Heligoland Read online

  Wilhelm was becoming frantic, as can be seen from a cipher telegram he received from Marschall on 4 June, upon which he scribbled various irate annotations.

  At yesterday’s conference between Count Hatzfeldt and Lord Salisbury the latter declared that he had found much anxiety amongst his colleagues concerning these concessions [Kaiser: ‘!’] and suggested that it would be better to postpone further this and the connected question of the Protectorate over Zanzibar [Kaiser: ‘No! All or nothing!’] and leave it for a later agreement. [Kaiser: ‘No!’]22

  Having convinced himself that no more concessions were to be garnered from Germany, on 5 June Salisbury closed the negotiations with Hatzfeldt, subject to the approval of his colleagues. It was a comprehensive draft agreement which covered not just Zanzibar but other parts of East Africa, and even reached as far as West and South-West Africa. In West Africa the boundary between Togo and the British Gold Coast colony was adjusted, and in the Cameroons there was a realignment of the western boundary between the German and British possessions. In South-West Africa the boundary between that German colony and British Bechuanaland was delimited, and Germany was given access from her Protectorate to the Zambezi by the cession to her of a strip of territory known as the ‘Caprivi Strip’. In East Africa new boundaries were defined. In the north Germany was to cede in favour of Britain all claims in respect of Witu and the Somaliland coast; and the immense region from the coast to the Congo was to be divided in such a manner that Britain took the territory lying north and Germany that lying south of a line from the River Umba across Lake Victoria to the frontier of the Congo Free State. Further, Germany agreed to acknowledge a British Protectorate of Zanzibar and the neighbouring island of Pemba.23 In return Britain undertook to persuade the Sultan to grant to Germany his coastal territory in East Africa. Eventually the Sultan agreed to cede his rights in the area for a payment of £200,000.

  Map 3 Africa in late 1890. (A Short History of Africa, Penguin, 1988)

  The Kaiser had more reason to be pleased than both Karl Peters’s German East Africa Company, which was effectively barred from Uganda, and Sir William Mackinnon’s equivalent organisation, which found its ambitions for a Cape-to-Cairo route sacrificed for the sake of the Anglo-German agreement.

  During all these discussions the questions of the rights, interests and especially the wishes of the Heligolanders had been virtually ignored. Their opinions had been given almost no consideration. In fact the islanders were regarded as something of a nuisance, who ought not to be allowed any opportunity to make trouble.24 Declassified Foreign Office papers show that on 18 June 1890 there was an exchange of letters about the islanders between Sir Percy Anderson in London and Sir Edward Malet, the British ambassador in Berlin, in which they spoke of the need to be watchful of possible ‘agitation by the natives’. It was curiously redolent of Governor Hamilton’s initial apprehension of the islanders all those years ago – except that this time there was genuine reason for them to be hostile.

  4

  Queen Victoria Opposes

  Queen Victoria’s public image as a distant and rather frosty monarch obscured the reality that she had a keen and indefatigable sense of responsibility towards all the peoples of the British Empire, even though, throughout her long reign, she visited virtually none of her extensive collection of overseas colonies. Ironically, although Heligoland was the most diminutive of all her imperial possessions, it might quite possibly have been the one she had seen more of than any other. She never actually stepped ashore there but on her rare trips on the royal yacht to visit relatives in Germany, via the port of Bremerhaven, she might have been unable to resist glancing at the enchanting little island on the horizon.

  Today, high on the island’s plateau, there is evidence of a once-distinctive landmark that the queen might have noticed. In the centre of the Upper Town stands the rebuilt war-torn church of St Nicolai. Cemented into a brick wall by the main door is a shrapnel-scarred bronze tablet. Donated by the Heligoland-born shipping magnate Rickmer Rickmers, it commemorates the construction of a distinctively pointed steeple on the church’s tower with the inscription: ‘For the honour and glory of God, and in great admiration of our gracious Queen Victoria.’ There were other reasons for Victoria to have enjoyed a quiet affection for the island. In 1863 the islanders had sent the Prince of Wales their best wishes on his engagement, and received him kindly when he visited them in 1886. Three years later, when she learned that the Governor had asked the Treasury to supply a portrait of the Queen for Government House, Victoria quietly ordered one to be sent at her own expense.

  From the correspondence between the Queen and Salisbury, which was only made public many years later, it is evident that Salisbury was remarkably slow to inform Victoria of the relevance of the island to the Anglo-German Agreement negotiations. Perhaps it was because he wished to wrong-foot her or because he had a premonition that the swap scheme would provoke royal displeasure, but he saw to it that she was only belatedly informed of the details. As long ago as 13 May he had presented to Ambassador Hatzfeldt his proposals for a grand Anglo-German Agreement, of which Heligoland was the crucial centrepiece. Sir Percy Anderson had already commenced detailed negotiations in Berlin. On 23 May Salisbury sent a cipher telegram to Victoria in which he informed her of another meeting he had just had with Hatzfeldt: ‘The emperor wants to cut us off from the great central lakes, which I could not allow.’1 In fact the first proper inkling the queen had of the extent of Heligoland’s role in all this came as late as 4 June 1890 when she happened to be speaking with Lord Cross, the Secretary for India, who had just arrived at Balmoral Castle from a Cabinet meeting in London. According to her Journal they ‘talked of Africa and what we required, which he showed me on the map. Germany wants more; he said there was an idea of giving up Heligoland as an equivalent, its being of no use to us; but this has not been brought forward yet.’2

  The next communication she had on the subject came on 8 June. A telegram from Salisbury informed her that the previous day the Cabinet had held a meeting at which the Anglo-German draft agreement had been the principal subject of discussion. The full Cabinet had decided that – other than a few minor border modifications – so far as East Africa was concerned they were broadly satisfied with what had been negotiated. She was told by her Prime Minister that the next steps to be taken were conditional on the Cabinet being quite satisfied that it was wise to part with Heligoland. At this point Salisbury and his closest colleagues became aware of the queen’s rage. On 9 June she sent Salisbury a blisteringly annotated telegram from Balmoral:

  Have received your account of the Cabinet. Understood from Lord Cross that nothing was to be done in a hurry about Heligoland, and now hear it is to be decided tomorrow. It is a very serious question which I do not like.

  1st. The people have been always very loyal, having received my heir with enthusiasm; and it is a shame to hand them over to an unscrupulous despotic Government like the German without first consulting them.

  2nd. It is a very bad precedent. The next thing will be to propose to give up Gibraltar; and soon nothing will be secure, and all our Colonies will wish to be free.

  I very much deprecate it and am anxious not to give my consent unless I hear that the people’s feelings are consulted and their rights are respected. I think it is a very dangerous proceeding.3

  Victoria certainly had plenty of reason to doubt whether Germany’s ‘unscrupulous despotic Government’ could be trusted to safeguard the human rights of the Heligolanders. Mary Kingsley, the niece of the royal chaplain Charles Kingsley (better known as the author of The Water Babies) was an intrepid travel writer. From her perceptive accounts of her journeys through territories in West Africa, Victoria would have been aware of Germany’s cruel methods of inflicting bloody punishments on dissenters. The German authorities could not even be relied upon to behave humanely towards their fellow-citizens in Europe. Indeed, on 13 May, the very day that Salisbury was meeting with Hatzfeldt at t
he Foreign Office to offer to hand over Heligoland, British newspapers carried stories about a gas workers’ strike in Hamburg that was crushed with much bloodshed.

  Salisbury was apparently so determined to hand over Heligoland as the price for securing stability in East Africa that he was willing to sacrifice his conscience to his ambition. Remarkably this was the same man who in April 1864, as a fortuneless young MP called Robert Cecil, had written a brilliant article in the Quarterly Review condemning the German expansion into, and brutal military occupation of, Schleswig-Holstein.4 In the years since he wrote that piece, it would doubtless have been brought to Salisbury’s attention that the plebiscite provided for in the 1864 Treaty of Prague, by which the Danes of North Schleswig were to be given an opportunity to decide their own fate, had never been held. The Danish ‘optants’, who had the right to choose Danish citizenship, were forced to do military service in the Prussian Army or to leave the country, and the Danish language was steadily being displaced by German in the schools. Elsewhere on its frontiers, such as Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, wherever the German Empire included non-Germans, there had often been harshness and repression on the one side, provoking discontent and hostility on the other.

  In respect of Germany’s empire overseas, matters were even worse. The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Goschen wrote to Salisbury on 10 October 1888: ‘German insolence with native races constitutes a very serious difficulty. Look at Samoa! I felt as if they behaved disgracefully there. And would not the proposed partnership, unless most carefully guarded, expose us to some of the evil results of the German method of action?’5 Lord Salisbury was fully aware that Germany was not to be trusted in that regard, as is evident from a letter he wrote to the British Consul at Zanzibar, Gerald Portal, on 25 November 1888: ‘The whole question of Zanzibar is both difficult and dangerous, for we are perforce partners with the Germans whose political morality diverges from ours on many points.’

  Bowing to pressure from the full Cabinet, which, on 7 June, after heated and lengthy discussion, insisted the question of Heligoland required more ‘careful sifting’, Salisbury appointed a special ad hoc Cabinet Committee. This pivotal ministerial group consisted of Salisbury himself; the Chancellor, George Goschen; the Leader of the Commons, W.H. Smith; the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour; the Secretary of War, Edward Stanhope; and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord George Hamilton.6 They assembled at a specially convened meeting in Downing Street to confer with naval experts on the question and reported to a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday 10 June. Her Majesty’s furious telegram was duly read out to the assembled ministers. Doubtless her inference that she was ready to refuse to sanction Salisbury’s swap scheme offered heart to those members of the Cabinet uneasy about relinquishing Britain’s North Sea possession. Salisbury must have been alarmed by this because he probably thought Victoria would be more likely to reject the proposals if they were not unanimously endorsed by the Cabinet.

  Some details of that momentous meeting on 10 June did come to light many years later. Salisbury’s biographer Aubrey Kennedy wrote in 1953 that the Admiralty had admitted this ‘untenable advanced base’ was valueless to Britain, but the curious point was made that the island was a splendid recruiting ground for the Royal Navy. Its inhabitants were described as ‘born seamen favourable to the British connection, and splendid material for bluejackets’. The meeting completed, Salisbury hurried to his desk and skilfully composed a letter to the queen in which he summarised the decisions taken about the Heligolanders, and the wider implications of the swap scheme with regard to Britain’s position in Africa. In accordance with his instructions the letter was ciphered and telegraphed to her at Balmoral that evening.

  He began by reporting that his colleagues were of the opinion that in any agreement arrived at with Germany the ‘rights of the people of Heligoland should be carefully preserved’. That, he assured her, had been done. Next he detailed the specific safeguards for them he had demanded on 5 June, and which Kaiser Wilhelm had provisionally decided to accept. Salisbury informed Victoria that ‘no actual subject of your Majesty living now will be subject to naval or military conscription. The existing customs tariff will be maintained for a period of years and every person wishing to retain his British nationality will have the right to do so.’

  Purposely blurring Victoria’s concerns, expressed in her 9 June telegram, about the risks of setting a precedent of being guided by the electoral decisions of colonial peoples, Salisbury assured her that anything like a plebiscite would be very dangerous as it would admit the right of the inhabitants of an imperial post to decide for themselves as to the allegiances of that possession. To that effect it might be used by discontented people in Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and even India. Certainly in the context of the times it would have been rather unusual for the wishes of the colonial peoples to be consulted. The crucial issue of the wishes of the Heligolanders Salisbury now sidestepped. The Cabinet, he claimed, thought it was ‘impracticable’ to obtain the formal consent of the two thousand inhabitants. He then embarked on a series of untruths by telling her that the information available to the Cabinet suggested that ‘the population, which is not British, but Frisian, would readily come under the German Empire if protected from conscription’.

  This was quite untrue. The inhabitants were as distinct from the Frisians as the island itself was totally detached from the Frisian Islands. Furthermore, as citizens of the British Empire the Heligolanders were already substantially British. Salisbury then rounded off this section of the telegram with the dubious remark: ‘On these grounds the Cabinet unanimously recommend the arrangement for Your Majesty’s sanction.’

  In this way Salisbury convinced Queen Victoria that there was now no effective constitutional means by which she could impede the process of the Heligoland swap, and on 11 June 1890 she reluctantly sent the following telegram to her Prime Minister in London: ‘Your cipher about Heligoland received. The conditions you enumerate are sound and the alliance of Germany valuable; but that any of my possessions should be thus bartered away causes me great uneasiness, and I can only consent on receiving a positive assurance from you that the present arrangement constitutes no precedent.’ The following day Salisbury replied, claiming that he and his colleagues well understood that Heligoland could not be a precedent: ‘It is absolutely peculiar. The island is a very recent conquest.’ On 12 June Victoria despatched her final telegram on the subject of the negotiations: ‘Your answer respecting Heligoland forming no possible precedent I consider satisfactory. I sanction the proposed cession or almost exchange. But I must repeat that I think you may find great difficulties in the future. Giving up what one has is always a bad thing.’

  Victoria was right to feel uneasy. She probably never knew how fully Salisbury had deceived her. The reality was that there was no unanimity – nor even a majority – in Cabinet in favour of the cession. From German foreign policy documents, released many years later, it has become possible to understand what happened. On the evening of 11 June, the day after the special Downing Street meeting, Count Hatzfeldt, the German ambassador, sent a secret telegram to Chancellor Caprivi. Salisbury had just informed him that ‘the Cabinet has declared, with certain reservations, its adherence to the agreement arrived at privately between the Prime Minister and myself. This fact is of importance, for Lord Salisbury repeatedly and confidentially informed me yesterday that certain Ministers had opposed him to the end.’ Nevertheless, on 17 June a preliminary agreement on Africa and Heligoland was initialled in Berlin by Sir Percy Anderson and Count Hatzfeldt.7

  Had Salisbury done a secret deal with his dissenting Cabinet colleagues? His next move was extraordinary and indicates that he was prepared to go to astonishing lengths to buy their public silence. To mollify those ministers who were ill at ease with the Heligoland cession and the outline Anglo-German Agreement, Salisbury now took the radical step of deciding that these two aspects should be split so Parliament could consider them separately. C
unningly, in accordance with his negotiating position with Germany, he arranged to make acceptance of the overall Anglo-German Agreement package subject to a vote on the Heligoland issue, which would be called soon after extensive parliamentary debate in both Houses of Parliament. Throughout the negotiations with Germany, Heligoland had been the tantalising bait he had used to lure the Germans away from East Africa. However, in Westminster during the summer he would offer the prospect of settling boundaries in Africa as the prize for ditching Heligoland.

  It seems quite likely that Salisbury was encouraged to opt for a strategy of separating the two debates by George Goschen, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Certainly in order to soothe parliamentary and public opinion he was urged by Goschen to provide an explanation of the deal ‘so as to explain it more fully to the common herd’.8 Unusually, Salisbury authorised the publication of carefully selected official correspondence concerning the swap. More exceptional was the inclusion of recent communications between himself and Queen Victoria, including a cipher telegram that he had sent her on 12 June.9 In his dealings with Parliament on the question of Heligoland, Salisbury was clearly prepared to be quite unprincipled. From the outset he ruthlessly sought to besmirch the hapless island by grossly exaggerating its frailties and minimising its virtues. These deliberately harmful misrepresentations began in the first parliamentary phase of the transfer of Heligoland.