Born in Amsterdam in 1866, the fourth child in a family of five, Deterding was the son of a master mariner who died when he was only six, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. However, he was educated up to the age of sixteen at the Higher Citizens' School in Amsterdam.
Career
After leaving school, Deterding took a clerical position in the Twentsche Bank, where he developed a remarkable aptitude for handling figures. To avoid the slow promotion of a banking career, he entered an examination for positions in the Netherlands Trading Society of the Dutch East Indies, gained first place, and was appointed to the company's Eastern staff. After some years with the firm, he began to work in the oil industry, which was then in its infancy. In May 1896, at the age of thirty, Deterding took a job with the Royal Dutch Oil Company, working with the managing director, J. B. A. Kessler. At the time, Royal Dutch was not a major company, still struggling to make good, and Deterding was instrumental in piloting it through many difficulties. Kessler died in March, 1900, leaving instructions, put in writing shortly before his death, that he wished Deterding to take over from him as general manager. Soon gaining the nickname of "the Napoleon of Oil", Deterding was responsible for developing the tanker fleet that enabled Royal Dutch to compete with the Shell company of Marcus Samuel. He led Royal Dutch to several major mergers and acquisitions, including the merger with Samuel's "Shell" Transport and Trading Company in 1907 and the purchase of Azerbaijan oil fields from the Rothschild family in 1911. In the last years of his life, Deterding was controversial when he became an admirer of the German Nazi Party. In 1936, he discussed with them the sale of a year's oil reserves on credit; the next year, he was forced to resign from the position of general manager, but remained a member of the company's board.
Personal life
In 1894, Deterding married firstly Catharina Neubronner, a Dutch woman, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In 1924 he married secondly Lydia Pavlovna Koudoyaroff, a daughter of the White Russian General Paul Koudoyaroff, who had been the mistress of his rival Calouste Gulbenkian, and they had two daughters, including the socialite Olga Deterding. After that marriage ended in divorce, at the age of seventy Deterding married finally Charlotte Mina Knack, a German who had been a secretary in the company, who later became a member of the Nazi Party, but there were no further children. During his second marriage, his English country house was Buckhurst Park at Winkfield in Berkshire, where Mrs Deterding continued to live with her two daughters after the divorce. The British newspaper the Daily Mail mistakenly published Deterding's obituary on 27 June 1924, and the news was copied by The New York Times under the heading "Henry Deterding dies at film show; Director General of the Royal Dutch Company Succumbs Suddenly in The Hague". However, on that day the Dutch envoy in London, René de Marees van Swinderen, said in a letter to the Dutch foreign minister, Herman Adriaan van Karnebeek:
"P.S. I could not resist sending also herewith the obituary in the Daily Mail dedicated to Deterding, who happily is very much alive."
In 1936, Deterding bought the manor of Dobbin, near Krakow am See, in Mecklenburg, Germany, and moved there. He also had a property in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and was there when he died on 4 February 1939. His body was returned to Dobbin to be buried there, but in 1968 it was moved again, to a grave in Liechtenstein.
