Lot 214: A Box of Somebody's Applause

Selected lots from the catalogue of the sale of the working effects of Huib Kooiman (1928–2025), to be held at Veilinghuis Roggeveen, Haarlem, on 12 December. Catalogue descriptions, measurements and figures by Ana Ferreira-Holm.

Note to the sale

Huib Kooiman made noises for radio plays in the drama studios at Hilversum from 1949 until 1988. He was never credited by name on air. By his own count, kept in a cash book (Lot 212), he worked on 2,316 productions, in which he was at various times a horse, several horses, a fire, the sea, a woman going upstairs, and the weather.

When the studios were cleared he was allowed to take his equipment home in a borrowed van, and it has stood since then in a garage in Bussum, in working order, arranged as it was arranged around the microphone. The family have asked that it be sold as tools and not as memorabilia. I have described it accordingly. Where I state something I could not measure, I say so.

Lot 201

*A pair of coconut half-shells, about 1949, with a second pair, 1971. The working pair worn smooth at the rims and darkened where held; one shell cracked and closed with a single brass staple. Diameter 11.2 cm and 11.4 cm. The second pair unworn, in its issue box, the lid marked in pencil te jong* ("too young"). Estimate €60–80

The staple is his. He used the first pair for thirty-nine years and the second, as far as I can tell from the rims, not at all.

Lot 203

*A thunder sheet.* Zinc, 183 × 76 cm, hung from a beech batten on two leather straps, with a turned handle at the lower edge. A dent, 9 cm across, at lower left. Estimate €150–200

A replacement was offered in 1966 and declined. Taken by the handle and shaken, the sheet gives ordinary thunder. Struck with the heel of the hand on the dent, it gives thunder a long way off over water. I tried both. (Inference: the dent is the instrument, and the rest is what it is mounted on.)

Lot 205

*A wind machine.* Slatted beech drum, 61 cm in diameter, on an oak trestle, turning against a canvas sheet weighted with a lath; iron crank. The canvas replaced in 1964 and dated on the hem. Estimate €300–400

Pencilled on the trestle beside the crank are five marks with words against them, lowest to highest: draught, washing day, dyke, North Sea, and at the top a word the family translate as the in-laws. At that speed the trestle walks.

Lot 207

*A door unit with eleven doors. A free-standing pine frame, 211 × 96 cm, on a weighted base, with lift-off hinges, and eleven doors to fit, each numbered on the top edge and labelled on a card: 1 front door, prosperous; 2 front door, poor; 3 kitchen; 4 bedroom; 5 cell; 6 office with glass; 7 church; 8 car (a section of a real one); 9 cupboard; 10 ship's cabin; 11 house where someone has died*. Estimate €800–1,200. The purchaser must collect.

I hung all eleven and measured each. Door 11 is the same door as door 3, cut from the same board, to within a millimetre. The difference is the hinges, which are older, and unoiled, and the latch, which he has packed with felt so that it closes without a click. I closed it several times. It is the only one of the eleven you find yourself closing gently.

Lot 209

*A walking tray. Pine, 120 × 60 cm, in six compartments: gravel, sand, cinders, parquet (four blocks, glued), linoleum, and one compartment empty with a card reading snow, see pouch*. With a leather pouch of cornflour, to be squeezed in the fist. Estimate €120–160

The cornflour is not original. Nobody knows how many times it has been replaced. I record this because a previous owner of a comparable pouch is said to have had the contents analysed.

Lot 211

*Two pairs of shoes.* A pair of men's black lace-ups and a pair of women's court shoes with a 5 cm heel, both size 43, both resoled; a cobbler's ticket of 1979 in one of the court shoes. Estimate €40–60

He was every woman who crossed a room on Dutch radio for the better part of four decades. The court shoes are the more worn of the two pairs. His daughter says he practised stairs in them at home and that for some years she believed all fathers did.

Lot 212

*The cash book and the scripts.* One ledger, cloth-bound, with a ruled line for each production from 3 October 1949 to 29 April 1988; and about 1,140 studio scripts with his cues marked in the left margin in a notation of his own: a small drawing of the object, an arrow for direction of travel, and a number from 1 to 5. Estimate €400–600

I have not been able to establish what the numbers measure. They are not loudness; a slammed door may be a 1 and a teaspoon a 5. (Inference, offered with little confidence: how much the listener is meant to notice.)

Lot 213

*A cup and saucer.* White earthenware, canteen pattern, the cup chipped at the foot; with a teaspoon. Estimate €10–15

This is the cup. It was set down on this saucer in every kitchen, parlour, vicarage and police station he ever furnished, and it is likely that more people in the Netherlands have heard it than have heard any other single piece of crockery. Interest in this lot has been declared by a member of the cataloguing staff, who has therefore been asked not to say anything further about it.

Lot 214

*A box of somebody's applause. One 18 cm reel of quarter-inch tape in a cardboard box, the lid labelled in Kooiman's hand applaus — niet van ons* ("applause — not ours"). No date, no leader, no splices. Duration at 19 cm per second: 4 minutes 12 seconds. Estimate €40–60

Everything else Kooiman owned is indexed. There are 388 other reels in the sale (Lots 215 to 226), each entered in a card file by subject, year and studio, and this one is not in the file. His daughter had not seen it before. It was at the back of the shelf, behind rain, various.

What is on it is applause and nothing else: no music before, no voice after. It begins already under way, as though the machine was started late. I have now played it thirty-one times and can state the following. The hall is of middling size with a wooden floor (inference, from the feet). There are perhaps three hundred people. It is winter, or they are old; there are coughs. The clapping is warm for forty seconds, dutiful for two minutes, and then warm again, which suggests somebody came back on. At 2 minutes 50 seconds it stops, and one person, to the left of the microphone and not far from it, goes on clapping alone for eleven seconds. Then that person stops too. At 3 minutes 1 second a chair moves. The tape runs on over an emptying room until it ends.

I cannot say whose applause it is, nor who it was for, nor why a man who could make an audience of three hundred out of his own two hands (Lot 216) kept one he had not made and wrote on the box that it was not his. There are no splices, so he never used it. There is wear at the head of the tape, so he played it.

Lot 216

*A reel, "Applause, own". 18 cm, boxed, indexed. Seven bands: small, large, polite, relieved, children, after a death, radio audience pretending to be a theatre audience*. Estimate €80–120

Each band is Kooiman alone, clapping, recorded over himself as many as forty times. On relieved you can hear him, between layers, breathing out.

Lot 221

*A reel, "Studio 2, empty, 1962".* 18 cm, boxed, indexed. Thirty minutes. Estimate €30–40

It is a recording of the drama studio with nobody in it, made to be laid under scenes so that silences would not sound like a fault on the line. It was, on the evidence of the cash book, the effect he used most. It is not blank. About nineteen minutes in, a long way off, somebody is whistling.

Lot 230

*A kitchen chair.* Beech, rush seat, 1950s, the back left leg loose in its socket. No estimate. Offered without reserve.

Not an effect. This is the chair he sat on between cues, and it is included at the family's request, so that the doors do not go alone. It creaks when weight comes off it. I have compared that creak with the chair that is heard to move at 3 minutes 1 second on Lot 214, at some length and on good equipment, and I am able to report that it is not the same chair.

I had hoped it would be.