Geldolph Adriaan (Dolf)
Kessler
Male
Netherlands
1884-04-02
Jakarta, Indonesia
1945-08-21
Oud Velsen, Netherlands
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolf_Kessler
Geldolph Adriaan Kessler was a Dutch footballer and industrialist. He was born into a very wealthy family from The Hague, the oldest son of six children. His father, Jean Baptiste August Kessler (1853-1900), was the first director of the Koninklijke Maatschappij tot exploitatie van Petroleumbronnen in Nederlandsch-Indië (K.N.M.E.P.) (Royal Dutch Society for the exploitation of Petroleum Sources in the Dutch East-Indies), which would eventually become the Koninklijke Nederlandse Petroleum Maatschappij (Royal Dutch Petroleum Company), now named Royal Dutch Shell.
Dolf Kessler made his debut as a football player at seventeen years of age, for the Hague-based football club HVV. At first he played as a left-back, later he was a right winger. At HVV he became national champion four times between 1901 and 1905. On 30 April 1905, he was captain during the first official international match of the Dutch national team. They beat Belgium 4-1.
The second interland and first home match also saw Kessler leading the team. By his third and last interland match in 1906, Kessler had passed the captaincy on to Kees Bekker. Kessler seriously considered a career in football until later that year he dislocated his knee, ending his career in football. However, sport remained important to him.
In 1907, Kessler graduated from the Technische Hogeschool Delft (Delft University of Technology), as a mechanical engineer. He got a job as secretary for Henri Deterding, who had succeeded Dolf’s father as the director of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company. Kessler worked for the company until 1915, when he left to look for a different job.
As Joost Jonker and Jan Luiten van Zanden write in their book “A History of Royal Dutch Shell,” his fiancée, Elizabeth ‘Bep’ Stoop (herself a daughter of a prominent oil explorer, Adriaan Stoop), “put his love for her to the test by asking him to choose between her and the Group”. His younger brother Jean Baptiste August ‘Guus’ Kessler Jr., who had married Bep’s cousin, Anna Francoise ‘Ans’ Stoop, continued with the Royal Dutch and eventually rose to head their father’s company.
In 1918, Dolf Kessler joined the committee for the funding of the Hoogovens (Dutch Blast Furnaces). In 1920, he became business director and from 1924 on he was also the director-general. He was considered a very innovative manager, steering the company through the difficult economic environment of the Great Depression; he also believed it was necessary to provide fair wages and establish a pension plan, which was unusual for that time. “His drive, entrepreneurship, imagination and leadership secured Hoogovens a firm foothold in a very competitive industry at a very difficult time.”
As leading figures in two major Dutch business concerns, Dolf and his brother Guus at one point formed a joint venture between the Hoogovens and Royal Dutch Shell to combat a perceived threat to the oil business by IG Farben. Dolf Kessler would remain the director of Hoogovens until his death from a brain tumor in 1945, with a short break during the Second World War, when the Germans kept him in the internment camp known as Kamp Sint-Michielsgestel, in the Netherlands.
Dolf and his wife Bep (1891-1968) had four sons and two daughters. Their home, known as Slingerduin or the Villa Kessler, was built and designed in 1929 by the prominent Dutch architect Hendrik Wouda (1885-1946), a follower of Frank Lloyd Wright. They owned one of the few known paintings by Hercules Seghers, River Valley (1620), which is now displayed in the Mauritshuis Museum (Royal Picture Gallery) in The Hague.
Kessler was an uncle of the Dutch diplomat and historian Max Kohnstamm (1914-2010), with whom he was interned at camp Beekvliet in Sint-Michielsgestel; they became quite close there despite the difference in age. The American journalist Glenn Kessleris one of his grandchildren.
In 2016, the Rijksmuseum published, as part of its Studies in Photography series, “Around the World in 87 Photographs: Dolph Kessler’s Grand Tour, 1908,” by Mickey Hoyle. Kessler took photographs while traveling on business for Royal Dutch Shell with Deterding. His photographs, and the commentary he wrote to his mother, are described as an early example of a photographic travel journal. Very few people at that time were privileged to make such a journey
1903 - 1903
0
2
1
Round 1
Dolf Kessler 1 *
Elisa Cornelis Unico (Eddy) Hartman
6-3
6-2
Round 2
Adolf Broese van Groenou 1 *
Dolf Kessler
6-3
6-2