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Rotary in Finland |
| From the first club, to a leading
civic organisation Rotary as a movement works trough the Rotary Clubs. When there is a club there is Rotary and Rotary ideals. |
 It is appropriate to start this
short history of Rotary in Finland from the first club, The Rotary Club
of Helsinki- Helsingfors.How did it all start? The first unofficial rotary meeting was held in Helsinki on August 5 1926. The invitation to that meeting was made by the president of the Rotary Club of Stockholm, Mr Josef Norén. In August 1926 a large YMCA meeting was held in Helsinki-Helsingfors and since there where many Rotarians among the YMCA leaders that had come together Norén wanted them to also have a Rotary meeting and it took place at Hotel Kämp, one of the finest if not the finest hotels and restaurant in town. There where some 40 Rotarians from different parts of the world attending. The meeting was chaired by, Mr. Charles R. Hemingway of Nottingham, England. Mr. F.N. Menefee from Michigan, USA was asked to act as secretary. Josef Norén was a leading figure in the YMCA-movement in Sweden and therefore also had many contacts to the leaders of YMCA in Finland, among the professor Arthur Hjelt. Professor Hjelt had recommended certain persons that he considered suitable to become members of the new club to also be invited to the August meeting. It was at this August meeting that the torch was lit and on December 1 1926 the founding meeting of the Rotary Club of Helsingfors-Helsinki was held at the Hotel Kämp. The meeting was chaired by, Rotary Internationals Special Commissioner for Europe Mr. Fred Warren Teele. The first President was professor Bernhard Wuolle and Mr. Paul Thorwall M.Sc. was elected to be the secretary. There was a total of 43 people present and they all signed the list of participants in this important meeting. Interestingly the median age of the first members was 45 years. The first board was also appointed and the first Club By-Laws were accepted. Among the charter members are many influential persons in business and culture. Names may not be so important to the reader but some deserve to be mentioned. In the first board was Mr. Risto Ryti a 37 year old lawyer who was to become the President of Finland in the difficult year of 1940 and he served until 1944 when he resigned to make way for a other Rotarian namely Marshall of Finland, Baron Carl- Gustaf Mannerheim.  Marshall Mannerheim was a honorary member of the
Rotary Club of Helsinki - Helsingfors until his death in 1951.Other influential persons worth mentioning are Axel Solitander, Alvar Niklander, Heikki Reenqvist (Reenpää) and Alfred Paloheimo and many others who held and would later hold important positions in society. The Charter of The Rotary Club of Helsingfors- Helsinki is dated January 26. 1927 and signed by then RI President Harry H. Rogers. The Club number assigned to the new club is 2470. Finland had become the 34th country in which Rotary was active. Naturally, the Rotary idea spread quickly and Turu-Åbo, the old capital (until 1827) had a club in 1929, Wiborg, a trade and industrial centre in the far east part of the country in 1931 and Tampere , an industrial centre in central Finland in 1933. Before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 a total of eight Rotary Clubs had been chartered and the total membership was 270 Rotarians. It may perhaps be interesting to note that the early club in Wiborg or Viipuri was forced to terminate in June of 1944 when the Soviet Union had troops in the city. Wiborg was first over run by the Soviets in 1940 but reclaimed by the Finns in the summer of 1941. During the last summer of the war the Soviet Union concentrated a huge force of men and guns on the Finnish front in June of 1944 with the idea of actually overrunning the country. The force was enormous and many say that the concentration of heavy guns was the densest ever collected. There was a heavy gun for every five yards on the Carelian Isthmus. The bombardment started and the Finns had to retreat, but in well organised manoeuvres and very heavy fighting. Finally the enemy was stopped just west of the city of Wiborg. The minutes of the last meeting on June 12.1944 is laconic and reads as follows: §1. There was a discussion about the military situation on the Isthmus, where the enemy had started a major general advance trust. §2. There was no presentation. §3 The next meeting will be held on June 19 1944 with Rotarians Karttunen, Leskinen and Mali to give presentations. Not even the signature of the secretary could be obtained to this last protocol. The next meeting was never held because the armoured troops of the enemy had rolled into town and the population had been evacuated to other parts of Finland. The war ended in September 1944 in a separate peace with The Soviet Union and parts of Eastern-Finland had to be seeded. The Rotary Club of Viipuri took up work in Helsinki on January 2 1945 with all the previous members who had not joined other clubs in their new hometowns accepted automatically as members. The Rotary Club of Wiborg- Viipuri appeared in the Official Directory for 1945-1946 but with the old address in the then seeded city of Wiborg. However Rotary International was of the opinion that, since the Wiborg club had lost its domicile it would not be considered a legal club. Therefore the club decided to send a letter informing RI that it had decided to terminate the membership on May 5 1947. Strangely RI had also determined that it was not possible to start a new club in Helsinki- Helsingfors and that the former members of Wiborg would have to join the Helsinki Club. The development then turned around and in 1948 steps where taken to start a new club under the name of Töölön- Rotaryklubi - Tölö Rotary Club. Again the charter members came from the old club in Wiborg. On May 16 1949 the first meeting of the new club was held and with 18 members present. The charter is dated May 30.1949 and the club has number 10013. The new club was the 48th club in Finland and the second in the city of Helsinki-Helsingfors. Of the 29 charter members, 21 had been members of the old club in Wiborg, most of the other charter members also had their roots there. This is interesting also from the point of view that a new club was chartered in post war Finland and serves to prove that the Republic was a sovereign state and not a puppet state of the Soviet Union. It may perhaps be of interest to the reader to note that Finland was one of the few countries that participated in the Second World War that was not occupied by enemy forces. Almost all other countries in Europe and Asia got foreign troops on their soil, (Austria, France, Poland, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Chechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Jugoslavia, Japan, just to name a few. Of the nations that participated in the war only four capitals, London, Moscow, Helsinki and Washington remained unoccupied. It is interesting to note that in the thirties there was a group of people who wanted to stop Rotary in Finland because Rotary was not looked upon favourably in Germany after 1933 when the National Socialists (Nazi) under the leadership of Hitler had established a new type of dictatorial regime. Past Governor Herbert Tillander who was Governor in Finland in 1949-50 has noted that no actual motion in that direction was made. The war years naturally had a strong impact on Rotary in Finland. Many of the members actually had to go into uniform and defend the nation, first in the bloody Winter War of 1939-1940 and then in the second War of 1942-1945. The war started on November 30 1939 with a major air bombardment of Helsinki and Kotka as well as Turku (ÅBO). The Helsinki- Helsingfors club had a meeting on December 5 1939 with only four members attending and the next meeting had only one member in attendance –out of 78 members. The club in Turku (ÅBO) had a meeting on January 9.1940 which lasted a record long time, some four hours of which three had to spent in the shelters. Finland was a nation that had to mobilize every last grain of resources that could be found. When the war started the population was less than four million. The South-Eastern district of Carelia was lost in the winter war of 1939-40 and some 415,000 people out of a total population of 3,6 million people had to evacuated and given a new home in the remaining part of the country. The army was a pure conscript army and as many as 17 percent of the whole population was mobilised in the defence, that is the highest percentage in the world! Good Activity in difficult circumstances Even if normal meetings could not be held at all times, Rotary was very active during the war years and after the war. The clubs in no way went into hibernation or disbanded, quite on the contrary. The clubs collected supplies and distributed them to people who had lost everything. In 1942 the Helsinki Club took 10 children as their godchildren and helped them financially to go to school and later into active work. Also a ring of guarantors was created to help gifted but penniless student to pursue their academic studies. This form of help spread quickly to almost all Rotary Clubs in the country. It must be born in mind that the nation was in severe difficulties for many years after the war because of the heavy war reparations (300 million US dollars in 1938 money) that had to be paid to the Soviet Union. The sum was later reduced to 226,5 million dollars, but calculated on the basis of actual prices and currency values the sum was 445 million dollars. This strangled the economy and it was not until the sixties that a well functioning system of economic assistance and an efficient Scandinavian style social security net could be created, on the national level. On the other hand the need to create new industry, especially in the field of mechanical engineering, shipbuilding and paper and pulp machinery made a change from a predominantly agricultural society to an industrial and later a post- industrial society possible. The problems where compounded by the fact that also a lot of paper and pulp products had to be delivered. That meant that a large part of the traditional foreign trade revenue was lost, there was no money to buy raw materials so badly needed for the reconstruction work of the country. The CARE-Program. What was the CARE programme? CARE comes from, Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe After the end of the war in Europe in 1945 The Rotary Foundation and many Clubs and Districts in America helped their European Rotary Fellows by sending many sorts of supplies. The Americans had hoped that the material sent should be distributed among the members of the Clubs receiving the parcels and that they should be given gratis. What did the Rotary Club of Rovaniemi in the then devastated far north of the country do? Yes, they distributed the goods so that all readymade clothes and shoes where given to the municipal home for the elderly and all foodstuffs such as chocolate, tea, coffee and wool yarn and soap war divided into 18 heaps of which each member got one lot. The writer can remember the distribution in Heinola a small rural town in Central Finland. The Club in Heinola (Chartered 23.01.1946) received a similar parcel. I had never seen pineapple, let alone banana and fruit conserves and coconut milk. However there was no talk of distributing among the members of the club but everything was given to those who had suffered the most hardships. The Grandmother managed to convince her husband that one of the parcels should be given to the housemaster/driver in the household. OK That was done and if the son of the house had to sneak away to the housemasters´ modest home to see the wonders of the west, and even got to taste the pineapple. There is also a story from real life on what was done with the parcels. At Kristeinestad RC the parcels got auctioned away at the club meetings. Nobody knew beforehand at which meeting the auction was to held and this naturally resulted in a very good attendance. Because of this activity the club had considerable monies and could buy many articles that the less fortunate really needed. That was mostly warm clothing and less sweets and chocolate. J. SibeliusThe Finns thanked the American Rotarians by many letters but then it was decided that a statue of the famous Finnish composer and Rotarian Jean Sibelius should be placed in the front hall of the Rotary Head Quarters in Chicago. The statue carried a very important symbolic message: “THANK YOU ROTARIANS IN AMERICA”.  When on April
27 1945 the last German troops had been driven out of the country in the
far north, (the Germans retreated into Norway and then gave up on May 5
1945 when the war ended in the German capitulation). THE WAR WAS OVER!The period from 1945-1955 was a time of rapid expansion of Rotary in Finland. When hostilities had stopped there was a period of brisk development of Rotary in Finland. On February 1 1945 Jakobstad Rotary Club was chartered followed by Borgå-Porvoo on March 7 1945 and Rauma Rotary Club on April 1 1945. Then there was a new Rotary club almost every month so that in 1949-1950 there where a total of 52 clubs in one district in Finland. In July 1945 Rotary International had 5413 clubs and an estimated 245 000 Rotarians in the clubs. May 1950 it was decided that there should be two districts in Finland. Mr. Oskar Sumelius from Tampere RC was the new District Governor for the western district and Mr. Paapvo Waris from Helsinki became the Governor for the eastern district. Mr. Herbet Tillander a master jeweller was a Past Governor at age 41! At the same district conference in Vaasa-Vasa 13-14 May 1950. Marshal of Finland Carl-Gustaf Mannerheim was elected Honorary Governor. Are there any others who have that title? In 1949 Rotary International had some 300 000 members worldwide. When Rotary International published a Directory for 1945-1946, Finland was the only country to be mentioned of those that had been co-belligerent with Germany in the war that had just ended. Of the Nordic countries, Clubs in Sweden and Denmark are also listed but not in Norway or Iceland. I have used the term co-belligerent and that may need a bit of explanation but we shall have to leave that to another article. The fact is that Finland was at war with the Soviet Union but did not have any kind of pact or formal alliance with Germany. The factual situation was different and weapons and material were bought from Germany and strategic minerals such as nickel and copper, plus paper and pulp were delivered all the time. German troops also operated in the northern regions of Lappland and Kainuu and troops where transported from the ports in the south to Norway. The Germans even had a permanent representative at the High Command in Mikkeli from 1941 on. We in Finland have tended to downplay the importance of the German troops but especially in the hot summer of 1944 the special air force squadron under the command of Kurt Kuhlmay was very important and highly efficient. It is not so well known that the Soviet war effort was assisted by the Americans, particularly from 1942 onwards. The US sent guns, ammunition, motor vehicles, food, even boots, some of which ended up in the rucksacks of the Finns when they hit behind the lines. Why was there such a large interest in starting Rotary Clubs? One should perhaps try to find the answer in the situation after the war. When the armistice came, a so called “Control Commission” under the leadership of General Andrei Zdanow arrived on October 5 1944. (Zdanow was one of the most trusted men of Stalin and had a iron will and was absolutely unscrupulous.) This commission had members from the UK, France and US among its members. The mission was to check to make certain that the Finnish army was disarmed, despite the war still going on in the north against the Germans. However the commission also had a tendency to express opinions about the domestic policy, a totally internal Finnish matter. It was widely suspected that the Russian delegates also tried to help a communist uprising and change of regime from a democratic western system to a totalitarian soviet regime. The years from 1944 to 1948 are often referred to as “The years of Peril” or “Years of Danger”. The Rotary movement, with its strong roots in the United States and in early entry in Britain, was seen as a gateway to the west, a possibility to create contacts, and to keep a door open to the west- come hell or hale! Naturally the ideological basis of Rotary: Freedom, Liberty, Honesty, Truth, Friendship and Brotherhood, all appealed to a nation and to a people who had laid the foundation of their nation on that basis and fought to defend their ideals. Helsinki 1952. External view of the Olympic Stadium.It is not an insignificant fact that the hosting of the Olympic Games of 1952 had been given to Helsinki. That happened in 1948 and that put Finland back on the world map again. The games of 1940 had been given to Finland but because of the war those could not be arranged. Times had changed also in other respects. Before the war much of the higher education was brought from Germany. Especially that was the case with technology of all sorts, chemistry, mechanical engineering, aviation, machine building etc.  Kalevala painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela: The Forging of the Sampo,
1893. Also literature and the arts was dependent on the contacts to
Germany, even if the painters of the “Golden Age of Finnish painting”
mostly went to Paris and sometimes also to Holland and Britain.Now the scales had turned to the Anglo-American side. The victors! People wanted to learn to speak English and to make new contacts. Lit.: Service Above Self , Palvelumieli itsekkyyden edelle Rotary 75- years in Finland Helsinki 2002 Editor Håkan Nordqvist. Tölön Roataryklubi 1949-1959, Viipurin Roatyklubi 1931-1944 Publication of The Rotary Club of Töölö-Tölö, Helsinki 1959. Editor Eino Parikka Varttuva Isänmaa , Finland under 50år 1926-1976 Publication on the 50- anniversary of The Rotary Club of Helsinki- Helsingfors ISBN 951-99086-9-2 Helsinki 1976 Editors: Väinö J. Nurmimaa, et alia. |
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