Wilhelm Hartmann (entrepreneur, 1844)

Wilhelm Hartmann, around 1880

Wilhelm Hartmann (born March 21, 1844 in Aumund near Bremen ; † December 11, 1926 in Esher in England ) was a German entrepreneur and founder .

biography

Wilhelm Hartmann was the third of nine children of the master bricklayer Hinrich Hartmann and his wife Meta geb. Stricker was born in Aumund and grew up in Vegesack. At the age of 19 he emigrated to England, where he accepted a job as a businessman. Two years later he took over the distribution and later also the production of Rahtjens Composition Antifouling Paint in London with his brother-in-law and two of his brothers, an effective protective coating for ship hulls independently. The company grew vigorously under the name until the First World War, so that several branches in England and overseas were founded. It temporarily supplied all well-known shipyards, shipping companies and the British Navy. The company logo was a red hand and so the company has been called the Red Hand Company since the First World War . Hartmann remained unmarried and had no offspring. The company was sold around 1929, but the product is still manufactured by AkzoNobel as Thin Film Antifouling International VC17M .

In 1903 he acquired the Milbourne House country estate in Esher, Surrey , where he served as a justice of the peace. He did not forget his homeland either. In 1885 he donated an asylum to the city of Vegesack for poor and destitute sick people, which opened in 1887 as the Hartmannstift city ​​hospital . The Hartmannstift later became part of the Bremen-Nord Clinic , since 1961 exclusively a women's clinic, which, however, moved to the Bremen-Nord Central Hospital in 1988. Then the Hartmannstift building housed the Bremen-Nord building authority; it has been empty since 2010. He donated three lifeboats to the German Society for the Rescue of Shipwrecked People.

Due to the First World War, the connections to his hometown broke off. As an English citizen, he was one of the "enemies"; his life-size portrait in the city council meeting room was imposed in 1915. Hartmann did not forget this affront and the city of Vegesack or the Hartmannstift was not mentioned in his will. The portrait later found a place in the Hartmannstift and has been hanging in the new Vegesack townhouse since 2010.

Honors

In 1887 Hartmann became an honorary citizen of Vegesack. In 1909 Mühlenstrasse, where his parents' house was located, was named after him.

literature

Wilhelm Lührs: Hartmann, Wilhelm (William), in: Bremische Biographie 1912–1962, Ed. Historical Society of Bremen, Bremen 1969, No. 198, p. 208 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ : "Brief history of the Bremen-Nord Clinic"