Heligoland Read online

  In 1868 the island saw the establishment of half a dozen English coastguards under a Royal Navy officer. The officer was also appointed Wreck Receiver – and thereby, on the subject of wreck and salvage, enabled ship-owners to obtain justice. Instead of being an alleged nest of wreckers, Heligoland became renowned for the order and regularity preserved when wrecks occurred. There was a sense that the presence of uniformed British coastguard officials on the island somehow brought Britain and Heligoland closer together. During gales the islanders used to drag their small lobster boats up to safety among the houses of the Lower Town, while their sloops had to ride out the worst of the storms at moorings that might frequently be carried away. Hitherto the island’s fishermen had lived heroically, often using their boats as lifeboats, manoeuvring them skilfully through the shoals that beset the island to save some schooner or brig driven aground. The arrival of the coastguards to do this work further strengthened the link of common seafaring experience between Britain and Heligoland.

  And yet still there were few in Britain who really knew much about the island. Artistic works were made of it, but for one reason or another the British public seldom got a chance to view them. In 1837 a grotesque etching entitled ‘The Death-boat of Heligoland’, of drowning mariners in a tempestuous sea, was created in the style of the seascape artist J.M.W. Turner, although it only appeared as an illustration in a collection of poems by Thomas Campbell. The exhibits displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace and the 1886 Colonial Exhibition in London gave the general public the opportunity to get some idea of the nature of Britain’s colonies. Heligoland, unfortunately, was too diminutive to be considered worthy of representation at such gatherings. In 1856 a sculpture of Alfred the Great clutching a Heligoland-style Frisian boat was unveiled at the Royal Academy. It was then permanently sited within the confines of the Houses of Parliament, but in a spot so obscure that no one had a chance to associate it with Heligoland. In the 1880s Hamilton Macallum, a distinguished Royal Academician, visited the island and was well received at Government House. The many images of it he painted during his visit were exhibited in London – but in the Grosvenor Gallery where only a privileged few had a chance to view them. During the nineteenth century the few charts the Admiralty produced of Heligoland were seen by only a few seafarers. The nearest the island ever came to ‘official’ pictures were the water-colours and sketches done by Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Frome of the Royal Engineers, who in the 1850s was apparently stationed on the island with the temporary garrison during the Crimean War scare. These were never shown in public, and could only be privately viewed at the Royal Commonwealth Society’s collection in Cambridge (from where they were eventually stolen in 1989).

  By Victorian times many more British people knew of the existence of Heligoland and were generally well disposed towards the island. But it really captured the British public’s imagination when Miss L’Estrange wrote a detailed and enchanting exposition of life on Heligoland. She was the daughter of an invalided British officer who had been stationed there years earlier. Her slim book, Heligoland, or Reminiscences of Childhood, somewhat surprisingly, became a bestseller and was reprinted four times in the 1850s. Nevertheless, in contrast to the Napoleonic period, when (weather permitting) dispatches from the island would appear in The Times twice a week, often whole years would pass without the island being mentioned by any British newspaper.

  Somehow there were very few Britons interested in actually making a visit, although the facilities for doing so were well-enough organised. According to a newspaper advertisement of 1836, passengers with the General Steam Navigation Company could travel from the City of London to Heligoland within 30 hours. The company ran a fleet of five ships, one of which would call twice a week to collect passengers from the foot of Lombard Street, at Custom House stairs. Departing down the Thames on a Wednesday morning aboard one of their ships bound for Hamburg, for example, passengers for the island could disembark en route at Cuxhaven and after a short trip on a mail boat, weather permitting, arrive in Heligoland at lunchtime on the Thursday.

  In contrast, German curiosity about the island had begun to grow. Ironically, the roots of their curiosity can be traced back to an incidence of British parliamentary meanness. In 1825 Joseph Hume’s persuasive denunciation in the House of Commons of what he insisted was the excessive cost of the island’s garrison had resulted in the removal of the two hundred soldiers later that year.6 It was a move which further required the islanders’ to revive their fishing skills, as well as the trades of their forefathers as pilots, capitalising on their specialist knowledge of the shifting sands and perilous mudbanks of the estuaries of the Bight’s great rivers. Even so, something more was needed to develop the island’s natural resources. Quite unexpectedly it was a Heligolandish carpenter who in 1826 came forward to create the foundations of a scheme that would eventually transform the island’s economic fortunes. Jakob Andersen Siemens had done quite well for himself on the mainland and now began to wonder how he might help his homeland. Could, he mused, a sea-bathing establishment be set up on Heligoland’s dependency, Sandy Island?

  The winters were usually stormy. May and even June were often wet and foggy. Even so, a few visitors came in the first summer season between early July and late September. In 1828 they numbered just a hundred. In a decade that figure had become a thousand, and the number kept rising until by the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was nearing fourteen thousand. The salubrity of the summer climate and the excellence of Sandy Island’s sea bathing assisted Heligoland’s evolution into one of the most fashionable and fun-loving bathing resorts of northern Europe. The visitors were from every rank in society, from princes to tradesmen, and most came from Hamburg and the other towns on the neighbouring coast. The paddle-steamer trip from Hamburg, down the winding Elbe, across the estuary and thence into the Bight, was in distance remarkably similar to the trip Londoners might regularly make to Margate on the Kent coast. Significantly, few of the summertime visitors to Heligoland were British; they were virtually all German.

  Because the British Empire embraced dozens of small island colonies – many of them tropical – across the world, Heligoland was naturally perceived by most British people in benignly matter-of-fact terms as being relatively unexceptional, but to the Germans it was a vivid novelty. Not only was it a unique offshore (rather than inshore) North Sea island, it was physically totally unlike anywhere else in Lower Saxony. In contrast to the mile upon mile of deserted fields that made up the drably featureless Frisian coastline, ‘perhaps covered in snow, bathed in a murky light’,7 the Germans regarded Heligoland as geographically unique, with its towering red cliffs, rocky shore and capricious sands. These beguiling attractions were enhanced by the oscillating tides and the presence of countless gulls and migratory seabirds which seasonally flocked to the island from distant lands. The mesmerising, magical sense of a charmed island which had somehow survived the rigours of fierce storms yet remained beautiful all added to the sense of the place as a whimsical paradise.

  In contrast to their British counterparts, German writers, artists and musicians were heavily influenced by the North Sea island. Composers who went there for spiritual fieldwork included Anton Bruckner (who in 1893 even wrote a work aptly entitled Helgoland), Franz Liszt, Hans von Bülow, and even the Austrian Gustav Mahler. Among the Germanic artists drawn to the island were the painter Gustav Schönleber. Sturmläuken auf Helgoland, a dramatic oil painting depicting Rubensesque Heligolanders hurrying along a street in a violent storm, was created by Rudolf Jordan. Famous writers also came: men of such stature as Franz Kafka, August Strindberg, and also Friedrich Hebbel. A particularly enthusiastic visitor was the influential German travel writer Reinhardt – the originator of the hymn ‘Watch of the German Fatherland’ – who published a glowing account of his trip.

  To the bemusement of the independently minded islanders, creative Prussian intellectuals presumptuously depicted Heligoland as the exem
plification of German virtues and the ‘Germanic spirit’. None did it more preposterously than the German lyricist August Heinrich Hoffmann. But few Heligolanders could have predicted his achievement back in 1841 when he first arrived on the island, virtually unnoticed. Born in Fallersleben near Wolfsburg in 1798, he had been employed as a professor of the history of language at the University of Breslau. In 1840 he published a political critique expressing National-Liberal views, as a consequence of which he was forced to leave Prussia, and he decided to travel abroad for a few years. On 28 August 1841, while sheltering as a political exile in Heligoland, he wrote the song ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’ (‘Germany, Germany over all’), under the pen-name Hoffmann von Fallersleben. It was an emotive work that pleaded for a single unified Germany to take precedence over all the numerous states into which the country was fragmented at the time. In due course, a number of years later, the song became Germany’s national anthem. This had the effect of bolstering the growing but absurd myth that Heligoland was, by association, something to do with Germany.

  Ironically, one unexpected consequence of adhering to Sir Edward Thornton’s well-meant entreaty that the colony be administered more or less as it had been in Danish times was that in two symbolic respects its sovereignty could be misconstrued as having German elements. Shortly after the island’s surrender in 1807, the British discovered a lighthouse on the highest point of the plateau. It took the form of a red-brick tower upon which was kept alight a coal fire. Surprisingly, captured papers revealed that its maintenance (and that of a similar lighthouse on Neuwerk Isle at the mouth of the Elbe) was financed by the Admiralty of Hamburg, which for countless years had been paying for 700 tons of high-quality coal to be procured for it each year from Scotland.8 At Colonel Hamilton’s recommendation the tower was replaced by a more effective, state-of-the-art rounded lighthouse, similar in type to those then being built around the coast of Ireland. However, because of Joseph Hume’s repeated criticisms in Parliament about the amount of money spent on the island, since 1825 the authorities in Hamburg had again been permitted to pay for the light’s running costs, although it remained the property of Trinity House.

  There was further blurring of the island’s national identity. Again to save money, the Colonial Office had allowed Heligoland’s postal affairs to be run by the City of Hamburg. With the British government paying the maintenance expenses, the postal authorities of Prussia undertook to design, engrave and print all the necessary labels and stationery at their own Royal Printing Office (ironically, it was they who printed Queen Victoria’s head on the stamps). That rather Byzantine modus operandi led to some astonishing scams. By 1870 a series of special stamps, which had first been issued in 1867, were being widely forged, notably by a gang of criminals known as the Spiro Brothers. Their plates somehow fell into the hands of a printer in Hamburg. Then a Herr Goldner, a dealer in that city, was allowed to purchase the plates of ten stamps of different value from the Royal Printing Office in Berlin. All the stamps were defunct, but immediately he obtained possession of them he set about producing reprints, charging double the ordinary price for supplying them postmarked. This arrangement caused ill-feeling between Government House on the island and the Hamburg Post Office, while much-needed revenue was being forfeited by the farming-out of the production of those symbols of nationhood.

  In 1848 the Germans were rethinking their naval strategy; although it was not evident at the time, this would have a profound influence on the future of Heligoland. In that year a former German diplomat, who had recently embarked on a career in politics but was still virtually unknown, wondered if the effectiveness of the German Navy could be increased by widening the barge canal that wound across the Jutland peninsula separating the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. His name was Otto von Bismarck. Far-sightedly he set about quietly acquiring the land rights which could eventually serve as the territorial basis for the construction of the Kiel Canal. ‘I travelled back to Berlin with the cession of an old strip of land on the Jade in my pocket, thinking not a little of my achievement’, he later admitted.9 But for many years subsequently, Bismarck was entirely distracted from his canal scheme by more pressing affairs of state.

  In the meantime, however, the planners of Germany’s fledgling coastal navy were increasingly having strategic nightmares about the Royal Navy’s devastating raid against the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807. The central question buzzing in their minds was how they could best forestall the British from making such a ruinously effective pre-emptive attack against their own warships. Ironically, their sense of strategic vulnerability was increased by the inauguration in 1869 of a new naval base called Wilhelmshaven. It was Germany’s equivalent to Chatham, but its location a few miles inland in the muddy Jade estuary made it potentially vulnerable to a blockade by the British, who could use Heligoland as a forward base, just 48 miles north across the Bight. With that strategic disadvantage in mind Admiral Ludwig von Henk, one of the developers of the new German Navy, in 1882 wrote a pamphlet entitled Heligoland’s Strategic Significance to Germany, in which he argued that it was vital for Germany to acquire the island.

  Rather surprisingly, even senior German naval officers were so awed by the power Britain could presumably wield via Heligoland that they overlooked the likelihood of the island being implicated in regional wars even when Britain remained neutral. This was brought home to Governor Ernest Maxse on 9 May 1864 during the Second Schleswig war when a ferocious sea-battle occurred between Austro-Prussian and Danish warships just off the coast of Sandy Island. Earlier that week the British government had hosted a reconciliation conference in London, at which the combatant nations had agreed to a limited armistice. So there was consternation in the Colonial Office at 2 o’clock that afternoon when a telegram suddenly arrived, via a newly installed North Sea telegraph cable, direct from Maxse. Excitedly he reported: ‘The Danes have won the action. One Austrian frigate is in flames, and she, together with the other Austrian frigate, and gunboats, is making for Heligoland. They are almost in English waters.’ Soon the battered vessels were lying at anchor in the roadstead just off the island. Momentarily there must have been some alarm that the fight might continue within the British jurisdiction, or even that the Danes might take advantage of the confusion to recapture Heligoland. But eventually the bedraggled Danish fleet sailed off, perhaps deterred by the sight of the frigate HMS Aurora, pugnaciously riding at anchor as guardship just south of the island with all her guns run out and ready for action.

  Mischievously trying to provoke a conflict with Britain, soon afterwards German nationalists wrote reports in continental newspapers falsely claiming that this British warship had manoeuvred to deceive and impede the Austrian squadron. Then, in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, in which Britain was also neutral, Heligoland’s non-involvement was again compromised. Unsuccessful though the French were on the battlefields, they had a substantial navy and put it to practical use blockading Germany’s navigable estuaries in the Bight. Not since the ‘continental system’ of the Napoleonic wars had there been so many ships anchored in the Heligoland roadstead. The opportunistic islanders sought every chance to sell provisions to the crews of the French blockading vessels. These breaches of neutrality became so blatant that in 1871 the German Ambassador in London demanded an enquiry into reports that the Heligolanders had been supplying coal to the French warships. Governor Maxse had previously turned a blind eye to the islanders’ activities, and the island’s parliament was furious when Whitehall ordered him to put a stop to such violations of British neutrality. Even so, just as he had done in 1864, Maxse used the island as an ideal observation post to keep London informed by telegraph of the locations and movements of the rival warships.

  Despite unnervingly close encounters in those two wars, Britain still failed to fortify the island. As long ago as April 1860 official meanness frustrated Governor Pattinson’s initiative to muster a local voluntary militia. He successfully raised a corps of twenty-five re
cruits but by January 1861 the scheme had collapsed because, despite numerous written pleas from Pattinson, the Colonial Office refused to pay for the much-needed ammunition to be sent from the Army depot at Purfleet. In October 1871 – according to the German newspaper Kreuz Zeitung – a battery of 12-pounder Armstrong guns was sent to the island from England, but they were only to be used for firing fog signals and salutes, and were not perceived as having any defensive function. There were anxieties that the accompanying stocks of gunpowder would run out anyway, Britain being too tight-fisted to ensure that supplies were regularly delivered.10