Heligoland (14 page)

Early in his governorship, Arthur Barkly set about improving the social conditions of the Heligolanders. He submitted legal orders for the protection of women and children, and on 1 February 1889 asked the Colonial Office to send him copies of the Falkland Island Ordinances, which he thought would provide for the islanders a less arbitrary legal system. Subsequently on 28 April 1890 he sent the Colonial Office a report on the administration of justice, suggesting amendments to the law.
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He had learnt from his father how governors should care for the protection and well-being of colonial peoples. In Basutoland Arthur had won the nickname ‘Lion’ as the commander of Barkly’s Horse, the regiment raised by his father, Sir Henry Barkly.
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Fearlessly publicspirited, Sir Henry had been a governor in several Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies. He showed his true mettle in 1873 when, as Governor of the Cape Colony, he resisted an attempt by the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, to force that territory into a South African Confederation. Quite by coincidence, as a member of Carnarvon’s 1879 Colonial Defence Commission, Sir Henry had recommended that Heligoland be fortified. Like Sir Henry, Arthur was a free-thinker, and by no means a malleable bureaucratic stooge. But did he have enough vivacity to challenge the Colonial Office and win?

Idyllic though his assignment in Heligoland seemed, money worries continued to haunt Arthur. By August 1889 he had accepted the fact that he needed to refund the balance of £470 advanced to him from the Seychelles. So desperate was his financial situation that each month he would write to the Colonial Office urging them to send his monthly salary sooner than the due date.
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For decades the confidential communications between Whitehall and Arthur Barkly have lain unopened in a hefty leatherbound book of official correspondence at the Public Record Office. It provides several clues as to what his political masters thought of him professionally. Seemingly they found him irritating; not, surprisingly, because of his constant urgings for prompt payment, but rather because of his frequent absences from his post. Perhaps his beautiful and cultured wife Fanny demanded trips to more glamorous places, and certainly he went several times to Hamburg, possibly for his health. The consequence was that by early 1890 the Colonial Office was ready for the slightest error on his part.

Diabetes weakened Barkly’s health that winter and he planned to take his annual holiday in the early spring. On 21 February he wrote to the Colonial Office requesting one month’s leave, commencing from 1 March. The previous autumn he had requested – and been granted – a maintenance grant to have the exterior of Government House repainted. But, quite by chance, in early 1890 a dignitary passing through Heligoland happened to remark to the Colonial Office that the paintwork on the windows of that residence looked rather blistered. Barkly’s superiors in Whitehall sought an explanation, and the Governor cited the inclement weather as the reason the work had not been done. Sensing official displeasure, on 10 March he wrote to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Knutsford, requesting permission for his leave to be postponed for a month, as weather conditions were still preventing the commencement of repairs to Government House.
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Thus senior ministers had reason to know that Heligoland’s Governor would be away from the island while the crucial negotiations about its future were in progress. Salisbury well knew that he would need to move very quickly if he were to get the swap agreement enacted before the Heligolanders could attempt to organise any effective veto.

Arthur and his family spent their leave in Britain. While at 1 Nina Gardens, his father’s house in South Kensington, Arthur was appalled by the newspaper stories about the impending swap. Indignant that the islanders were not being consulted, he was also fearful for them; his knowledge of German cruelties in Africa gave him good reason to fear that the Germans could not necessarily be trusted to treat their colonial peoples well. Returning to Heligoland on 21 June he immediately met with the island’s parliamentary Executive Council to check through the outline agreement. On 26 June he was off again, this time to Berlin – ostensibly to discuss details of the hand-over ceremony, but also to meet Sir Percy Anderson, the chief negotiator, to ascertain if there was any scope for amendments to be made. Despite all Arthur’s efforts, there is no evidence that Anderson ever attempted to discuss the issue with the Germans, nor of any willingness to allow the islanders to indicate their choice by means of a plebiscite. The draft Anglo-German Agreement was signed, unamended, by Anderson in Berlin on 1 July. Arthur made one last desperate attempt to protect the islanders. On 10 July he wrote to the Colonial Office requesting that the existing ordinances provided for the administration of justice in Heligoland should be replaced, at the transfer of sovereignty, by ordinances similar to those obtaining in the Falkland Islands. Irritated by Barkly’s attempt to interfere with the treaty-making process, Knutsford refused.

The Heligolanders regularly read the Hamburg newspapers, which circulated freely on the island, and were well acquainted with events in Europe. Thus, on 17 June there had been an excited response to a false report that Heligoland was to be ceded to Denmark. When the next day’s papers disclosed that Germany was to be their new colonial master there was much apprehension. Newspaper stories soon appeared about German entrepreneurs with ambitions to turn Heligoland into a sort of Monte Carlo; they were said to be attempting to lodge licences in Berlin for hotels, restaurants, concert halls and casinos on the island. Of the 2,000 Heligolanders there were a few who reckoned the cession could be for the better, but many were concerned that the transfer would mean Heligoland losing its duty-free advantage. The fear that their island paradise would be spoilt under German rule was widespread. Bird-lover Heinrich Gätke, who was also director of the island’s ornithological institute (and also, since 1865, the official government interpreter), expressed concern that German militarisation might overwhelm the Oberland plateau with heavy guns, destroying its peace and quiet and making impossible the work of the island’s worldfamous migratory-bird sanctuary.

All that summer demands at Westminster for the views of the Heligolanders to be ascertained were being side-stepped with excuses about precedence and logistical difficulties. Whitehall could – if it had wished – have been guided by assessments of the islanders’ wishes, provided by Barkly. But these were never requested. Rather, on 1 July 1890 Sir Edward Malet sent a secret telegram to the Governor enquiring what ‘steps were being taken to prevent agitation’.
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Salisbury well knew the islanders were far from indifferent about their impending change of nationality. When he spoke in the Lords debate on 10 July about the ‘confidential’ information he had received on the subject, his source was actually Arthur Barkly, from whom he had received a telegram, via Lord Knutsford, that very afternoon. Barkly had wired:

Typically the Heligolanders were rather slow in making their deeper feelings known. It was not until 21 July – just three days before the crucial Second Reading debate in the Commons – that Barkly received, and immediately forwarded to England, a petition from the islanders addressed to Queen Victoria.
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It declared: ‘In parting from your Majesty, as subjects of the great British Empire, we shall never forget the manifold reasons we have experienced to feel contented and happy under your Majesty’s government.’ Correspondence now available for scrutiny makes it clear that Victoria was very touched by these sentiments, for she ordered Lord Knutsford to forward her reply to the islanders. It stated: ‘[Queen Victoria] gladly recognises the loyalty of the inhabitants which they showed under her Government, and she sincerely desires their sustained prosperity and contentment; to secure which, she is satisfied, that no effort will be wanting on the part of the German Emperor.’ Barkly arranged to have that message publicly displayed on placards throughout the island, mindful that the last line carried a hint that she would be keeping a watchful eye on Wilhelm’s future conduct.

But it was all far from over for Arthur Barkly, whose anxieties were deepening further. Accepting that there was no realistic hope of derailing the transfer of sovereignty, he energetically sought other employment for his staff. Evidently the Colonial Office negotiators had not given the slightest thought to their future. On 2 July they informed him that, with regard to compensation for the British officials losing their appointments, it was now too late to make further demands on the German government.
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Would, he asked Malet to discover, the German government be willing to continue to employ Heinrich Gätke and the native officials? Other than Barkly himself, the one most in need of security was the Chief Magistrate, Colonel Edward Whitehead, who had with him on the island a wife and eight children. In vain Arthur attempted to get him a posting with the government of Gibraltar.

Paradoxically, in that summer of 1890, when Heligoland was on the verge of becoming the focus of international attention, its governor was obliged to spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with the staff at the Colonial Office, as he needed them to persuade the Treasury to reimburse him the £11 in expenses incurred during his recent four-day visit to Berlin.
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Already close to penniless, Barkly was distraught to realise that no one in the Colonial Office had thought to make even a minuscule financial provision for him to get home. As late as 5 August 1890, by telegraph, he had to inform London that if he was to depart from the island by mail-boat on 9 August he could only do so if the ceremony of transfer was done early in the day. Even so his family, and that of Colonel Whitehead, were in the potentially humiliating circumstance of not being able to get home unless a passage allowance was paid for them out of funds from the Heligoland government.
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One consequence of the uncertainty as to whether the House of Commons would approve the Anglo-German Agreement bill (which it did by 209 votes to 61 on 25 July), was that the timetable for the hand-over was not determined until near the time appointed. On 23 July Arthur received a telegram from the British chargé d’affaires in Berlin informing him that the German emperor would visit the island some time after his return from Osborne. On 31 July he received a cable announcing that the Kaiser would be visiting on 10 August
when the island would be taken over
. It was presumed that his own administration would leave on 9 August, and advised him that ‘The Admiralty have been informed’.
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On 3 August the steam corvette HMS
Calypso
, fresh from naval duties off Plymouth, reached Sheerness, where her captain, Count Frederick Metaxa, was informed that she had been appointed the headquarters ship for coordinating the British withdrawal.

On the evening of 6 August
Calypso
anchored in calm water off Heligoland, as did the Admiralty yacht HMS
Wildfire
, which had accompanied her from Sheerness. At 5.30 the next morning a 61-strong working party of seamen was landed ashore by the ship’s steam pinnace, barge and cutter to bring off stores.
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The events of that day and the next echoed the scene of eighty-three years earlier, when HMS
Explosion
’s mortars were heaved aloft to the plateau, but now the process was in reverse. One by one the Armstrong saluting guns were slung over the side of the Falm Esplanade near Government House, and lowered on ropes and pulleys down the steep red cliff there, before being taken out to the
Calypso
. In the course of the heavy and dangerous work the corvette’s cutter was damaged, and a hundredweight boat anchor became irretrievably jammed in an underwater crevasse near the harbour.

Heligoland was virtually the first ever
colony
to be peacefully transferred in peacetime by Britain. (The Ionian Islands, which were handed over by Britain to Greece in 1864, had been a
Protectorate
.) This meant there were effectively no procedural or ceremonial precedents on which Arthur could draw when organising the British retreat. ‘Should’, he telegraphed London, ‘the official portrait of Queen Victoria be removed?’
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Required by circumstance to turn himself into an imperial impresario, he often had only his initiative to guide him. He saw to it that the emblems of the British Empire were removed: the busts of Victoria and Albert were taken from the alcoves in the little post office, and royal coats of arms, where possible, were taken down from public buildings and brought aboard the corvette.

In Germany there was great excitement about the Empire’s forthcoming acquisition, which was already being dubbed ‘Germany’s pearl of the North Sea’. Astonishingly most Germans at the time considered the island to be a far better prize than Zanzibar, or even Uganda.
The Times
correspondent in Hamburg reported on 8 August: ‘The interest taken in the cession of Heligoland is increasing to an enormous extent, the island forms the chief topic of conversation, and the communications sent by reporters of newspapers of standing are read almost with the excitement of despatches from a battlefield.’ When the
Hamburger Correspondent
disclosed that Wilhelm II himself would be landing on the island on 10 August, cession enthusiasm went into overdrive. As the Kaiser was visiting his grandmother Queen Victoria earlier in the week, a rumour (unfounded) also began to circulate that the hand-over ceremony might even be attended by a member of the British royal family. Evidently it was going to be an historic weekend, with the cession of the island to Germany on the first day, and the arrival of the emperor on the second to take possession of this ‘Last jewel in the Crown’, as it was widely referred to. The
Freia
, a magnificent steampowered ferry built several years earlier, was already fully booked expressly for the 6-hour crossing from Hamburg. Numerous extra steamers, from Cuxhaven and Bremenhaven, were hired to carry spectators to the island to witness the transfer and imperial visit. On the island there were fears that there would be standing room only, and that there would not be enough food for the converging hordes of excursionists.