An urgent correction on the factual errors in my Sinterklaas exposé on the important subject of the
The name ‘Amerigo’ is quite recent, as it was the name of the police-horse ridden by Bram van der Vlugt, who portrayed the official Sinterklaas throughout my conscious lifetime. Amerigo carried the Sint during the second half of van der Vlugt’s twenty-year tenure. This period coincides with the saturation of Western culture with instant broadcast media, so it’s hardly a surprise that the horse who took over the role in 2011 also took the stage name Amerigo to avoid confusion.
When van der Vlugt first donned the tabard and mitre, he rode a variety of horses who all carried the name Jasper. His predecessor rode a horse stage-named Schimmel, rather unimaginative as that’s the Dutch word for a white dapple horse - or a fungal mould (Dutch vocabulary is compact and full of confusing homonyms). The horse’s actual name, I’m proud to discover, was Nico, also a police-horse.
Before that, a variety of horses served the Sint and would take a stage-name for the duration of their rider’s tenure. Bianca and Sasmona in the sixties and seventies, and Majestuoso from 1934 to 1958, with the exception of 1944. In the year of the hunger-winter, when the Nazi occupation and unusually brutal climate conspired to starve some twenty-thousand Dutch men and women.
In early 1945 the RAF and US Air Force began their respective imaginatively-named food drops: Operation Manna and Operation Chowhound. Travel through Holland was challenging, as the retreating German army had sabotaged many ports, bridges and dykes. A famous photo shows MANY THANKS spelled out in tulips in a field; the only way the Dutch could figure out to share their gratitude with the airmen who dropped sorely-needed food and supplies.
Later in 1945, the Canadian forces who liberated Holland provided supplies and support to reinstate the annual arrival Sinterklaas and bolster Dutch spirit, supplying twenty jeeps. Colonel Gilday thought that Sinterklaas was similar to Canadian Christmas and wanted to give the people of Amsterdam a spectacular celebration with sixteen Sints.
At the insistence of the Dutch interim government, reluctantly scrapped fifteen of them.