The First Woman Watchmaker

“He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much.”

— Luke 16:10, ASV

Behind the Counter

For most of the twentieth century’s first two decades, Corrie ten Boom’s life was the life of a daughter at home. She helped to run the crowded household, nursed her failing mother, and took her part in the family’s church and charitable work. The shop downstairs was her father’s world, and for a time it was Betsie’s, who kept the books and served the customers. Corrie, by her own later account, was the one who cooked and cleaned.

Around 1920 that changed. In The Hiding Place Corrie tells how a spell of illness kept Betsie from the shop. Corrie took her place behind the counter, and Betsie took over the household, and each found that the swap suited her. Betsie had a gift for making a home beautiful on very little. Corrie discovered that she loved the shop, and above all the workbench. Whatever exactly happened, by the early 1920s the two sisters had settled into the roles they would keep for twenty years. Betsie ran the house, and Corrie worked with her father in the shop.

Learning the Trade

Casper taught Corrie watchmaking at his own bench, as his father had taught him. But she did not rely on his teaching alone. According to Dutch sources, she went abroad to train, serving an apprenticeship with a watchmaker in Switzerland, the heart of the European watch industry. Basel is the town most often named. It was an unusual step for a Dutch woman of her time and class. Watchmaking was a skilled trade, and like almost every skilled trade it was dominated by men.

At some point in the early 1920s Corrie gained her professional qualification. The museum’s chronology and the Dutch women’s biographical lexicon both say that in 1924 she became the first woman in the Netherlands to qualify as a watchmaker. Other sources give 1921 or 1922, and no one seems to have seen the certificate itself. The exact year hardly matters. What matters is that in her early thirties, with no expectation of marriage and no great prospects, Corrie ten Boom became a master of a demanding craft. According to the museum, she was the first woman in her country to do so.

It is a detail that her later fame has tended to overshadow, and it deserves to be remembered. Before she was a rescuer, a prisoner, or a preacher, Corrie ten Boom was a skilled professional woman. She broke a small barrier in her own trade, quietly, without making anything of it.

Small Mechanisms

The work itself is worth imagining. A watch of the 1920s was a marvel of tiny parts: springs as fine as hair, jewels on which the wheels turned, and screws that had to be handled with tweezers under a magnifying glass. Repairing one required patience, steadiness, good eyesight, and an almost stubborn attention to detail. One grain of dust in the wrong place could stop the whole mechanism. One impatient movement could ruin a part that would take days to replace.

Corrie spent the best part of twenty years at such work, day after day, in the back room of the Beje. It is not fanciful to think that it shaped her. Watchmakers learn to work slowly and carefully, and to trust the small things. They learn that a mechanism will only keep good time if every part does its work, however small or hidden. They learn to keep going on a repair when nothing seems to be happening, because the result will only show at the end.

Those were exactly the habits the underground would need. The work of hiding people was also a matter of small mechanisms. There were ration cards to be collected and delivered, and false identity papers to be obtained. Safe addresses had to be found and checked. Messages had to be carried, and drills practised with a stopwatch in hand until the guests could vanish in seventy seconds. The courage of the ten Booms was not only a matter of bold decisions. It was a matter of patient, careful, repetitive work, done right every time, because one careless slip could cost lives.

“Faithful in a Very Little”

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from one of Jesus’ hardest parables, about a dishonest steward. But the saying Jesus draws from it is plain enough: “He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10, ASV). Faithfulness is not a quality that appears suddenly when great things are at stake. It is built, or neglected, in small things.

Scripture repeatedly honours ordinary work done well. Paul told the Colossians, “Whatsoever ye do, work heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23, ASV). The book of Proverbs asks, “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings” (Proverbs 22:29, ASV). Corrie ten Boom, the careful watchmaker of Haarlem, did in fact end up standing before royalty. In 1962 Queen Juliana made her a knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau, and she visited the former Queen Wilhelmina more than once. But the diligence came first, in the back room, on repairs no one would ever praise.

A Shop as a Cover

There was one more way in which the shop prepared the family for what was coming. A watchmaker’s shop has a constant flow of visitors. People come and go all day long, bringing in watches, collecting them, asking questions, and paying bills. Nobody notices one more customer at the door.

When the house became a hub of the underground in 1943, that constant traffic became a cover. Corrie’s 1945 account describes the stream of young resistance workers pouring into the Beje from early morning, and her room upstairs as a kind of clearing house for supply and demand. It would have been far harder to hide such traffic at a private house. The shop that Grandfather Willem had opened with a hundred guilders in 1837 turned out to be exactly the right front for the work of 1943.

A Hundred Years

In The Hiding Place, Corrie opens her story with a celebration. In January 1937 the shop turned one hundred years old, and friends, customers, and neighbours crowded the little house to congratulate her father. As she tells it, her brother Willem arrived with news of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany, and the shadow of what was coming fell across the party. It is a writer’s device, the happy occasion with a hint of darkness at its edge, and it may have been shaped for effect. But the date is right, and the shadow was real. In Germany the Nuremberg Laws had already stripped Jews of their citizenship, and thousands were trying to get out. In the Netherlands, a watch shop celebrated its centenary, and the family who kept it went on praying for Jerusalem as they had for nearly a hundred years.

For Reflection

Corrie ten Boom’s twenty years at the watchmaker’s bench are the least dramatic part of her life, and perhaps among the most important. There she learned patience, precision, faithfulness in small things, and the stubborn habit of doing a job properly whether or not anyone noticed.

Most of our lives are made of such work. It is easy to think of it as a waiting room, the dull time before God calls us to something significant. Corrie’s life suggests another view. The faithfulness God asks of us in small things is not a waiting room. It is the workshop where he makes us into people who can be trusted with much.