 Willem
De Cock Buning was born in Surakarta (Solo) in Java in 1880 then
part of the Dutch East Indies. He left there for the Netherlands
when he was 4. After schooling he went to work in 1903 for
Dunlop and Kolff who exported goods to India, where he went as
Commercial Representative for 2 years, and then for 4 years to
Batavia and after that to Semarang . In the 1920s he joined
Rotary and became a member of the S’Gravenhage RC in The
Hague. He rose to become District Governor in 1928, and a few
years later to RI Vice President and Director. In the
intervening years he was given a post as an Associate
Commissioner for Extension appointed by Rotary International to
travel on behalf of Rotary. In that capacity, Buning spent part
of 1929 journeying through Europe. Paul Harris
met Buning in 1928 when he stayed at his house. He wrote
about this:
"I spent my first night in Holland as the guest of the District
Governor, a gentleman who had spent sixteen years in Java, and
then
returned to his native land to spend his remaining years in
literary
pursuits and in doing just what he pleases."
His first visit was to Vienna, one of three clubs with Prague
and Budapest which had originally been developed with the help
of Fred Molloy and the Doncaster Club. From Austria he went to a
visit all the clubs in Hungary, before going to
Novom Sadu in the
post war country of Yugoslavia. There he inaugurated a new
Rotary Club. Next he went onto Belgrade where he presented a
Rotary flag to the club as the first club of its country.
Heading further South, he proceeded to Athens where recently
Jim
Davidson had convened an inaugural meeting. Buning there
presented the club with both their charter and with a Rotary
flag. Following Davidson’s trail, Buning repeated the
presentation of charter plus flag to the Cairo and Jerusalem
Clubs.
After spending some time in India he wrote about it: “It gives
me satisfaction to know an organisation of men who have the same
scruples regarding business, and who are prepared to make
sacrifices to bring improvements in social life’.
Buning was also one of the Rotarians who attended conferences of
the International Auxiliary Language Association, along with PRI
Walter Head and Dr Lester Struthers. This body was advocating a
new international language like Esperanto to improve
international relations. En route to a meeting
of lawyers in The Hague in 1932, Paul Harris was greeted in
Boulogne by a group of Rotarians led by De Cock Buning "and his
charming wife who had been with us in Chicago only a few weeks
before".
Researched and posted by Basil Lewis with thanks
to Paul Elsener of the S'Gravenhage RC 8/08 |
