Bakker

Bakker is the man who baked, from bakken, to bake, and the Dutch record puts it cautiously: possibly rather than certainly from the trade. What is not in doubt is how many carry it. In 2007 there were 55,273 Bakkers in the Netherlands, the sixth commonest surname in the country, and the thickest concentration sat not in a city but on the old fishing island of Urk, where 5.80 per cent of the inhabitants were Bakkers. In Belgium the name appears 466 times.

Every western European language coined its own version: Piekarz in Polish, Boulanger and Fournier in French, Becker in German, Baker in English. None of them records a household. Each records the same job, noticed and named over again in a different language.

The Dutch guild moment is dated and exact. In Amsterdam in 1694 the cake-bakers, the pie-bakers and the rusk-bakers separated from the older Bread Bakers Guild and set up their own to regulate their side of the work: a city whose baking had once been one trade under one set of rules had grown various enough that bread would not hold the rest of it together.

Bertha Bakker-Nort, called Betsy, was born in Groningen on 8 May 1874 and took the surname in 1904 on marrying Gerrid Bakker, a grain merchant and translator from the same suffrage association. She had joined it in 1894 on returning from Sweden, where she had studied the Scandinavian languages and ended by translating some forty Danish, Norwegian and Swedish books into Dutch, and she recruited members door to door with Aletta Jacobs, who became her mentor.

In 1908, aged thirty-four, she enrolled to read law at the University of Groningen, reasoning that the fight for women's rights required knowing the law properly; she was the fourteenth woman ever to enrol. She graduated in 1912 and two years later took a doctorate at Utrecht comparing the legal position of married women across western Europe, the first woman to earn a Dutch doctorate in law on a full research study. Dutch wives, she found, were the worst placed of any she studied, because the courts read the law more strictly: under the code of 1838 a married woman was legally incompetent to act, unable to open a bank account or sign a contract of employment without her husband's consent.

The 1922 general election was the first in which Dutch women could vote, and the Free-thinking Democratic League gave second place on its list to a woman: Jacobs was too ill to take it and passed it to the woman she regarded as her successor. Bakker-Nort was elected that July, one of seven women in a House of one hundred, and used her maiden speech to call the marriage law scandalous. She was returned four more times.

In 1930 she led the International Woman Suffrage Alliance's preparations for the League of Nations conference on international law at the Peace Palace in the Hague, where delegations marched in dresses graded from white for legal equality to black for none, the Dutch women in black. Arguing against the ban on women serving as mayor, she suggested that if physical strength were truly the qualification the minister should hold boxing matches to fill the posts; the ban was lifted. In 1933 she sat as one of the foreign judges at the London counter-trial of the Reichstag fire.

Her last day in the chamber was 9 May 1940; Germany invaded the next morning. Born to a non-religious Jewish family, she was arrested in December 1942 and held at Westerbork, moved to Camp Barneveld, then sent in September 1944 to Theresienstadt, where a Dutch repatriation mission found her alive in June 1945 with four hundred other Dutch survivors. She died at Utrecht on 23 May 1946. Her papers, given to the International Archives for the Women's Movement, were seized by the Germans in 1940 and taken on to Moscow, returning to Amsterdam only after 1992.

Cornelis Jan Bakker, born in Amsterdam on 11 March 1904, took his doctorate in 1931 under Pieter Zeeman, on the Zeeman effect in the spectral lines of noble gases. He worked on wireless technology for Philips at Eindhoven, built a cyclotron there with August Heyn during the war, and in 1946 returned to the university as professor of physics. In 1951 Pierre Auger invited him onto a group of eight experts to plan the future CERN, and he is counted one of its founders; he directed its Synchro-Cyclotron department and in 1955 succeeded Felix Bloch as director-general, holding the post until 23 April 1960, when he was killed in a plane crash in New York City. A street at CERN's Meyrin site carries his name.

Henri Bakker, born at 's-Hertogenbosch on 15 February 1878, was a bicycle maker and motorcyclist first. On 7 April 1911 he became the second Dutchman to gain a Dutch flying licence, and that May he opened a flying school, De Condor, on the Hertenberg, giving demonstration flights in his Bleriot until the public worked out that the show could be watched perfectly well from outside the field. On 20 September 1911 he flew the first flight made in Dutch army service, carrying acting lieutenant Visser over manoeuvres near the Pettelaarse Schans, and in 1938 his home town put up a monument to it.

Sybe Kornelis Bakker, born at Wier in Friesland on 10 November 1875, became a Reformed minister of the liberal wing at Zwolle who held that Christianity had to be anti-capitalist. He sat on the board of the Dutch Protestant League from 1908 until his death, co-founded the Religious-Socialist Union in 1915 and campaigned for the social democrats and for total abstinence. His titles say the rest: Naast het kruis de roode vaan, beside the cross the red banner, in 1907. He died in 1918 at forty-two, his gravestone carrying a cross on a red flag.

Ina Boudier-Bakker, born Klaziena Bakker in Amsterdam on 15 April 1875, took her standing among Dutch novelists with Armoede, written in Utrecht between 1907 and 1909, and her best known book, De klop op de deur, came in 1930. Through the occupation she wrote a poem for each act of terror and recited them once the war was over; Finale followed in 1957, and in 1963 she was given the Tollensprijs for her whole body of work. Read widely enough to be called the queen of the Dutch women's novel, she died at Utrecht in 1966.

The word sits over Dutch commerce too: Bakker and Timmenga the organ builders, a make of motorcycle, a mail-order house. And the Bakkers in the record are not a family. Bert Bakker the publisher and resistance man, Sjoerd Bakker the resistance fighter who did not survive 1943, Gerard Bakker who made the Scheveningen fishermen's memorial: nothing joins any of them to any other. The sixth commonest surname in the Netherlands is a record of ovens, not of households.