shows a 20-m-long (70 ft) whale, stranded on the Dutch coast between Scheveningen and
Katwijk on February 3, 1598. , painted 1658 of the beach The earliest reference to the name
Sceveninghe goes back to around 1280. The first inhabitants may have been
Anglo-Saxons. Other
historians favour a
Scandinavian origin.
Fishing was the main source of
food and
income. The
Battle of Scheveningen was fought between English and Dutch fleets off the coast of the village on 10 August 1653. Thousands of people gathered on the shore to watch. In 1660
Montagu's flagship picked up the English king at Scheveningen in order to accomplish the
Restoration. A road to neighbouring The Hague was constructed in 1663 (current name: ). In 1470, a heavy storm destroyed the church and half the houses. The village was again hit by storms in 1570, 1775, 1825, 1860, 1881, and 1894. After this last storm, the villagers decided to build a harbour. Until then, the fishing boats had had a flat bottom (), and were pulled up the beach. By around 1870, over 150 of these boats were in use. Once the harbour had been constructed in 1904, more modern ships replaced the . In 1818, Jacob Pronk constructed a wooden building on a dune near the sea, from where people could bathe from four separate rooms. It marked the start of Scheveningen as a bathing resort. Since then, Scheveningen has attracted numerous tourists from all over Europe, notably from
Germany. The hotel
Kurhaus was opened in 1886. The village attracted a number of Dutch artists over the centuries, who painted the drawn up on the beach, or fishermen at work in the
North Sea. Notable painters who recorded the village include
Adriaen van de Velde,
Simon de Vlieger, and
Hendrik Willem Mesdag, whose large
panorama, 14 m high and 120 m wide, preserved the view of Scheveningen in 1881. The
International Skating Union was founded in Scheveningen in 1892. Anecdotal evidence exists of the name
Scheveningen being used as a
shibboleth during
World War II to identify German spies: they would pronounce the initial
Sch as one consonant (the
voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, pronounced approximately like , ), rather than the native Dutch sequence of the
voiceless alveolar sibilant followed by the
voiceless uvular fricative: , , as in
Genghis Khan. Scheveningen was never an independent municipality, but it has its own coat of arms, officially recognised by The Hague local council (proposal 136 of 23 March 1984); even in the Middle Ages, it was part of the same administrative region as The Hague. Nevertheless, Scheveningen always had a strong identity of its own. For instance, it had its own football club, playing in the highest Dutch division (its name was "Scheveningen Holland Sport"). In the course of the second half of the 20th century, this club was forced to merge with
ADO Den Haag. ship
MV Norderney, Scheveningen (7 April 1973) From 21 April 1960, the pirate radio station
Radio Veronica broadcast its programmes from an anchorage in the
North Sea about four miles off the Scheveningen coast, originally calling itself Vrije Radio Omroep Nederland (VRON), Free Radio Station [of the] Netherlands. It was joined by
Radio Noordzee Internationaal in 1970 and the relaunched
Radio Caroline in late 1972. When the Netherlands ratified the Treaty of Strasbourg on 1 September 1974, Veronica applied for legal status and became the VOO, Caroline moved anchorage to the English coast, and RNI closed down. Memorable episodes during this period included the stranding of Radio Veronica's ship, the
Norderney, which lost its anchor in a storm and ran aground on Scheveningen beach on 2 April 1973, and a firebomb attack on RNI's ship, the
Mebo II, on 15 May 1971. Since the 1970s the population of the original Scheveningen changed as the fishing industry declined and some artists and professionals moved in. Most of the fishermen, captains and trawler owners houses were demolished. Some still remain and have been protected by the authorities, including some of the original 'hofjes', in an enclosed area with small row houses on each side.
Slobodan Milošević, the 3rd
president of Serbia and Montenegro was found dead
in his prison cell on 11 March 2006 while he was being held in the
UN war crimes tribunal's detention center in Scheveningen. ==Culture==