Heligoland

by George Drower

  Suddenly, through the aircraft’s rain-streaked windscreen and whirling propellers, there it is: angular and red, its long outlying booms and moles stretching out to sea like tentacles. The plane flies over the airfield at nearby Sandy Island. Then in an unforgettable manoeuvre it banks sharply to port and plunges downwards in a controlled dive; levelling out, it skims over a beach and the edge of a sea wall, before gliding to a gentle landing on a wet concrete runway which seems scarcely longer than a football pitch. Spontaneously the German passengers cheer and applaud, relieved to have safely survived the stormy crossing; one wonders how many of them appreciate the history of this far-flung outpost of their country.

  There is no standing on ceremony here. Everyone pitches in: passengers unload their own luggage, piling the rucksacks on to a handcart provided by the customs official, who also seems to operate the control tower. No passports are checked, and air fares (just €87 from the mainland) are trusted to be paid on arrival. When sterling travellers cheques are offered there is consternation. Amazingly these have never been seen before – an indication of how few British people have been here in recent years. Irrespective of the stormy weather the wind is surprisingly salt-free, clean and warm, indeed even gently soothing. Sandy Island is a one-horse hamlet, with roughly made roads, and just one shop where bathers can get provisions. Low-lying and otherwise covered in untended gorse which grows to the fringes of its dunes and dazzling beaches, even now it has some sense of a faded wartime airfield. Readily visible are other indications of former military activities. Intact at the Dünenhafen, on the west side, is the ‘L’-shaped mole created as a major (and only completed) step in Hitler’s ‘Hummerschere’ seaport scheme.

  To get from the airfield on Sandy Island to Heligoland’s main island, a few hundred yards on the other side of the roadstead, involves a short trip in a waterbus. At Sandy Island’s landing stage, if the wind has dropped, one might wonder why there should be a simple bus shelter-type structure, which is so over-engineered with curiously thick glass and hefty steel girders. As if by instinct a few tourists suddenly crowd inside, sensing something is about to happen. Sometimes even well-seasoned travellers get caught unawares. Almost without warning the waters of the roadstead, which had seemed to be calming down, become a seething cauldron of steeply pitched, white-crested waves. Rain and hail lash the transparent waterbus shelter, perceptibly rattling it to its foundations. Hoved to, for a while, the catamaran ferry that shuttles between Heligoland and Sandy Island struggles around the west mole. The trippers embarked, it battles back into the roadstead. As the ferry pitches and rolls along its short course to Heligoland’s north harbour, it is quickly evident that it is no ordinary ferry. The three-strong crew are alert, yet calm and protective of their passengers; everywhere ropes are neatly coiled and safety equipment is gleaming, stowed ready for use. Too well they know the local phrase ‘Nordsee ist mordsee’ – literally the North Sea is murderous. Everything is prepared and used to coping with more severe seas than these.1

  At first glance, the traveller who knows Heligoland only from Victorian paintings and postcards is struck with a profound impression that very little has changed. In the narrow Lung Wai, the high street where once stood warehouses crammed with merchandise for smuggling to the mainland in defiance of Napoleon’s ‘continental system’, there are now duty-free shops selling luxury goods. The island depends a great deal on its VAT-free status and these wooden weatherboarded buildings are filled with liquor, cigarettes, perfume and confectionery. Near the landing stage, where Governor Arthur Barkly bade his historic farewell to the islanders in 1890, is the spot where the Conversation House used to be. On that very site there is now the Musikpavillon, a Sandy Island-style glass and steel structure around which visitors can linger in the open air to hear a German three-piece band singing perennial favourites like ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’.

  In the summer it all seems noticeably carefree. On Heligoland there are no cars or bicycles. A handful of electric-powered delivery vans are used in the early mornings to haul packages up to the Oberland. Discreetly out of sight they use an obscure freight road through the uncovered remains of the old railway tunnel cut to haul Tirpitz’s howitzers on to the high plateau. The road runs through the vast crater of the 1947 ‘Big Bang’ and past an old people’s home constructed with donations raised by Hamburg’s ‘Friends of the Heligoland Society’. At the crest is a tablet denoting the exact place where Werner Heisenberg, the father of Germany’s atomic bomb project, figured out his method to unravel the secrets of the hydrogen atom. Within the crater is a clinic for sufferers of Parkinson’s Disease; on its roof is painted a huge, distinctive Red Cross symbol. Perhaps it is there in case the RAF decides to return.

  At the top of the lighthouse, where a powerful lantern runs on a well-oiled though surprisingly ancient-looking mechanism, the lighthouse-keeper remarks that when the weather is clear it is possible to make out the north German coast. A more fascinating sight from that vantage point over the plateau’s grotesquely distorted and unrepaired surface are the many giant craters made by the British ‘earthquake’ bombs. There are other undisguised evidences of conflict on the edge of the precipices over the sea where disused gun mountings have been ingeniously resurfaced and made into bird-watching platforms. Nearly all the houses on the Oberland, and indeed most of those in the Lower Town, have small gardens, and many are graced with window boxes or hanging baskets. There is still a street called Gouverneur Maxse-Strasse, and a Gätke Strasse, after the ornithologist who was part of the island’s British administration in Victorian times. Nearby is the rebuilt St Nicolai Church, from the ceiling of which hangs a huge model ship, a replica of the one donated by Governor Maxse. On the wall outside, the German vicar shows visitors the metal plaque dedicated to Queen Victoria by a distant relative of former Bürgomeister Henry Rickmers.

  Shifting economic circumstances in Hamburg have had an effect on Heligoland. German reunification has opened up the Elbe to Hamburg-based ferries and cruise vessels which previously only sailed downstream to the estuary. Heligoland’s traditional status as a popular tourist resort has also been challenged by airlines offering European destinations. The fastest ferries now operating to the island sail from the historic nexus of landing stages on the Elbe in the St Pauli district of Hamburg. High-speed catamarans, in calm weather they can reach 36 knots and take passengers to Heligoland in just two hours. Their shallow draft allows them to dock at the outer harbour, just as Germany’s torpedo-boats used to. By noon, five conventional elegant white-hulled ferry ships are anchored in the roadstead, having made the arduous crossing from various German coastal ports. Local wooden boats draw alongside and convey the trippers either to Sandy Island for a few hours’ sunbathing or to Heligoland itself for some duty-free shopping. By 4 o’clock all the ferries have departed for the mainland. The tugs and pilot boats that sometimes call in to the outer harbour might boast the latest high-tech specification but the sea has not changed since Victorian times and neither has the frequency of their movements.

  On the island still is a dedicated lifeboat service, with its corvette-sized rescue vessel ever ready and waiting. Appropriately enough, the helicopter hangar is sited on dockyard land near where the British Coastguard team was based in the nineteenth century. Picturesque sailing yachts are now neatly moored in the Südhajen harbour, which Kennedy’s Aphrodite plane should have attacked in 1944. Parts of the subsequently destroyed U-boat shelter are still visible at low water. The statue of Karl Peters has gone, and so has the rest of the U-boat shelter. In its place now stands a yacht club and the world-renowned Biologische Anstalt Heligoland research station. Pointing to a wall map in his office the BAH’s Professor of Studies notes with some bitterness a breach in the North Mole made many years ago by the RAF. Indeed, some of the bombs from the 18–19 April 1945 raids narrowly missed the lobster ground on the weather side of the island and are still there, trapped in the fissures of the rocks. However, in con
trast to the scientists the fishermen are quite matter-of-fact about such annoyances. On rare occasions the lobstermen accidentally haul one to the surface, and simply call the German Navy in to disarm it.

  If the weather is sometimes so awful that the ferries and light aircraft do not arrive, the Heligolanders are utterly unflustered. They dismiss it with a worldly shrug of the shoulders, for they know that the island can readily have four seasons in a day, and that better weather may come tomorrow. For them, grim weather is a reality for much of the year. From September until the spring the island is effectively ‘closed’, the ferries running, if at all, only twice a week. Heligoland winters remain a hidden world, which has not been well described since Fanny Barkly’s account of the time when her husband was governor. The islanders, left to their own devices to endure the winter, talk of seas of almost unimaginable ferocity.1 But these are a stoic people to whom survival is a matter of experience. When they go for walks on the windswept Oberland plateau in winter they put rocks in their rucksacks to prevent the wind blowing them over the edge.

  If there is any lingering resentment of past British actions it is entirely directed at the RAF, whose leaders, the islanders believe, bombed Heligoland quite gratuitously. They are bewildered that the man they hold principally responsible, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, the head of Britain’s Bomber Command, should have been nationally venerated by the unveiling of a statue to him in Whitehall. Despite the sins of history the older Heligolanders’ affection for Britain has endured. Younger islanders tend to have a rather vague European outlook and refer to Heligoland’s dependency coldly as just ‘Dune’, while the oldsters occasionally delight in using anachronistic English names like ‘Sandy Island’. Traditionally, every summer in the harbour a rowing race is held, re-enacting the scramble to save the crew of HMS Explosion. On the evening of every 9 August many of the now 1,650 islanders gather at their civic centre, the Nordseehalle, to watch an annual pageant commemorating Governor Barkly’s handover of the territory to Germany. A remarkable spectacle to witness, it shows the extent to which Heligoland remains in a midtwentieth-century time-warp. Their culture is almost pre-Rock’n’Roll. At the Nordseehalle, everyone is well washed and dressed in their Sunday best or blazers. During the performances a choir gathers on stage and heartily sings ‘Men of Harlech’ in German and ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’ in English.

  Heligoland is only some 290 miles from the shores of Britain, but its people’s affection for their former rulers continues to go unrequited. In 1990, when a special edition was made of the island’s flag in respect of the 100th anniversary of the handover, Sir Frank Roberts privately sent a message of goodwill – but the British government coldly ignored the island. Since 1965 the nearest that the British public really got to being reminded of their cultural link with the Frisian Islands occurred in 1979 with the movie adaptation of The Riddle of the Sands. Heligoland was mentioned in best-selling novels, by Richard Woodman (1991) and Shena Mackay (2003); then was described in adventurer Ben Fogle’s humorous travel book offshore (2006). In 2010 the story of the controversial 1947 demolition was well presented on BBC television’s Coast programme. And still, for the British, the island remains a curiously forgotten land.

  Perhaps if the story of Britain’s improper treatment of Heligoland had been told more in English literature, subsequent misdemeanours by the Foreign Office might have been forestalled. In 1890 it was widely assumed in government circles that the Heligoland– East Africa swap had established a constitutional precedent whereby all such relinquishments of territory should only be carried out with the approval of Parliament. And yet, as the years went by and Heligoland was forgotten, the Foreign Office found a means of reneging on that principle, by using Orders in Council. Elsewhere there came to be instances of a three-stage process – perhaps it should be called the ‘Heligoland Syndrome’ – by which British officials would unscrupulously round up islanders, deport them by boat into exile, and then use the forcibly vacated island for economic or military activities. This happened in 1947 to the Banabans in the West Pacific, in 1958 to the coconut gatherers on Christmas Island, and in 1971 to the inhabitants of Diego Garcia.2

  Rarely were public-spirited individuals ready to champion the rights of such vulnerable peoples. There were exceptions, decent courageous parliamentarians such as Sir Bernard Braine, who – as William Black and Sir Douglas Savory had earlier done for the Heligolanders – in the 1960s and 1970s campaigned to scupper Foreign Office plans to hand over the Falkland Islands to the military dictatorship of Argentina. But Parliament has become too timid to speak out in favour of such islanders in opposition to self-righteous Foreign Office dealings. Now, more than ever, there are many lobbyists who eloquently campaign for wildlife in colonial territories, but none is primarily concerned about the well-being of islanders. In 2000 the former islanders of Diego Garcia won the right to return to their homeland – not because British MPs spoke out on their behalf, but because they successfully took the Foreign Office to the High Court themselves. Subsequently they were barred from returning by an Order-in-Council, and then in 2010 by the creation of a Marine Protected Area.

  In 1955 government meteorologists representing countries bordering the North Sea convened and agreed that sea areas they wanted altered on the maritime weather map should be given the names of sand-banks there already well known to mariners. Accordingly the Dogger sea area was halved, and its NE section named Fisher; while Forties was also divided and its northern half named Viking. At that meeting every opportunity was taken by the German delegation to get the name of the area Heligoland Bight changed to ‘German Bight’. The Germans argued that German Bight was the name by which the area had generally became known on their side of the North Sea. The validity of those assertions was doubtful but they were successful in getting the others to accept their demands. Unsurprisingly, the Heligolanders were never consulted3 as to their views on the abolition of their distinctive Bight’s name.

  The loss of the term Heligoland Bight, which was to take effect in 1956, could have been resisted by the British government. However, the Meteorological Office was then still under the control of the Air Ministry which – becoming anxious that the postwar bombings should be forgotten – had reason to let the Bight further fade from public view. Furthermore, officials would have realised that the likelihood of parliamentary questioning by Sir Douglas Savory was diminishing. Savory’s eyesight was deteriorating – which was possibly a contributory factor in a mysterious, and serious, accident he had falling down the Grand Staircase at Westminster – and in 1955 it was already known he was preparing to retire from the House of Commons.

  No wonder yachts flying the Red Ensign are rarely to be seen in the Bight. The sea area’s change of name has meant nothing to the occasional tempestuousness of the waters there. As recently as May 2002 Yachting Monthly reported that charts covering the treacherous area of shoals and twisting channels near the Frisian Islands were then quite woeful.4 In a fresh breeze boats venturing into the area can anticipate exciting sailing conditions: fast, wet, and exhilarating; added to which there are tidal changes which can be radically altered by strong south-westerly winds and beguilingly capricious floods in the Elbe. Yet another requirement Erskine Childers would shiver to recognise there is that, to escape waves breaking on the shallows, in making a passage along the Saxony coast in stormy weather, yachts must hazard venturing outside the islands, proceeding many miles offshore – into the Bight and nearer to Heligoland.

  With its traditions and British heritage, Heligoland is still a remote part of British life, ignored though it is. Every time the familiar tones of the Meteorological Office’s Shipping Forecast sound out, the replacement of Heligoland by German Bight should remind us of a now largely forgotten place in British history.

  Notes

  Chapter 1: HMS Explosion Arrives

  1. Gates, The Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815, pp. 42, 47.

  2. Ibid, pp. 39, 82; Hill, British Strategy in th
e Napoleonic Wars 1803–15, pp. 47–9, 157–8.

  3. Vale, Correspondence, Despatches and other Papers of Lord Castlereagh, vol. 6, pp. 168–8.

  4. Hill, British Strategy, pp. 48–9; MPG 1/970.

  5. Penning, Geological Magazine, 1876, pp. 282–4; CO 700/Heligoland 3.

  6. L’Estrange, Heligoland, p. 6.

  7. ADM 53/1067.

  8. FO 933/22.

  9. The Naval Miscellany, ‘Seizure of Heligoland, 1807’, 1902, pp. 380–3.

  10. ADM 1/5121/22.

  11. ADM 1/557, 2 September 1807.

  12. Dictionary of National Biography; Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, vol. 1, 1823, p. 140.

  13. ADM 1/557, p. 196.

  14. Ibid, p. 197.

  15. Ibid, pp. 200, 232, 234.

  16. Ibid, p. 200; CO 118/1, p. 3.

  17. ADM 1/557, p. 232.

  18. CO 118/1, pp. 23, 25.

  19. ADM 1/557, pp. 201, 205.

  20. Ibid, pp. 197, 20121.

  21. CO 118/1, p. 37.

  22. ADM 1/557, p. 212.

  23. Ibid, p. 216.

  24. CO 118/1, p. 5.

  25. ADM 1/557, p. 232.