Chapter 7. Victor Dewulf and Flavie Muylle, Torhout, 1879 to 1962

A farmer like his fathers

Victor Dewulf was born at Torhout on 20 May 1879, the third son of Desiderius and Barbara (chapter 6).¹ Like his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather, he became a farmer.

He married Flavie Muylle, whose full name was Flavia Maria Theresia. She was born at Hooglede on 1 February 1880.² Hooglede lies a few kilometres south of Torhout, towards Roeselare. According to the family tree, her parents were Joannes Baptiste Muylle and Philomena Blomme. They married at the town hall of Torhout on 18 November 1903, at eleven in the morning. Victor, twenty-four, was a klompenmaker, a clog maker, and his father was already dead; his mother Barbara Hillewaere, fifty-one, gave her consent in person. Flavie, twenty-three, was a werkster, a working woman, living at Torhout, and both her parents, farmers at Torhout, were present.³

The Torhout of their wedding was a busier place than their grandparents had known. Its potteries were having a last flowering, from 1897 to 1910, with ceramics in the art nouveau style; smiths from Hooglede had started a firm making weighing machines; and in 1911-1912 a weaving mill, the Société Textile de Flandres, opened in the town.⁷

The children

The first three children were born not at Torhout but at Zwevezele, a farming village about ten kilometres to the south-east, where the young family lived for some years; by 1913 they were back at Torhout:⁴

Sidon was born on a Thursday, at eleven in the morning. On Friday afternoon his father registered him at the town hall. The alderman wrote that he was Victor Dewulf, landbouwer, oud vier en dertig jaren, geboren te Thourout en er wonende, a farmer aged thirty-four, born and living at Thourout, and that the mother was Flavia Maria Theresia Muylle, zijne vrouw, huishoudster, oud drij en dertig jaren, geboren te Hooglede, his wife, a housewife, aged thirty-three, born at Hooglede. The two witnesses said they could not write. Victor signed V. De Wulf: the family still wrote its name as two words.¹

The war

Fifteen months after Sidon was born, the war came. German scouts drove into Torhout at the end of August 1914, and on 15 October 1914 the German army occupied the town and made the town hall its headquarters. For four years Torhout lay some twenty kilometres behind the trenches of the Yser front. It became a German hospital and rest area, and in 1915 the occupiers laid a tram and railway line through the town to supply their troops. Allied bombs fell on it too. In 1917 and 1918 most of the remaining mills were blown up or pulled down. When the Germans withdrew in October 1918 they destroyed the railway installations, the mills and the church tower. The Belgian army entered Torhout on 16 October 1918.⁵

The Dewulfs, farmers with four small children, lived through all of it. What the occupation meant for them is not in any record read for this history.

Old age at Sint-Henricus

Victor died on 1 December 1956 and Flavie on 15 January 1962, both at Sint-Henricus, a parish of Torhout.⁶ Their deaths are too recent for the civil registers to be open to the public, so these dates come from the family tree. They were seventy-seven and eighty-one.