Heligoland (22 page)

It became apparent that other influential institutions and people were calling for Heligoland to be readmitted to the British colonial fold. As early as 21 October 1918, Lord Fisher, in his capacity as a former Admiral of the Fleet, had written to Downing Street in response to an inquiry from Sir Maurice Hankey, the Secretary to the War Cabinet, about requests to be presented at future peace talks. Fisher informed him he had just five simple, if draconian, peace points to offer: that ‘no spot of German territory in the wide world be permitted; that the German Fleet be delivered up intact; and ditto every German submarine. Fourth and fifthly: Heligoland be delivered up; and also the two flanking islands of Sylt and Borkum’.
¹³
These sentiments were reinforced on 6 November in a letter to
The Times
by yet another Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Culm Seymour, who claimed: ‘I have been to Heligoland and knew it when it was ours. Now the war is drawing to its end I, as a naval officer, desire to express my opinion that it should be returned to us, and I think that many of my brother-sailors agree with me.’ On 23 November there appeared another letter calling for Germany to be deprived of further use of the island, this time by the ingenious means of neutralising it by ‘making it an international aerodrome for commercial aircraft’.

That letter was mysteriously signed ‘G.F.W.’ It could have been from the tenacious and faithful William George Black. So keen to write to
The Times
again on the subject of Heligoland he had perhaps sent two letters! The other, which the paper also printed on 23 November, he had written from the Carlton Club, and characteristically expressed concern for the wellbeing of the islanders. He called for the island to be recolonised by Britain on the grounds that: ‘We could not have defended Heligoland had we retained it, but an unfortified Heligoland would have been little use to Germany; therefore, had we kept it there would have been no system of German coastal defence.’ Additionally he called for Sylt to be given back to Denmark.

Map 6
Regardless of the breached sea walls of its southern harbour, because of the 1919 Versailles peace agreement, during the interwar years Heligoland regained its place as a stylish tourist resort. (
Helgoland Regierung
)

Irrespective of all the busy house-proud Heligolanders’ make-and-mend efforts, conditions on the island were not much improved. Germany’s own economic plight became ever more dismal, so that those islanders who had the heart to claim compensation for lost business and damaged property were reminded that people could scarcely buy a loaf of bread, so low had the Reichsmark fallen. This was an important factor in the agitation that swept the island in October 1919 demanding separation from Germany and union with Britain. Having watched the decline in Germany, they saw British rule as a haven in contrast. Understandably frustrated that their views were not being heeded in London they took matters into their own hands and petitioned the Supreme Council at the Versailles peace talks. Begging that the ‘many injustices of the Prussian regime may be examined and abolished’, they stated that ‘under the long and blissful administration of the great British nation, all our rights and customs were always most loyally upheld’. The quaint concluding phrases of the petition bear repetition:

Were Heligoland to be returned to Britain as part of a postwar agreement, the diplomatic means by which such a move could be facilitated were available at the Versailles peace conference. However, the tide was beginning to turn and there seemed to be too few influential British statesmen willing to endorse those pleas. Winston Churchill, who had returned to government as Secretary of State for Munitions, and at the time of the Armistice was Secretary of State for War and Air, happened to speak on the subject of Heligoland at a well-reported public meeting in Dundee on 4 December 1918, when he was asked whether he was in favour of the island being returned to Britain. He replied: ‘Admiralty experts had come to the conclusion that it was not necessary to demand it. There had always been two views as to whether it would have been of use to us during the war.’ By then he had probably received intelligence reports detailing the newly discovered German defences found on the island: camouflaged emplacements; concrete trenches hidden beneath sand and soil; and an apparently plain dwelling house at the head of the Pottchen stairs, which concealed a strongpoint commanding the Unterland. It all showed that his Heligoland invasion scheme, had he persevered with it, could have been disastrous.

The Foreign Office’s response to the revanchist urgings was to produce, somewhat half-heartedly, a pamphlet entitled
Heligoland and the Kiel Canal
, which conspicuously made not the slightest mention of the islanders’ requests. Unfortunately for Heligoland, a leading British representative at Versailles was the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, the nephew of the deceased Lord Salisbury, who had already shown himself none too keen to reclaim Heligoland.

At Versailles almost any future for the island seemed possible. Perhaps it would be ‘internationalised’, as had happened to other key strategic places only scores of miles distant, such as the Kiel Canal and the mighty Elbe. The question of the disposal of Heligoland was discussed on 17 March 1919 in connection with proposals by the Allied naval authorities that the military facilities on the island be dismantled. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, was sceptical. Although acknowledging that the harbours had been constructed solely for warlike purposes, he objected to their destruction, on the grounds that they might be used as a refuge by merchant shipping in bad weather. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, recognising that Heligoland was currently a subject of popular interest in Britain and there might be public disappointment there if the island remained German, telegraphed London that afternoon calling for the War Cabinet to convene and formulate an opinion. Meeting urgently in Downing Street the next day they were profoundly influenced by an Admiralty memo which feared that the fall of a British-held Heligoland would be an unnecessary national humiliation. Uniquely, the memo argued the most crucial part of the island was the harbour complex, because it was only through that could Heligoland’s heavy fortifications – if razed – be rebuilt. Winston Churchill endorsed that view, scribbling with red ink in the paper’s margins: ‘I agree that it should be destroyed – let me see.’ Accordingly the delegation were telegraphed on 21 March: ‘From a practical point of view it is most desirable that the island should not be taken possession of by Great Britain: from a sentimental point of view it is desirable that it should not be returned to Germany.’ And thus, the message concluded: ‘It is urged that either: 1. The island be razed to the high water mark, making re-fortification impossible, in which case the harbour might be retained; or 2. That the fortifications and the harbour be destroyed.’ Lloyd George’s delegation accepted the latter option.

On all such matters the views of the islanders were never taken into account. As a consequence of the Versailles conference even the question of whether or not Schleswig should be returned to Denmark was to be decided by the people of that province in a plebiscite. However, for the Heligolanders there was to be no such choice, and no voting opportunities were to be made available. Not long before, Balfour had issued his famous declaration denying Palestinians rights of consulation on Jewish settlement in their homeland. To add insult to injury, Britain deliberately chose not to renew the 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty, even though it was listed as Article 289 at Versailles. This meant that Britain would no longer have any legal status with regard to the Heligolanders’ conditions. There were even some rumours that Britain might agree to cede Gibraltar to the League of Nations. But for the ‘Gibraltar of the North Sea’ there would be no change.

No one was more scathing of the Foreign Office’s refusal to regain Heligoland for Britain than the gung-ho Lord Fisher, who wrote in his memoirs: ‘Through some extraordinary claim of reasoning, absolutely incomprehensible, the islands of Heligoland, Sylt and Borkum were not claimed or occupied. In view of the prodigious development of aircraft it was imperative that these islands should be in the possession of England.’ Later Fisher claimed: ‘All this to me is absolutely astounding. The British Fleet won the war, and the British Fleet didn’t get a single thing it ought to have, excepting the everlasting stigma amongst our allies of being fools in allowing the German Fleet to be sunk under our noses.’
¹⁴

Thousands of miles away in East Africa the First World War was still going on. Elsewhere on the planet the guns fell silent on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, but in Tanganyika a defiant German guerrilla force under Colonel Tafel continued fighting. Throughout the war the Allies had been unable to entirely conquer the vast territory known as German East Africa, nor did they succeed in doing so until 25 November 1918. Tanganyika’s borders had been secured as part of the 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar swap agreement but even Lord Salisbury could not have predicted the extent to which the fates of those three possessions would be linked. In 1915 the German raiding cruiser
Königsberg
, having destroyed a dozen merchant ships in the Indian Ocean, became trapped in the shallow waters of the sinuous Tanganyikan Rufiji river, where she was discovered by British seaplanes. However, someone at the Admiralty happened to remember the two monitors HMS
Mersey
and HMS
Severn
which Churchill had insisted on building in 1914, despite the unremitting protests of the ‘battle-cruiser gang’, as part of the planned invasion of Heligoland. Such was the low draft of those vessels that their designers claimed they could be ‘sailed in the Round Pond at Kensington Gardens’. Sent via the Suez Canal and Aden to Zanzibar, the monitors edged upriver for the kill, and eventually destroyed the
Königsberg
– at last they had a target worthy of their guns.

At Versailles, Germany was stripped of all her colonies, but her humiliation was not total. She was allowed to keep her smallest and nearest colonial-style island, Heligoland. What subsequently happened at the peace conference shows how curious was Britain’s attitude to various colonial possessions. The strategically important but tiny island of Heligoland she cast aside, while eagerly taking responsibility for the strategically and economically unimportant Tanganyika – all 373,000 square miles of it – to be run as a League of Nations trusteeship. Effectively it was a new British colony.

For the Heligolanders any remaining hope that Britain might take their little island back as one of its colonies ought to have come to an end on 28 June 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Arthur Balfour had successfully seen to it that the Heligolanders’ pleas for recolonisation fell on deaf ears. But still they did not give up. Even in October 1919 reports were reaching London, and published in
The Times
, of agitation for separation from Germany and union with the United Kingdom. In November there were further stories of the islanders’ resentment of German injustice. They were still sickened by the way their houses had been vandalised by the German military, and to add insult to injury those who had received compensation payments found the money virtually worthless.

They now had other anxieties, too. What particularly concerned them was that in the impending demolition of all the German-built fortifications on the island, a few structures that were relevant to their way of life might also be mindlessly destroyed. Attention focused on the plan to destroy the small boat harbour formed by the old marine mole and the northern wall of the New Harbour works. On 15 August 1919 the Heligolanders put together a petition calling for the retention of the small area known as the northeast harbour. When the request reached London on 1 September 1919 it was dealt with by the Admiralty, rather than the Foreign Office, because the island had long since ceased to be a British colony. That their Lordships were sympathetic to the islanders’ plight was evident from a comment an Admiralty official scribbled four days later in the margins of a file hastily put together on this very subject: ‘It is considered the islanders’ views on this matter are deserving of consideration.’ The petition was passed to the Head of the Naval Section at the British Delegation in Paris, who forwarded it on to the Naval Inter-Allied Commission of Control (Heligoland Sub-Committee). It was practically the first issue considered when the latter began work. So favourably disposed were they towards the islanders that on 7 October 1919 the Head of the Naval Section was able to report to the Admiralty that the Commission on Heligoland had decided the small boat harbour should be retained.

Fortunately for the Heligolanders, although nobody in the Foreign Office seemed to care about them, there were various influential people within the Royal Navy who were concerned. One such was Andrew Cunningham, a talented naval officer destined for flag rank, who in 1919 was appointed commander of the team preparing to dismantle the fortifications on Heligoland. One factor in favour of the retention of the fishing boat harbour was derived from the naval authorities’ view that some redress was due to the British-based commercial fishermen who had campaigned – as unsuccessfully as all the various nongovernmental lobbyists in Britain – for the island to be retroceded. In 1918 the
Grimsby News
had even produced a special pamphlet urging that the harbour be kept, as it would thus ensure that the island could offer a safe haven to British fishing boats in the event of stormy weather in the Bight. (Many years later it was claimed that the appeal to save the harbour element of the dockland on Heligoland had been secretly inspired by the German Navy.)