Last modified: 2015-07-28 by ivan sache
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![[Flag of De Haan]](../images/b/be-vwvdh.gif)
Municipal flag of De Haan - Image by Filip van Laenen, 4 November 2001
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The municipality of De Haan (lit., "The Rooster"; in French, Le Coq; 12,177 inhabitants on 1 January 2007; 4,217 ha) is located on the North Sea between Bredene and Blankenberge. The municipality of De Haan was formed in 1976 by the merging of the former municipalities of Klemskerke (2,066 ha), Vlissegem (1,666 ha) and Wenduine (485 ha).
De Haan was not a municipality before the 1976 reform but a hamlet,
later a popular sea resort, split between the parishes (later
municipalities) of Vlissegem and Kemskerke, mentioned for the first
time in 988 and 1003, respectively, and therefore considered as the
oldest polder villages in Flanders. The area was never flooded because
it was protected from the sea by a bar of dunes.
De Haan was once a poor hamlet made of a few huts; its inhabitants were
workers, shrimp fishers selling their products from village to village
with the help of a donkey, a cobbler, a weaver and a fiddler. The
hamlet had a very bad reputation: the villagers of Vlissegem and
Klemskerke considered De Haan as a centre of bad-tempered thieves and
poachers, whereas the authorities considered that the huts had been
built illegally. They were indeed riots in De Haan when flotsam and
jetsam landed on the coast, but the inhabitants paid kind of taxes on
cattle grazing and were commissioned to plant beachgrass (Ammophila
arenaria (L.) Link) to stabilize the dunes eroded by wind. More
respectable inhabitants of De Haan were customers, whose post was set
up around 1814 and moved around 1830; they lived in posts called
komiezenkotten, the last of them having been suppressed in 1961-1962.
Beachgrass hardly limited the erosion of the dunes, therefore pines
were planted, to no avail. In 1838, Theodoor Van de Walle, President of
the Flanders Agriculture Council, was allowed to manage the planting of
trees in the dunes; one of his workers was Pieter Jan Gezelle, father
of the famous Flemish poet Guido Gezelle. Van de Walle was successful
but the management of the plantations failed after his death in 1848,
so that in 1854 the Mayor of Vlissegem complained about this to Van de
Walle's widow. Another threat for the dunes was the huge population of
rabbits; in 1874, the villagers asked for an eradication program.
In 1886, the landscape architect L. Van der Swaelmen was officially
commissioned to set up a big park to attract tourists from Blankenberge
and Ostend. It was decided to fertilize the soil, to select the most
relevant trees, to protect the dunes from the rabbits and to limit
cattle grazing. The main result of the program was a 157-ha wood
located between Wenduine and Bredene.
A tramway line inaugurated on 8
August 1886 brought several tourists to De Haan, including the
architect Édouard Colinet, who proposed to create a sea resort. On 22
July 1888, Imschoot, President of the Ostend Trading, Maritime and
Industrial Union, inaugurated the sea resort and the first hotel. A
Royal Decree signed on 29 July 1889 granted to Colinet and
Passenbronder a concession on 50 ha of dunes in Vlissegem and
Klemskerke. After Colinet's death in 1890, his widow was transferred
all his rights and sold them in 1895 to Leon Herreboudt, from Brussels. He immediatly sold them to Delphin Depuyt, notary and mayor of Gistel,
who founded the first Société Anonyme du Coq sur Mer, which was
increased in 1904 and 1912.
The successive owners of the concession kept very strict rules of
urbanism and made of De Haan a green area: everyone building a vacation
house had to plant trees and to set up flowers and lawns; the built
area should not exceed one-sixth of the plot area. The most famous
architect was J. Stübben, who worked in Berlin, Aix-la-Chapelle,
Cologne, Basle and Bilbao and was King Léopold II's personal advizer.
He prohibited high buildings in De Haan (and there are still very few
of them compared with other Belgian sea resorts) and promoted the
planting of woods to protect the resort from wind; he designed tortuous
streets to restrict the speed of the cars and several cottages in
Anglo-Norman style. Léopold II funded the building of the Royal Road
and the set up of the first golf course in Belgium. At the end of the
XIXth century, the former thieves' hamlet had became a sea resort
popular among the French and British tourists. A casino was built in
1899 (but suppressed in 1929). In 1899, Simson started the building of
the Grand Hôtel du Coq, one of the most famous of the time, renamed
in 1949 L'Espérance and today the town hall of De Haan. The
combination of the sea, the beach and the woods was recommended and
several social and children vacation centers were opened, including Dr.
Alexander's zeepreventorium, founded in 1924.
The boom of the resort caused local problems, the inhabitants of De Haan asking for the set up of a municipality independent from Vlissegem and Klemskerke. This was popularized by the newspapers in the 1930s as "the quarrels of the Rooster with its village", but the things calmed down after the Second World War and everybody agreed to preserve the quality of the sea resort.
Wenduine was until 1180 a parish depending on Uitkerke. It was a big
fishers' village: in 1378, the Wenduine fleet was made of 43 boats
manned by 178 fishers split into the Old Fishers' League (121) and the
Young Fishers' League (37). At the same time, the village had 24 pubs.
The Wenduine fishers were famous overseas and are mentioned in English
archives for the problems they had with pirates and war vessels, and
mostly with porpoises. They required from the authorities of Bruges the
authorisation of hunting purpoises, which was granted all the year round
met't harpoen, zonder pardoen (with a harpoon, without mercy); they
thanked the Provost of Bruges with ... a porpoise. The motto was
inscribed on the fishers' guild banner in 1424. Fishery declined in the
XVIth industry. In the XVIII-XIXth centuries, Wenduine was a small, poor
village and several of its inhabitants had to work in the neighbouring
towns or in France.
Wenduine woke up at the end of the XIXth century when tourists from
Blankenberge used to visit the village on donkeys. The clever
inhabitants of Wenduine opened booths named Café des Etrangers,
Bienvenue aux Etrangers, Pavillon des Dunes or Café de la Gare,
where they served sandwiches and coffee to the happy visitors. In 1876,
however, the municipal council refused to create a sea resort, claiming
that the roads were not good. A few years later, the new municipal
council spared 57,000 francs (of the time!) to fund the road to
Blankenberge (1884) and the correspondence with the
Ostende-Blankenberge tramway (1888). The Born Institute, built in
1878-1880, was the first childrens' rehabilitation center in Belgium.
In 1888, the first plots were sold to private owners; the next year,
the municipality purchased bathing charts used to bring the "swimmers"
into the sea. Without the help of external funding, Wenduine became
known as "the Princess of the Sea Resorts" even before the First World
War.
Like all famous sea resorts, De Haan has attracted several famous
visitors.
King Léopold II, who had commissioned the architect William Kidner to
draft the new sea resort, often stayed at De Haan (1890, 1901 and 1903)
but the Royal cottage designed by Albert Mitchell was never built.
Queen Elizabeth visited the zeepreventorium in 1940, when it housed
several injured soldiers.
Zita, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from 1916 and 1918, lived
from 1929 to the Second World War in Steenokkerseel and spent her
summer vacations in Wenduine, with a monk who read the mass for her in
her cottage. Zita and her family signed the first pages of the Wenduine
visitor's book after the ceremony of blessing of the sea.
The famous painter James Ensor, who lived in Ostend, often visited De
Haan. On 2 August 1933, he had dinner at the Cœur Volant inn with
the French ministers Anatole Monzie, who came especially to Belgium to
award the Légion d'Honneur to the "Prince of the Painters". Another
famous painter, Alphonse Blomme, lived in Klemskerke from 1929 to 1970,
where he became a close friend of his neighbour, Albert Einstein, and
made his portrait. Henri Cassiers, a poster designer, made the first
advertizing poster for De Haan in 1897, still very famous, and designed
the menu for the inauguration of the Grand Hôtel du Coq. Among the
customers of the Grand Hôtel was the writer and later Nobel Prize
awardee Maurice Maeterlinck, who stayed there in 1889. The Austrian
writer Stefan Zweig, who visited his friend Emile Verhaeren every year,
has described his peaceful stay in Le Coq in the summer 1914 in his
book Die Welt von Gestern, with the prophetic sentence "All the
nationalities lived peacefully beside each other".
However, the most famous guest of De Haan was Albert Einstein. Back
from the USA with his wife Elza Koch on the ship Belgenland (Red Star Line), Einstein learned that Hitler had taken the power on 13 March 1933 and
had confiscated all his goods. On 28 March 1933, he landed in Antwerp
and said he would not come back to Germany. Einstein stayed for a few
days at the Cantecroy castle, invited by Pr. Arthur de Groodt, whose
wife advized to hire two cottages in De Haan, the Villa Savoyarde for
the Einstein and the Maisonnette for the de Groodt. Einstein left De
Haan for London (via Ostend) on 10 September.
Source: Municipal website
Ivan Sache, 12 June 2007
The municipal flag of De Haan is horizontally divided red-white-green
with a red cross voided and pommety (with eight knobs) in the middle of
the white stripe.
According to Gemeentewapens in België - Vlaanderen en Brussel, the flag was adopted by the Municipal Council on 15 September 1986, confirmed by the Executive of Flanders on
10 December 1986 and published in the Belgian official gazette on 3
December 1987.
The three stripes represent the three former municipalities merged to form De Haan, which all
have the Templars' cross in their arms.
The Templar's cross is used on the arms of villages that belonged to the domain of Vinckx, part of the Vrije van Brugge (lit. the Free [domain] of Bruges), a large territory surrounding Bruges but not belonging to the town, and owned by the Knight Templars.
The arms of Bredene were granted by Royal Decree on 19 April 1847; as
shown by Servais, they are white with a red cross and two finches, a
red one in the upper left corner and a black one in the lower right
corner. The finches (in Dutch, vink) are canting.
The villages that belonged to Vincx all used similar arms, differing by
the finches; they were already shown on the map of the Vrije van Brugge
made by Pieter Pourbus in 1562.
The arms of Nieuwmunster (incorporated to the municipality of
Zuienkerke in 1976) were granted by Royal Decree on 18 April 1847. They show two black finches placed like on the arms of Bredene.
The arms of Klemskerke were granted by Royal Decree on 18 April 1847. They show the red
cross but no finch at all.
The arms of Vlissegem were granted by Royal Decree on 27 June 1846. They show a black
finch in each corner of the shield. The old arms of Vlissegem are shown
in the point of the current coat of arms of the municipality of De
Haan.
Pascal Vagnat & Ivan Sache, 12 June 2007