In Memory of Kees (1958-2025)

Kees Maarschalkerweerd, who died on Dec 27th 2025, was an independent surveyor and a friend to our company; one in an army of independent inspectors who exist to report that delivered goods have entered the warehouse 'as per contact'.

The very existence of such surveyors can be said to prevent countless disputes between buyers and sellers across the commodities trade. And yet those who carry out this work are often uncelebrated and anonymous.

Kees was, for us, a paragon of his trade - known to many in the Minor Metals Trade Association and affably able to undertake our complicated instructions about how to survey the elements in the backwaters of the periodic table with which we were occupied.

Some may wonder at how people such as Kees entered this field. In Kees’ instance his life as an inspector looked back to a time before ports became automated. His father had been a lighterman in the port of Rotterdam, a trade plied by owners of small tramp vessels offering services of off-loading or loading commodities such as wood, cereals, metals scrap, cocoa beans, clinker, or other bulk commodities from vessel to barge or vice versa.

According to friends, it was possible to determine what cargo Kees had been working on by the materials in which he was often coated – coal dust for example!

In the 1950s his mother and father not only worked long hours on the river and estuary but lived onboard. It left such a lasting impression on the young man, that in later years Kees bought a barge on the water in Dordrecht which, with his wife Karlien, was home. If the family felt like a holiday, he told me, all he had to do was slip his moorings - and off they went!

Kees was no anachronism, though. His skills were those that are unlikely to be replaced by robots. His main expertise was ‘draft surveying’ – that is to say, measuring the displacement of vessels in the water at dock, to prove that the cargo at load port was one and the same as the cargo discharged. Kees’ skill and determination meant he was often to be found out in all weathers – wind, sun, rain, snow and ice – to climb the vertical metal ladders of vessels docking in the Port of Rotterdam. The draft surveyors’ job, often in a swell, was to take six or seven measurements of how the vessel lay, to do the calculations to measure displacement and apply the corrections appertaining to water density at load and discharge, and variations such as ballast, fuel use, and other consumables. On one occasion his close friend Ben recalls hanging onto Kees’ arm as he balanced on an ice-flow trying to decipher draft lines on a vessel’s bow, stern and midship.

Yes, Kees, was personally brave. But another key attribute was his willingness to embrace new work of almost any kind with the proviso not to depart from the professional morality of ‘independent inspection’. In the case of our own company’s trade in minor metals almost every challenge was new.

In the period from 1989, when the metal world found itself in the hands of new sellers from the former Soviet Union, such skills were in great demand.  And many came unstuck when a seller with only partial grasp of the nature of the goods he was selling, met a buyer who had a similarly hazy grasp of what he was buying.

We ourselves could so easily have fallen foul had we not made the decision early on to involve such sellers in correct practices as an insurance against disputes. It would have been all too easy, in those days of the ‘wild east’, to find room for misunderstanding - wilful or otherwise. Kees stood large in the doorway as our pillar of probity, issuing reports that detailed the exact condition of goods delivered, and listing the procedures of how they were sampled and analysed. Kees understood that his job was to fairly represent goods upon arrival in Rotterdam without fear or favour. And ‘boy oh boy’ (!) was the work varied!

Our relationship all started with a material that was so unusual and apparently insignificant that no one else in Rotterdam knew anything about it – or wanted to. APR (Ammonium Perrhenate) - a white crystalline powder that to the untrained eye could so easily be taken for cocaine. Consignments from Kazakhstan even came wrapped in little white cotton or plastic pillowcases; like something out of the 1971 film ‘The French Connection’. 

Kees merely applied himself to the subject, learning from us how the goods arose, how and why it needed to be packed as it was, and how valuable a few grammes could be. Following all the rules of his trade – he would inspect a parcel in its entirety - take samples across a parcel, cone and quarter with the purpose of obtaining a truly representative selection of the goods and then dispatch the resulting kilo, or grammes, for analysis (keeping sufficient reserve samples at the RC Inspection BV office). Kees became our main surveyor for this and so many other elements in the periodic table for more than 30 years.

Some of the materials Kees viewed on our behalf were not just uncommon to our trade but rarely seen by metallurgists, or even in nature. Crystals of scandium, hafnium and zirconium, mixed parcels of rare earths containing everything from erbium to holmium, terbium to ytterbium. Some parcels were scrap of zirconium heat-exchangers, old Soviet nickel-cadmium battery plates, flanges and off-cuts of titanium fabrications, palladium-bearing air filter catalyst from old Soviet submarines, and much more. Each of these presented unique problems for the sampler, to which Kees lent his professionalism and talent.

Perhaps one of his finest hours (for us) came with a cargo of thallium that our company purchased from Kazakhstan - a material toxic to the human organism but nevertheless useable safely, and essentially, in certain industrial applications.

It was on the cusp of the moment when the EU, in a fit of regulatory piousness under the EU Chemical directive, had effectively decided - by omission - that thallium, from a compliance point of view, did not exist. It was something straight out of the copybook of the Soviet Union. Physically the goods were in store at a leading LME/MMTA registered warehouse. Bureaucratically, they were not.

The regulation between the time the goods had entered the warehouse, and the time of its inspection had altered to the extent that it was no longer legal to move such goods as originally packed. The new rules dictated that thallium – as a marine pollutant – could only be stored in specific UN drums. But how to unpack from the old Soviet wooden cases into those stipulated when the regulation dictated it was not possible to touch the goods in their original packing?

This was clearly a job for Kees!

In fact, the thallium had been packed beautifully at source in wooden cases, ingots individually wrapped in paraffin-impregnated paper, and each lot covered and sealed with a two-inch layer of wax. The chance of poisonous thallium leaching into the environment or anywhere else was extremely slim. But the law stipulated that unless such goods were in UN drums they could not be moved. The warehouse did not want the goods in their warehouse, while we (who had a customer for them) were not permitted to move it. So, with permission of the warehouse, it was agreed that the goods could exceptionally travel in vans at night to Kees’ preparation laboratory where Kees (dressed in full hazmat gear and breathing apparatus) would delicately unwrap and place each ingot into new and correctly labelled UN and EU-approved regulation packing, and dispose of all exterior clothing afterwards. By morning the goods were back in the warehouse as if they had never moved.

Thanks to Kees’ work our company was able to deliver the thallium to our customer, where the molecules were safely put to work in specialty glass. [‘Glass?’, you ask. No, not tumblers for whisky or cognac, but for doping in glass micro-lenses for the platen of scanner machines. Their purpose? To un-bend the light to create the pixel-for-pixel accurate photocopies and scanned documents we take as routine.]

Kees was a modest man with a lion’s heart – kind to all of us – a man who would introduce himself on the phone, as Suzannah has told me, with the words – ‘It’s your worst nightmare!’

In fact, the very opposite. It was Kees alone who saved us from every living nightmare we would have experienced had it not been for his supreme professionalism.

We shall truly miss him.

By Anthony Lipmann

11th January 2026