, with one brewery in Rotterdam adding a gaper above their factory in 1650 – which it is suggested was placed there to advertise to people that their beer was not only tasty, but also had medicinal qualities and health benefits too.

But eventually the success of the Gapers started to become their downfall, because by the mid-18th century, the number of pharmacies and drugstores had mushroomed, creating an environment with so much competition that pharmacists started to sell spoiled or counterfeit medicines.

In order to reduce the number of pharmacies, it was decided that when a pharmacist died, their widow would receive a large amount of compensation to close the store and go live off the cash.

As a result, the number of pharmacies decreased and gapers started to disappear.

Fast forward to the 20th century, with its changing attitudes towards race and discrimination, and the remaining Gapers became something of a hot topic, with their exotic looks now starting to be seen as monstrously outdated.

Questions started to be raised about the appropriateness of having gapers on the streets across the nation with their exaggerated features and darkened faces.

Should they be considered harmless relics of time gone by, a simple cultural eccentricity – or – were they a reminder of the country’s colonial past, perpetuating harmful stereotypes, ridiculing people that had suffered great pain and anguish.

And so, the case for removing gapers became something of a national debate, with notable members of the public making arguments for and against keeping them.

For example, Walther Schoonenberg, a famous architectural historian in the Netherlands argued that Gapers were never meant to ridicule anyone, suggesting that they were used as symbols of power and knowledge, representing the exotic origin of the medicine rather than any signalling any kind of oppression, saying, "Only idiots take it seriously, Gapers come in all skin colours and were simply a way to promote the idea that the medicines came from far away and were good for you”.

But that argument didn’t sway public opinion, and much like in the rest of Europe, and the US, where controversial statues began to be defaced or pulled down - like the people of Bristol did with slave trader Edward Colston's statue - cases of vandalism grew in the Netherlands, with Gaper heads being torn down from shop fronts, and some chemists even receiving death threats.

As such, eventually the Gapers began to disappear from the streets completely, many of them being moved into private collections or museums, like the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen and the Het Nederlands Drogisterij Museum in Maarssen – both of which have impressive collections of 100s of heads.

But, despite the controversy, and most of the Gapers now having been removed from storefronts, you can actually still spot a few of the remaining Gapers if you know where to look – like Van Der Pigge in the city of Haarlem, which is a traditional drugstore that advertises itself as ‘the good of then with the best of now’, selling healthy natural products in a store that proudly displays a blue-faced gaper that's been there since 1849.

And so there you are.. If we’re talking about Sculpture in The Netherlands during 1001-2000, we really can’t ignore the quirky history of Gapers which once represented cultural exchange and commerce, but which today reflect modern values, and serve to show that the past is rarely simple.

Either way, the next time you're wandering the streets of the Netherlands, keep your eyes peeled above doorways for the head of an exotic man – and you might find yourself standing there, mouth agape, just like the visitors of old.

And if you have an opinion one way or the other on gapers, or have a photo of one to share, let us know at peteandryan@hhepodcast or on our social media @hhepodcast

The tale of Barry the head
In 2022 the crew of the shrimping boat Wieringer 22 were out doing their thing off the Wadden islands, an archipelago that kind of follows the coast of the Netherlands, looking like a little crest on the head of the nation.
One day they were pulling in their nets when they saw that they had managed to catch something quite different than the seafood they were looking for.
It was quite normal for them to pull up bits of wood with their catch, but this one piece of wood seemed quite different to the fishermen who examined it – because this wood looked right back at them.
It was a sculpted wooden head with curly locks on the sides, the lapels of a jacket or coat around the neck and a distinctive conical cap with the top bent forward, looking something like the hats worn by the Smurfs.
Thinking this was quite a laugh, the fishermen first gave him a name “Barry” and popped Barry onto Twitter to see if anyone knew what he might be.
Well Barry caused something of a storm and soon the ship was being inundated with contact by the media.
Because the archaeologists who saw the Tweet had guessed that Barry was a rare find indeed. They believed he was a figurehead, or sculpture from the stern of a warship, possibly during the Eighty Years’ War, dating it from somewhere between the mid-1500 and1600s.
This was so rare because mostly wood like this would rot and be lost. With Barry, though, it was thought he must have got himself buried into the sea floor, keeping safe from the organisms that would normally eat it.
Following archaeologists advice the ships crew popped Barry in an eel tub of seawater to prevent him drying out and they made their way back to shore.
Soon Barry was in the hands of archaeologists and by 2023 he was living in a freeze-drying device in Zandaam, for reasons explained by a Archaeologist Michiel Bartels, " It has been lying on the seabed for more than 400 years and has absorbed salty seawater. If you were to put it in the open air now, it would rot. Freeze-drying ensures that the water is removed and that it then becomes stable.”
It was not a quick process, as Bartels stated in a later interview, "It was in the freezer for over five months. Five liters of seawater came out and it looks a bit different now,"
During this time it was also concluded he wasn’t a figurehead from the front or the stern of a ship, but an ornament from the staircase of the middle deck, designed to frighten the enemy.
By September 2023 he was due to go on display the Dutch town of Den Oever and then I somewhat lost his trail.
But lucky for us Tjeerdo Wieberdink who was closely involved with Barry, agreed to talk to us and he described the challenged they faced drying Barry out and how tricky it was for them to find a place to show and display the head in their facility which is not a custom-made museum.
As for the fishermen who found Barry, well, they’re back out there plying their trade, wondering what treasures they might dredge up next.
But it’s probably just shrimp again.