Heligoland Read online

  Heligoland is just 290 miles from Britain’s Norfolk coast.

  GEORGE DROWER

  First published in 2002

  This edition published in 2011

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © George Drower, 2002, 2011

  The right of George Drower, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7280 5

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7279 9

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. HMS Explosion Arrives

  2. Gibraltar of the North Sea

  3. Rivalries in Africa

  4. Queen Victoria Opposes

  5. Swapped

  6. The Riddle of the Sands

  7. Churchill Prepares to Invade

  8. Project Hummerschere

  9. ‘Big Bang’

  10. The Islanders Return

  11. Forgotten Island

  Notes

  Bibliography

  (Harrison, Pastures New, 1954)

  Introduction

  ‘There are warnings of gales in Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Dogger, Fisher . . .’. Those sea area reports, which are read out on the UK’s Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast, all have their own recognisable personalities and quintessentially British-sounding names. A curious exception is the one called ‘German Bight’. It is a wild 20,000-square-mile area of sea and coast which stretches between two headlands: near the Dutch island of Texel, to the Jutland port of Esbjerg. For many centuries seafarers knew this tempestuous corner of the North Sea as the ‘Heligoland Bight’. That was until 1956 when, in the absence of any British government objections, the Meteorological Office agreed for it to be renamed. For secretive reasons it was not Germany which preferred to keep Heligoland Bight airbrushed out of its history, and with it the remarkable story of the forgotten island at its heart – from which the Bight’s true name derives.

  Then on 18 August 1965 a file marked ‘Secret’ landed on the desk of the Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart. At that time Britain was having to protect the inhabitants of Gibraltar against an economic siege by Spain, which was demanding sovereignty of the Rock. Yet the Foreign Office was willing to become more radical in its steps to cope with such ‘End of Empire’ dilemmas. In 1968 it contemplated handing over the Falkland Islands to Argentina. Secretly, in order for Britain to conduct H-bomb tests, it had arranged for the eviction of the coconut gatherers from Christmas Island in 1957, and in 1966 was considering deporting the inhabitants of Diego Garcia from their homeland, to lend it to the United States to develop into a military base.

  Stewart was intrigued to see that this report concerned none of those. It was from the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Frank Roberts, who had just attended a 75th anniversary celebration in a North Sea island which even the Foreign Secretary had never heard of. The ambassador, who had been astounded by the good-natured welcome he had received in this former British colony, reported that: ‘Everywhere I heard comments from the Islanders on the tradition of the benevolence of the British Governors.’

  In August 1890, when it was still an enchantingly obscure British possession, Heligoland had become the focus of international attention as the hapless bait in an astonishingly epic imperial deal to persuade Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany to hand over substantial elements of the continent of Africa. In Britain the audacious, and quite unprecedented, territorial swap provoked public protests that Summer. Even Queen Victoria furiously remonstrated that the two thousand inhabitants of this sophisticated island were being callously sacrificed like pawns in a diplomatic chess game.

  Unforseeably, the story of Britain’s involvement with Heligoland continued after the transfer of sovereignty in 1890. There was cause bitterly to lament Lord Salisbury’s decision to yield it in both world wars, when the strategically vital island was turned against Britain. It was becoming, as Admiral of the Fleet ‘Jacky’ Fisher, exclaimed, ‘a dagger pointed at England’s heart’. In its waters was fought the Battle of Heligoland Bight, the first surface scrimmage of the First World War; and next, the Cuxhaven Raid, the first British seaplane incursion. Started on the island was ‘Project Hummerschere’, an ambitious scheme in the interwar years to construct a German form of Scapa Flow – so important that it was visited by Hitler in 1938. During the Second World War there came to be further significant historic records: for example, in 1940 the RAF’s first mass night bombing raid of that conflict was made over the Bight.

  And then, unbeknown to many, Britain next inflicted on Heligoland a misdeed far worse than a mere swap. Between 1945 and 1952 the Heligolanders were exiled to mainland Germany while the British – probably illegally – used the island as a bombing range for high-explosive and chemical weapons, and evidently as a test-site for various elements of Britain’s prototype atomic bomb. Even now the quaint mile-long island still bears the scars, albeit now hidden by lush vegetation. Such was the severity of the bomb damage suffered in April 1945, when the 140-acre former British colony was attacked by the RAF with a thousand-bomber raid, that the windswept upper plateau remains buckled and twisted like the cratered flight deck of a crippled aircraft carrier. Despite such devastation, there remain a few indelible clues to its British colonial past: a street named after an English governor, and a church wall bearing a shrapnel-scarred bronze tablet honouring Queen Victoria.

  For all its commercial sophistication, Heligoland is a beguiling place, guided predominantly by the rhythms of the seasons. Its people are a tough, independently minded, close-knit community of seafaring folk: strong, stoic, quiet and slow-moving. Their first loyalty is to their island and their outlook so innately maritime that they instinctively keep their sturdy houses and tiny gardens neat and shipshape. On the walls of their hotels, guest houses and even private houses hang maritime pictures – sometimes of old British merchant ships. Traditionally, despite Heligoland’s constitutional links to the states of Denmark, Britain and then Germany, they have continuously sustained a deep perception of themselves and their island as a distinct and viable entity. Not untypically for inhabitants of small islands, their downfall has been their reluctance to sustain an effective representation of themselves in influential political arenas abroad until it is too late.

  Known to the Germans as ‘Helgoland’, for simple linguistic reasons, the island lies tantalisingly close to Germany’s North Sea coast. Even so, the severity of the weather in the Heligoland Bight means tourist ferries mostly only dare to make the 30-mile dash during the summer months. German trippers willing to brave the often stormy trip arrive from Hamburg and the coastal ports of the coasts of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. By late morning the graceful white ferries have converged on the roadstead, where they ride at anchor until the late afternoon; then, fearful of being caught in the Bight after dark, they wisely scurry off home. To visitors, the island seems to represent an earlier, more innocent world, and one which has no need for cars or even bicycles. Goods are moved o
n four-wheeled hand-trolleys, rather like miniature corn wagons. Each year tens of thousands of tourists are drawn to the island, some of them attracted by its defiantly anachronistic allure as one of Western Europe’s last outposts of duty-free shopping. Some trippers go for the chance of a few hours’ bathing on the nearby dependency, Sandy Island, and a few for the exceptionally clear sea air, which is claimed to be the secret of the islanders’ remarkably healthy old age.

  Heligoland became a British colony in 1807, and from the very outset it was strategically important because of its location in the corner of the North Sea near the estuary of the Elbe and three other great rivers. During the Napoleonic wars the island played a crucial role as a forward base for the officially endorsed smuggling of contraband to the continent, and also as a centre for intelligence gathering. After the wars it established itself as a tourist resort, on the initiative of an entrepreneurial islander, and settled down to life as a British colony. For Britain, a major world power with more island colonies scattered across the globe than it knew what to do with, Heligoland was not unique. But for neighbouring Germany, it was very much a novelty. Artists, poets and nationalists venerated Heligoland, all too often – to the bemusement of the islanders – devising ludicrous fantasies that it embodied the essence of the Germanic spirit. In 1841 Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote Germany’s (old) national anthem there (while it was still under British rule!) Few were more enchanted with the romance of the place than Kaiser Wilhelm II; some years before he was crowned, he visited the island and vowed to make it German. Bismarck, his Chancellor, regarded Heligoland in terms of its strategic disadvantages as a British outpost, and coveted it for many years, not least to provide security for his pet project, the Kiel Canal. Indeed, he even suggested to Prime Minister William Gladstone that the island might be exchanged for an enclave in India called Pondicherry. This was refused.

  But in August 1890 Lord Salisbury (who was both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary) prepared to hand over this enchanting island to Germany in order to halt further German encroachments into East Africa, thereby preventing the ruthless German colonialist Dr Karl Peters – himself born near Heligoland – from gaining control of the headwaters of the Nile. This astonishingly audacious deal – concerning which the islanders’ opinions were never sought – included Zanzibar and various border areas in East Africa. Salisbury certainly did not get everything his own way. His fiercest critic was no less a personage than Queen Victoria, who in private furiously condemned Salisbury for even considering handing over the island. Several British newspapers and cartoonists were nearly as scathing in their criticism.

  One cause of the interest in the island was its actual physical composition. The power of the waves in the Bight was such that Heligoland (and Sandy Island) was perpetually changing its shape. Coastal erosion was ongoing: sometimes barely perceptibly, but occasionally, especially in winter, dramatically, as prized sections of the cliffs disappeared overnight. And yet somehow Heligoland retained a magical quality of indestructibility. No matter what Nature (or Allied bombers) could hurl at it, the island would always survive. For decades none of this has ever needed to be known to British travellers because few, if any, caught even the most distant glimpse of the island. Passengers on civilian airliners never see Heligoland through the portholes because all the aircraft that shuttle between England and the main northern German cities – Bremen, Hanover, Hamburg and Berlin – cross the North Sea coast over the Netherlands. And even the car ferries operating between Harwich and nearby Cuxhaven often sail past the island at night.

  In view of the number of significant events and personages with which it has been associated, it is astonishing that Heligoland has remained so undiscovered. It is only 290 miles from Great Yarmouth, yet very few people in Britain even know of its existence at the centre of the stormy Bight. Each year, on 9 August, the islanders gather at their town hall, the Nordseehalle, for a dignified public commemoration of the 1890 cession. But no British person ever attends it. By an extraordinary series of oversights, Heligoland has repeatedly missed out on opportunities to make the headlines in Britain. It broke a remarkable assortment of historical records: in addition to having the quaint distinction of being Britain’s smallest colonial possession, Heligoland was also Britain’s only colony in northern Europe. The first sea battle of the First World War was fought in its waters, while in the Second World War it was reputed to have been the first piece of German territory upon which RAF bombs fell. Then, in the postwar era, it secretly figured in Britain’s atomic bomb programme.

  So often it slipped through the net. In Victorian times its people were seldom invited to colonial gatherings, and later, when the British Commonwealth began to take shape in the 1920s, it did not participate in that either because it no longer had any constitutional links with Britain. Both the 25th and the 50th anniversaries of its transfer into German hands coincided with more dramatic events in the First and Second World Wars respectively, and so the occasions passed unnoticed in Britain. Several interesting consequences have flowed from this lack of wider British knowledge of Heligoland. Almost invariably it has allowed Whitehall a freer hand, almost always at the expense of the interests of the island. For the public, having ceased to be reminded of it, Heligoland vanished beyond the horizon of consciousness. Soon the only readily perceivable lost worlds were fictional places in movies like: Mysterious Island (1961), Creatures the World Forgot (1971), The Island at the Top of the World (1974), and The People That Time Forgot (1977).

  Government secrecy has certainly played a part in the island’s history. At first it was as a matter of traditional diplomatic practice that details of the 1807 accession treaty were not publicly disclosed until 1890. More recently there are grounds for wondering whether official attempts have been made to brush aside embarrassing details of Britain’s treatment of Heligoland. Dusty ledgers at the Public Record Office at Kew clearly show in fine copperplate handwriting that several confidential documents concerning the attitudes of the islanders to the swap deal have been destroyed. However, the Heligolanders have clear memories of the misdemeanours committed against their island. This is their story of the enchanting island that Britain knew as the ‘Gibraltar of the North Sea’.

  1

  HMS Explosion Arrives

  Some 30 miles from the coasts of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, Heligoland rises like a fist from the swirling waters of the North Sea. Its cliffs tower some 200 feet above sea level, their red sandstone vivid against the cold flatness. Nearby are Germany’s East Frisian Islands (Borkum, Memmert, Juist, Norderney, Baltrum, Langeoog, Spiekeroog and Wangerooge), separated from the mainland by mud and sand flats. Strung parallel to the Lower Saxony coast, this chain of low-lying islands once formed an offshore bar stretching from Calais to the Elbe. Between the coastal islets stretch the muddy estuaries of the rivers Elbe, Ems, Weser and Eider. In this area, known as the Heligoland Bight, strong currents, high winds blowing down from the Arctic and relatively shallow waters combine to produce not only severe weather but also steep waves. Historically, in some winters the rivers would freeze over, and with the thaw large sheets of ice would tear free and flow downstream to the open sea. Even in medieval times such dangerous waters required daring and specialist piloting skills that very few locals other than the Heligolanders were perceived to possess. Centuries later those exceptionally grim sea conditions were vividly brought to the attention of British mariners in the spy novel The Riddle of the Sands by the famous adventure writer and yachtsman Erskine Childers.

  By the late summer of 1807, during the Napoleonic wars, England’s situation had become more dangerously isolated than ever. On land, Bonaparte’s armies were sweeping across Europe, relentlessly shattering the powerful coalition the British Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, had constructed just two years earlier with Austria, Russia and Sweden. Austria was defeated at Austerlitz in 1805, Prussia partly broken at Jena in 1806, and the Russians overcome in East Prussi
a in July 1807. Under the terms of the momentous Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807, Napoleon demanded that Russia become an ally of France; its territories were much reduced and some occupied by French troops, as was what remained of the Lower Saxony part of Prussia. So swiftly did Napoleon’s forces ride into Lower Saxony later that month that Sir Edward Thornton, Britain’s plenipotentiary in Hamburg (effectively its ambassador) had to flee overland to Kiel, narrowly escaping capture. When, soon afterwards, French troops occupied Portugal and then Spain, Napoleon assumed that in some form or other he had secured control of the entire coastline of mainland Europe from the Adriatic to the Baltic.

  So far, of all the forces ranged against Napoleon, only the Royal Navy had succeeded in making any significant strategic impact. The attacks on French shipping off Egypt at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and on the Danish fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 proved that Britain was able to make audaciously devastating strikes by sea. Forced by the destruction of the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805 to cancel his long-planned invasion of England, Napoleon decided to bide his time and rebuild his navy. In the meantime he devised an equally ambitious scheme that was intended to subjugate Britain by economic means. In November 1806 he decreed that the so-called ‘continental system’ was to be imposed along the entire coastline of Europe; this was intended to stop any of France’s enemies, as well as neutral countries, from trading with Britain. By placing Britain under blockade, he hoped to ruin the international trade that formed the bedrock of her prosperity, and thus force her to accept his terms for peace. In January 1807 the British government retaliated by declaring a counter-blockade, by which Royal Navy warships would prevent vessels of any neutral country having commercial dealings with any French port, or with any port belonging to the allies of the French.