Heligoland (33 page)

The climax of the ceremonials was an open-air church service and a ‘Festakt’ at the highest point of the island beside the lighthouse. It seemed only appropriate that the day’s jollifications should end on a solemn and impressive note as the crowd sat in darkness on the spot where Kaiser Wilhelm II had officially taken over the island. The religious service was simple, solemn and moving. The same hymns were played as in 1890 and the same music also accompanied the Festakt, which concluded with the mass singing of Fallersleben’s 1841 national anthem. In an interview broadcast on Deutsche Welle radio, which was afterwards printed in the official government bulletin, the Chancellor emphasised that Heligoland, once the symbol of unhealthy opposition to England, was now no longer a ‘bulwark’ – the Kaiser’s description – against a traditional enemy. It was, on the contrary, a symbol of peace and of peaceful accomplishments.

Soon after
The Times
article appeared in May 1964 the British Consul-General in Hamburg, K.R. Oakeshott, hastened to the island to discuss details of the 1890 commemoration. The intended ceremony was a purely German affair, with many notables from the mainland. Bürgermeister Rickmers – for all his enthusiasm – was pessimistic about his ambition to have some British participation, although he hoped for some gesture from the British. Oakeshott reported this to the British ambassador in Bonn at the time, Sir Frank Roberts. This was the same Frank Roberts who, as a junior Foreign Office bureaucrat in the late 1930s, had drafted letters for Anthony Eden deflecting suggestions that Britain should recolonise Heligoland. Sir Frank ought to have got some inkling of just how much the island still meant to Germans in August 1964 when, as ambassador, he had attended an Anglo-German ceremony in Cologne marking the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Heligoland (the first naval battle between Britain and Germany during the First World War). The battle was still so relatively recent that present was a former naval stoker, Adolf Neumann, who was the sole survivor of the flagship
Köln
, which had been sunk with all hands. Despite this, when the 75th anniversary of the cession was about to take place, British officials were hopelessly ill-prepared for it. A flustered Roberts later wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart: ‘Although I had looked forward to this occasion as likely to prove useful for Anglo-German relations, I must confess that I had never expected that the result would be so strikingly favourable.’
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On 9 August 1965, the day before Chancellor Erhard’s re-enactment of the Kaiser’s arrival, a ‘British evening’ reception had been given by Bürgermeister Rickmers. It took place at the same hour as one held exactly seventy-five years earlier by Arthur Barkly. In the absence of a British consular presence on the island the Foreign Office had never bothered to keep track of the views of the islanders. Thus it had no means of knowing that, as memories of the bombings gradually faded, there was a resurgence of the traditional warmth towards the British, derived from memories handed down of benevolent British rule. A declassified report by Oakeshott about the commemorations reveals that a German admiral had confided that many Heligolanders believed the friendly atmosphere of the ‘British evening’ was the high point of the celebrations. Typical of the spirit of the Heligolanders was the fact that the island’s own flag normally flew proudly at the top of a display of flags. Significantly, although the German Federal flag and the Union Jack tended to come next, the British flag – Oakeshott reported – ‘sometimes had pride of place’. He went on:

Yet although the Royal Navy had helped to improve relations by sending to the island the modern conventional submarine HMS
Opossum
, which some several hundred people eagerly clambered over, the best the Foreign Office could manage, somewhat belatedly, was the presentation by Sir Frank to the islanders of two bound volumes of copies of official documents covering the eighty-three years of British administration. From Heligoland, goodwill towards the British spread to the seafaring northern parts of Germany with which British connections had always been closest. All this took place in the aftermath of the Queen’s successful state visit to Germany that summer. As Roberts himself saw on an official visit to the island via Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven and Bremen, the Heligoland celebrations were having a beneficial impact.

In the wider context of the 1890 settlement, Germany was willing to accommodate the ghosts of the past. During his fleeting visit to Heligoland on 10 August 1965 Chancellor Erhard went out of his way to explain in the context of Zanzibar that the ‘colonial conception of the Wilhelmine period had completely disappeared in a Germany which now only wants to cooperate in development projects and through association with the EEC with overseas countries and more especially with the independent nations in Africa’. In contrast, British officialdom preferred to forget, tending to believe that Britain had no place in celebrations regarding a possession that was now another country’s. In 1964, in a distant continent, Zanzibar was decolonised and became part of Tanzania. The next year official celebrations were held in Zanzibar to celebrate the end of the Second World War. Even so, the Foreign Office reprimanded Britain’s Deputy High Commissioner there who dared to politely attend.
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Even in summertime now, when the seas in the Bight are too rough for ferries to disembark their passengers in the roadstead, the only means by which Heligoland can be reached is by light aircraft. Yet the difficulties involved in finding such a plane well illustrate why it is that the island has become almost entirely unknown to non-Germans. For today’s British traveller the first stage is a scheduled Lufthansa flight from London to Hamburg’s busy high-tech Fuhisbüttel airport. With just two propeller-driven planes, Helgoland Airlines is among the world’s smallest regional airlines, so much so that enquiries at Fuhisbüttel’s information services and two or three speculative shuttle-bus trips to other terminals reveal nothing. Eventually it transpires that they might be flying from the executive aircraft hangars on the air freight side of the airport, but there is no such airline nameplate outside the flying club-style building. All is deserted. Only after several minutes’ searching is a clue found – an old Helgoland Airlines poster showing times of departure. So this is the place. Eventually a pilot arrives and announces that the scheduled flight will be leaving for the island an hour early, so it can stop off and collect passengers from another airfield en route.

Appropriately enough, a sturdy and immaculately kept Channel Isles-built Britten-Norman Islander is the workhorse of Helgoland Airlines. Its jaunty Jolly Roger fluttering piratically at the cockpit window is removed and securely furled, and the twin engines thunder into life. Within minutes the rugged aluminium plane is airborne, en route to a military maritime reconnaissance airfield to collect a cargo of excitedly chattering German holidaymakers. Soon resuming its 150-km journey to the island, the plane heads north-west along the wide serpentine Elbe, passing first Brunsbüttel at the mouth of the Kiel Canal and then the resort of Cuxhaven. The ebbing tide exposes vast tracts of muddy saltflats, green with algae and criss-crossed with impromptu rivulets. This is all now a national wildlife park. The sight of those historic islets, the Scharhorn, Neuwerk and the Grosser Knechtsand, inevitably reminds the traveller that this was the sight Erskine Childers would have been seen from his seaplane on the Cuxhaven raid in 1914. Perhaps it was the last land the doomed Hampden bomber crews ever saw before they were all shot down in flames in 1939. At 120 knots the Britten-Norman continues at 2,000ft, blown around like a leaf in turbulence; while in the wild Bight below coastal merchant ships and sailing yachts, pitching heavily in the swell, claw through a white-horsed sea along the Lower Saxony coast.

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.
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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.