Ah, the glorious and almighty Netherlands! One of the great things about living in a country is seeing its rich history in everyday life.
Whether visiting houses constructed hundreds of years ago or walking cobblestones worn down by time, a flash from the past is always a pleasure.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could relive the days of yonder-year past? Well, thanks to a video dug up by Twitter user Ben Coates, we can!
Come with us as we take you by the hand and journey back in time to the 1950s Netherlands. In all its black-and-white vintage glory.
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Flash from the past
Funnily enough, NATO produced this Disney-style video. It was filmed back when there were just 11 provinces and Queen Juliana ruled the land. It’s a time when factory work was king and the country spent ten times more on defence than they do today.
Unexpected highlights of the video include seeing binoculars and lightbulbs being made, Queen Juliana’s ultra-weird wave, and cheese (looots of Dutch cheese).
Our favourite part? “It is for these new generations, for a population that is increasing so much faster than anywhere else in Europe, that so many new homes are being built.”
They didn’t quite do it well enough, did they? But, you know, we guess we can forgive them.
This is wonderful – a film made in the early 1950s by NATO, with the intention of introducing the Netherlands to other countries it had recently joined in the alliance.https://t.co/xmUypUt2nf
— Ben Coates (@bencoates1) September 20, 2019
You’ll want to watch it all the way to the end to see exactly how the Netherlands stole land back from the sea — it’s quite impressive!
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Alright, alright, we’re a little bit proud of this nation. But we’re not crying, you’re crying.
What was your favourite part of the video? Tell us in the comments below!
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in September 2019, and was fully updated in May 2023 for your reading pleasure.
Wow!!! Thank you Ben and Samantha for sharing this. This takes me back when I was young living in Amsterdam.
Very bucolic. However, in the fifties a considerable number of food stuffs were still rationed as well as gas and heating fuels. There was a huge housing shortage, getting a phone took 2 years and we were so nutritionally impoverished that children were given milk at school as well as visits from the school dentist. Then there was 1953, the year the dikes broke, watersnood ramp. Those dikes were replaced by the Delta works over 50 years and one of the engineering wonders of the world. But butter? Nope, the Dutch have an expression: As expensive as butter, we could not afford it. It took the country until the end of the sixties to mostly recover from the war, like the rest of Europe. The Germans didn’t quite make to the “Scorched Earth” plan, but they came very close.