Cornelis Fock

Cornelis Fock was a career mayor before the term existed. He was born in Amsterdam on 29 November 1828, the son of Abraham Fock, a marine insurer and president of De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank. The family was Mennonite. Cornelis studied law at the Athenaeum Illustre and took his doctorate in Utrecht in 1852.

From village to capital

His first job as mayor came in 1854, in Vreeland and Nigtevecht on the river Vecht. Wijk bij Duurstede followed, and from 1859 to 1866 Haarlem. A royal decree of 26 February 1866 appointed him mayor of his home city, and he started on 1 May 1866, aged 37. He was a liberal and also sat on the provincial council of North Holland.

His Amsterdam spell lasted just over two years. On 4 June 1868 he left for The Hague as Minister of the Interior in the Van Bosse-Fock cabinet, formed under the influence of the liberal leader Thorbecke.

The minister of the metre

As minister Fock was remarkably productive. His Weights and Measures Act of 1869 made the metre and the kilogram the basis of all measures and set up an inspection service. His Burial Act required every municipality to have a public cemetery and the dead to be buried in a closed coffin. There were also laws against contagious cattle diseases and for the safe use of steam engines. He then spent almost thirty years as the King's, later the Queen's, Commissioner in South Holland, where he was known as rigid and inflexible.

A family of administrators

The Fock family stayed close to power. His son Dirk Fock became a minister and Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. His son-in-law Jan Willem Cornelis Tellegen later became mayor of Amsterdam himself. And one of Fock's sons married a daughter of Cornelis den Tex, his successor as mayor.

In Slotermeer, in Amsterdam's Nieuw-West district, you will find the Burgemeester Fockstraat, in a neighbourhood where several streets are named after Amsterdam mayors. Cornelis Fock died in The Hague on 9 May 1910.