Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy(Schaapmarktplein Sneek)

It was commissioned by the Comité Oprichting Nationaal Gedenkteken Prof. P.S. Gerbrandy. The statue was unveiled by Queen Juliana on Thursday, October 14, 1976.

The initiative to erect a national memorial to Gerbrandy came from a committee in Sneek, in response to an idea by former school principal Berend Keulen. This committee announced at a press conference in Sneek in October 1975 that it wanted to erect a monument to the memory of the man who was Prime Minister of the War Cabinet in London in the years 1940-1945 and through his energetic, determined and courageous actions led actual and passive resistance to Hitler-Germany.

The monument was not to be an interpretation, but should show Gerbrandy as he actually looked. Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy was born near Sneek on April 13, 1885 on a farm in Goëngamieden, in the municipality of Wymbritseradeel. His father kept red and white cattle there - the only one in the area. The family of father Sjoerd Joukes Gerbrandy, mother Jeltje Pieters van Zijl, three sons and a daughter, was Reformed and very sympathetic socially and politically. Apart from the statue on Schaapmarktplein, the name of a street in the Zwette Plan in Sneek reminds one of Professor P.S. Gerbrandy. In April 1968 his wife opened a Protestant Christian elementary school named after him on the Westhemstraat. This building has since been demolished. Gerbrandy later lived in a beautiful canal house at Westersingel 34 in Sneek where he settled as a lawyer in 1914.