Heligoland (17 page)

In several important respects Salisbury’s Anglo-German Agreement deal was successful. As he had intended, it had the knock-on effect of settling other crucial colonial spheres of interest arguments – but at a price. As Lord Salisbury admitted in conversation with the French Ambassador on 21 June, Britain and Germany had ‘completely forgotten’ about the 1862 Declaration, an oversight which gave the French government an excellent opportunity for seeking compensation in Africa. On 5 August – just four days before the cession of Heligoland – a new Anglo-French Convention was signed. Britain agreed to recognise French claims to a Protectorate over Madagascar, while France withdrew her opposition to the British Protectorate over Zanzibar. In the opinion of the French ambassador in London, his country had obtained considerable advantages from the bargain at a minimum sacrifice. The Anglo-German Agreement also generated enough diplomatic momentum for Salisbury to clear up a number of festering colonial disagreements with Portugal, by means of the Anglo-Portuguese Agreement signed that year.

These agreements amply fulfilled the purpose for which they were designed. The pacification proved a lasting settlement, as well as an immediate one. The stream of acrimonious disputes, which for years past had flowed between the African departments of the various Foreign Offices, dried up from 1890. Indeed, peace reigned in those regions both diplomatically and actually, until all peace was swept away in the cataclysm of 1914. According to Salisbury’s daughter, the writer Lady Gwendolen Cecil, a year or two before his death in 1903 he dwelt with satisfaction on the presence of Germany in Africa: ‘Britain could not be sufficiently grateful for it’, he said. ‘It was the best, indeed the only, guarantee that Britain possessed of South African loyalty.’

Another benefit of the Anglo-German Agreement was that countless thousands of indigenous peoples in East Africa came under the British flag and so were spared the cruelties of German rule. The details of Germany’s harsh colonial practices were only belatedly made known to Parliament and the public at large in 1894, when the Foreign Office in Whitehall published their
Report on the German Colonies in Africa and the South Pacific
.
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By then news was emerging that Dr Karl Peters, while at Kilimanjaro in January 1892, had hanged a native girl called Jayodja. She was one of his concubines (whom he called his ‘princesses’), who had fled for protection to a neighbouring chief. Peters reputedly had the girl brutally flogged, day after day, until her back resembled ‘minced meat’. He was brought before a disciplinary court at Potsdam in April 1897, five years later, and was sentenced to be dismissed from the service – not because of his actions but because he had made false reports. Yet owing to the pressure applied by the Colonial Party, Peters was granted a pension by the Emperor, and a statue of him was erected in his honour in Dar es Salaam. Another was later erected on the seawall near Heligoland’s Biological Institute.

All the while, on their tiny island off the coast of Europe, the Heligolanders sacrificed for Salisbury’s diplomatic triumphs were adjusting to their new overlords. Improvements were certainly made in terms of tangible facilities. Within weeks Heligoland joined the telephonic age, as a telephone cable was laid connecting Heligoland with Cuxhaven. It was also connected to Sandy Island. The resort facilities were improved, most significantly by an enhanced lift in the metal tower built alongside the old Pottchen steps linking the Unterland and the promenade on the Oberland. In 1892 the island’s clean air conditions were justly rewarded with the founding near the harbour of a small scientific research centre, the Biological Institute Helgoland (BAH). All classes of island shopkeepers were soon enjoying more prosperity. The novelty of the Fatherland’s newly acquired island meant the number of trippers and excursionists increased, although the vast numbers of proletarian three-day-eventers meant that the princes and higher nobility of Germany no longer went to Heligoland for the summer as they had done when it was in English hands.

The swiftness with which the Germans began the fortification of Heligoland far exceeded Barkly’s most dismal prognosis. Within weeks of the cession a barracks arose in the Sapskuhlen area of the plateau. A small army of military engineers and Italian labourers built a light railway and constructed a fortified battery on the South Point. The island’s shores were faced with granite to protect them against the ravages of the sea, and to reinforce a safe naval harbour. No Heligolanders were employed on these projects. Even the islanders who had welcomed the transfer of sovereignty, hoping for improvements in public facilities, were becoming despondent. Everything – including the islanders’ well-being – was subordinated to militarisation. The ransacking of the Grunen Wasser dance-hall by a gang of marines further soured relations. The Heligolanders were even more displeased when – for security purposes – iron gates were suddenly built on the Pottchen steps. Perhaps the first-ever ‘Iron Curtain’, they had a menacing presence which the locals resented, alarmed at the idea that their freedom of movement on their own island could be restricted. Under British administration, law and order had comfortably been maintained by three unarmed policemen; now there were ten armed German military policemen.

In early 1891, after the legislative process was complete and Heligoland’s incorporation into Germany had been constitutionally settled, the interim governmental arrangements were stood down. The system of having separate civil and military governors was abandoned and the office of governor abolished; the senior representative was henceforth to be termed the Commandant of the island. Administratively, Heligoland remained
de facto
a colony but it was shifted from the German Colonial Office to a subsection of the province of Hamburg. Evidently Germany was resolved to assimilate the island into the mainland both culturally and administratively.

In social matters, it became evident that Germany was attempting to stamp out Heligoland’s ancient laws and traditions, thus violating the letter and the spirit of the Treaty. The Heligolanders did not speak German. Their language was Frisian – a tongue far more closely related to English than to German or Dutch. Yet the Germans insisted that the islanders spoke German, and soon forbade the teaching of both English and Frisian in schools. The new colonial power also changed the official spelling of the island’s name from Heligoland to Helgoland.

Nowhere did this drive for Germanisation affect the islanders more than on the question of nationality. Despite pleas for Heligoland to have a British consul to represent its British citizens after the cession, Whitehall refused. An ideal candidate would have been the former Government Secretary and ornithologist Heinrich Gätke. Danish interests on Heligoland were represented by an honorary Danish consul, even though Denmark had vacated the island eighty-three years earlier! The Germanisation of the island mattered because, under Article 12.2 of the Anglo-German Agreement, any islanders wanting to adopt British nationality had to do so before 1 January 1892. Somewhat arrogantly, the British government had handed over not only the island but
the nationality of its inhabitants as well
. During Sir Percy Anderson’s negotiations in Berlin, between 21 July and 6 August, the rights of the islanders were reduced from electing to
remain
British to needing to opt
for
British nationality. In practical administrative terms this meant that in order to
regain
their British nationality every islander would individually have to go before a uniformed German official to make the necessary declarations. This was a highly intimidating procedure which many islanders found an insurmountable hurdle. In the absence of a consul no British representative was present on the appointed day to see that fairness was observed. As a matter of fact those who did choose to remain British very soon found themselves boycotted by the German authorities. One instance will suffice. It was declared that only German subjects were eligible for employment in ferry-boats and so, within a few months, to save their livelihood and live at peace with their masters, all the boatmen (some of whom had sons or brothers serving in the Royal Navy) were obliged or cajoled into becoming German citizens, with a single exception.

Hardly surprisingly, Whitehall made no effort to bring this early breach of the spirit of the Anglo-German Agreement to the British public’s attention. The writer William George Black had just returned from a visit to the island, where he was approached by the islanders who begged him to speak out on their behalf. On 25 September 1891 he succeeded in getting a letter published in
The Times
. Black also contacted Salisbury, requesting an investigation. This Salisbury agreed to, and the process even involved accepting evidence from high-ranking diplomats such as Sir Percy Anderson and Sir Edward Malet. However, its effectiveness was wrecked by a memo maliciously scribbled by a Foreign Office functionary. Without any foundation it dismissively referred to Black as ‘discovering a mare’s-nest’. The put-down cast a long shadow over the investigation – and in late 1891, quite unbelievably, it was reported to Salisbury that the islanders had no grounds for complaint in this regard!

Salisbury was a hard-nosed diplomatic strategist, and within a fortnight of achieving the Heligoland-East Africa swap in early August 1890 he ruthlessly poured cold water over Kaiser Wilhelm’s next act of self-important posturing. Curiously impervious to the existence of antagonistic sentiment, the Kaiser was anxious that the transfer should be endorsed by the presence of British warships at the German naval manoeuvres at Kiel in September 1890. Lord George Hamilton made a tactful excuse, but the Kaiser persisted, refusing to take no for an answer. Count Paul von Hatzfeldt, the German ambassador, appealed to Salisbury to overrule the First Lord of the Admiralty. The Kaiser, it was explained, had the matter closely at heart and would be bitterly disappointed at a final refusal. Salisbury was driven to candid explanations. The English people, he said, were and always had been particularly jealous of any foreign influence upon their government, and this year that jealousy was concentrated against Germany. On 22 August 1890 he informed Hatzfeldt:

But the Kaiser was an insecure character who just did not know where to stop. By the summer of 1891 it was no longer possible for Salisbury to further postpone Wilhelm’s first state visit to Britain. (Hitherto Wilhelm had only come on private trips.) The previous year Salisbury had been able to delay the visit by telling Hatzfeldt that he feared the crowds would boo the Kaiser. This time he tried to keep him out of London by insisting it was ‘full of socialists’. Even so, in July 1891 the visit went ahead. After a procession, a reception at the Opera, a speech at the Mansion House and another reception at Windsor, an enormous garden party was given for the Kaiser in the park at Hatfield, Salisbury’s country house. There were sixty guests for dinner each night in the glittering banqueting hall. In commemoration of his visit the Kaiser gave Salisbury a gigantic oil painting. The picture was not a landscape or some such innocuous scene, but a 30ft x 10ft portrait of the Kaiser himself in the uniform of a British Admiral of the Fleet. The picture was so vast that it occupied one entire wall of Hatfield’s drawing-room. Unimpressed by the picture and the dreadful foreign visitors, Salisbury retreated to his study – and wrote that he believed the Kaiser was ‘a disturbing influence’ on peace, ‘mad enough for anything’ and potentially ‘the most dangerous enemy we have in Europe’. Given that he had probably held these opinions for some time, it reflects very badly on him that he willingly handed over the Heligolanders to someone he so distrusted.

In February 1891 Wilhelm had meddled in administrative matters concerning the Royal Navy, recommending some trivial procedural improvements. Salisbury’s response was to ask the First Sea Lord to send a reply ‘showing that in some directions we are adopting his recommendation. . . . It rather looks to me as if he was not “all there”!’
³
Within a year or so, there was another incident. ‘One of the best days of my life’, the Kaiser later remarked, ‘which I shall never forget as long as I live, was the day when I inspected the Mediterranean Fleet when I was on board the
Dreadnought
, and my flag was hoisted for the first time.’ Wilhelm at this time was enjoying a cruise in the Mediterranean, and visited Athens to attend the wedding of his sister to the Crown Prince of Greece. He decided that in his new role as an honorary British officer he would exercise command. Consequently the Union flag, the emblem of the Admiral of the Fleet, was unfurled on the main-mast of the battleship
Dreadnought
. Nominally at least, as long as the flag was flying, the Kaiser was in command of the greatest of all the fighting squadrons of the British Empire.

Heligoland was to play a part in the development of Wilhelm’s increasingly bizarre love–hate attitude towards Britain and the Royal Navy. He wanted to develop Kiel as a prestigious yachting centre to rival Cowes, and in 1891 founded the Imperial Yacht Club there, but as few Germans were interested in competitive sailing he needed to persuade British racing yachts to cross the North Sea. In 1892 he instigated the Dover–Heligoland yacht race. The winner received the Emperor’s Cup, his gift, although every yacht entered was virtually guaranteed a prize. Staged every year until 1908 it became a prestigious event, and was the only regularly held ocean race in Europe in the early part of the century. Attracting overseas entries from the United States and France as well as Britain, it was the first truly international yacht race. Just how close to Heligoland those giant racing schooners dared to anchor when they completed the 300-mile course is not known. In this race, as in races at Cowes throughout the 1890s, competition was fiercest between Wilhelm’s yacht
Meteor
and the Prince of Wales’s
Britannia
. Such was the Kaiser’s ludicrously compulsive need to be seen to be winning, he even entered
Meteor
for races in which the prize was the Meteor Shield – supplied by himself! It was a deadly game. In August 1898 the
Meteor
accidentally collided with the yacht
Isolde
in the Solent, killing Baron von Zedtwitz, its owner.
⁴