Pieter Jelles Troelstra

Dutch lawyer, journalist, revolutionary socialistic politician, Frisian poet and writer. He was for thirty years the charismatic leader of the SDAP, the Dutch Labour party. He shook the Dutch nation on 12 November 1918 by his parliamentary call for a revolution. It never happened, but the political climate was changed by it. .

Troelsta was the eldest child of the Liberal tax inspector Jelle Pieters Troelstra and Grietje Dirks Landmeter, who married 8 May 1859 in Lemmer. Between 1860 and 1871 they got seven children.

His father Jelle Pieters Troelstra (15 October 1833, Lemmer - 30 January 1906, Leeuwarden) was also the eldest child of his poor family. To sustain the family he started working at age six, polishing the jewellery of a goldsmith, notes Troelsta in his autobiography. Earn money, study hard, and progress in society was his fathers motto. Though his father left school at age nine, he auto-didactically learned him-selves the tax laws needed for his job and the foreign languages English, French and German, besides the Dutch and Frisian languages, he natively spoke. He made first career as a tax collector, but in 1880 he erceted the fire insurance company "Neerlandia", which brought him much profit. Jelle Pieters was a board member of the twentieth Freemasonry lodge in the Netherlands, "De Friesche Trouw" in Leeuwarden.

His Freemason mother Grietje Dirks Landmeter (19 April 1837, Lemmer - 12 May 1871, Stiens) was the eldest daughter of a school head. She suffered from bad health, visited a professor in Amsterdam, and often feared to die young. She died after the birth of the seventh child Albert Jelles Troelstra (12 March 1871 - 22 Augustus 1871). Troelstra was still a young teenager then. It of interest that his too early dying mothers name "Landmeter" means in Dutch land surveyor. Franz Kafka's famous protagonist "K" in "The castle" was also a land surveyor.