Heligoland (6 page)

And yet, despite their close links with the Frisians, the islanders always perceived themselves as Heligolanders, not Frisians. There was some justification for this, because Heligoland had rarely been constitutionally associated with any of the Frisian Islands. They even had their own dialect, Heligolandish, which they instinctively used when chatting among themselves. To those not of their island, even to Frisian people who spoke a similar language, Heligolandish was virtually incomprehensible. In the absence of a dictionary of Heligolandish (indeed, one was only compiled in 1954), early on in his governorship Colonel William Hamilton had to persuade the Colonial Office to supply him with a translator.
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By 1811 the British had completed a census of Heligoland. This revealed that the civic population consisted of 2,061 persons living in 461 dwellings, and that 390 of them were pilots and fishermen, operating 100 boats and 9 schooners.
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Flesh was put on to the bare bones of those statistics by the distribution within official circles of a description of Heligoland. Even that found the islanders something of a puzzle. They were good people: quiet, strong, honest, courteous, friendly and law-abiding. And yet, though welcoming, they were also beguilingly inscrutable and obscurely impassive. They kept their thoughts to themselves. A stoical bunch, their distinctive character had been carved by the sea, like the geography of their homeland. Their island’s defiant ability to withstand the worst that the elements could throw at it made them perceive it as having magical qualities. Their pride in the island extended to their homes, which were all kept scrupulously clean. They regarded their island as the centre of the only world that mattered, and even the most skilled Heligolandish sailors seldom ventured into seas beyond the Bight. So content were they with their tiny island homeland that they regarded it – perhaps rather absurdly – as being a nation itself. Such pride derived substantially from the island’s exceptional geographical qualities. This they celebrated in their own popular rhyme, which translates as: ‘Green is the land, red is the rock, white is the sand; these are the colours of Heligoland.’

In the archive of dusty official papers surrendered by the island’s former Danish administration, Governor D’Auvergne was delighted to discover seventy protocols and documents. In the absence of any sort of written constitutional history of Heligoland, these were the clues he needed to learn the arrangement of the previous structure of government. The island’s affairs were run by six Magistrates, who in turn nominated seven Quartermasters. As well as commanding pilot boats and other craft engaged in public service, their duties included keeping clean the streets in their ‘Quarters’. The Magistrates also nominated sixteen Aldermen, who acted for the Quartermasters in their absence. Together the Magistrates, Quartermasters and Aldermen formed the membership of the island’s parliament, the Vorsteherschaft, which assembled so rarely that it did not even have a meeting-house.
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The Heligolanders evidently did not realise, or did not mind, that such a system discouraged individualism, and thereby inhibited the growth of indigenous leaders who could effectively speak on their island’s behalf. In any event, at the time of the Treaty of Kiel, Sir Edward Thornton made sure the island’s Danish style of constitutional system would continue virtually unchanged under British rule. Initially that suited Britain too, as her new colony had a well-established constitutional system. Although quite sophisticated, it was not greatly dissimilar to those in most of Britain’s other colonial possessions, most of which had a governor, a council and an assembly; so, from 1814, Heligoland joined the ranks of Britain’s smallest colonies – remote places such as St Helena and the Falkland Islands. Like them, it received a minuscule annual grant to cover the cost of employing a handful of British people to assist with the territory’s administration. The Colonial Office was so rigorously parsimonious that for many years the civil staff expenditure remained fixed, with scarcely any permitted alteration. In 1848 the total cost of the civil establishment’s salaries on Heligoland, as paid for by the Colonial Office, was just £1,022 – an amount scarcely changed from 1836 when it was just £963.

Unwittingly, Governor D’Auvergne’s generosity in facilitating the distribution of the forty bags of bread in 1807 had defined the dynamics of the crucial conflicting attitudes regarding Heligoland. On the one hand there were the islanders who, though independently minded, were instinctively well disposed, and indeed even affectionate, towards Britain; and on the other there was mean-spirited officialdom in London which was inclined to be predominantly concerned with the cold realities of Britain’s wider interests. Caught between the two were the governors, and it was they who played a vital role in reconciling those sometimes conflicting forces. Moreover it was the humane means by which they did so that cumulatively improved the situation. The islanders quickly realised that in January 1814 when, the war having ended, all the contraband merchants departed, bringing to an abrupt end a buccaneering business activity which had seen some £8 millionworth of goods transferred through Heligoland in each year of the ‘continental system’. Almost immediately, the islanders were left with virtually no employment. Even for the better-off that winter, Christmas dinner consisted of a plate of seagull and cabbage. They were further reduced to a deplorable state by the weather, as the island was encircled by great shoals of ice. In the absence of much Colonial Office support, on his own initiative Governor Hamilton launched an appeal for financial subscriptions to assist the islanders.
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Subsequent governors did what they could to present the Heligolanders in a favourable light. Hamilton’s successor, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry King (governor 1815–40), did so for twenty-five years. The sympathies of the next governor, Admiral Sir John Hindmarsh (1840–57), were with the poorest of the working class. He was followed in office by Major Richard Pattinson (1857–63), who invariably took the side of Heligoland’s pilots in maritime disputes, especially when they were unfairly accused by shipowners of hazarding vessels in the Elbe.

For decades the colony had been unusual in the British Empire insofar as it made remarkably few complaints against the Colonial Office.
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But all that began to change in 1864 when Whitehall began planning to reduce the island’s heavy £7,000 national debt burden – which had been growing alarmingly since the Napoleonic wars – by means of a tax on gambling. Local politicians, perceiving the imposition of such a betting levy to be an infringement of their ‘Ancient Rights’ of no taxation, refused to co-operate. In March 1865 a deputation proceeded to London to voice their opposition. Their protests were endorsed by the island’s newest governor, Major-General Sir Henry Maxse (1863–81), an energetic and fearless former soldier who had witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade and distinguished himself in the Crimean War. In the dispute he took the side of the islanders. At his request, in June 1867 the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, arrived on the island on the Admiralty yacht
Enchantress
, becoming the first British minister ever to set foot there. What he heard and saw caused him to decide that a simpler form of government should be established on Heligoland, and accordingly that was done by an Order in Council in February 1868. For taking a humane stand on their behalf Maxse became something of a hero to the islanders – so much so that they named a street after him. It is still there.

Regardless of the differences some of the island’s elders had with London, the inhabitants were mostly well satisfied with the post-1868 state of things, although naturally there was always likely to be a slight general hankering for the good old times of wrecking, gambling and no taxation. Britain continued to make no attempt to stifle local identity. Indeed, it affably accepted, and indeed encouraged, such distinctiveness. Its benignly disinterested stance towards the territory meant the islanders felt they were enjoying the best of both worlds. On the one hand their relatively strong sense of independence was respected, while on the other, their status as a British colony – unlike all the other Frisian Islands and neighbouring North Sea coastal ports – meant they were uniquely associated with the world’s greatest maritime power. Queen Victoria’s head appeared in the corner of all their distinctive green, red and white stamps. London had no objection to the Heligolanders evolving a flag of their own, depicting the island’s native colours of green, red and white, and formally approved of that tricolour having the British Union Jack motif in one corner. That flag became one of the Heligolanders’ most prized possessions. It tangibly linked their little island with Britain’s immense naval power, and they scarcely missed an opportunity to fly it proudly – if rather provocatively – from the ensign staffs of their fishing-boats when visiting neighbouring ports.

In 1868 the island saw the establishment of half a dozen English coastguards under a Royal Navy officer. The officer was also appointed Wreck Receiver – and thereby, on the subject of wreck and salvage, enabled ship-owners to obtain justice. Instead of being an alleged nest of wreckers, Heligoland became renowned for the order and regularity preserved when wrecks occurred. There was a sense that the presence of uniformed British coastguard officials on the island somehow brought Britain and Heligoland closer together. During gales the islanders used to drag their small lobster boats up to safety among the houses of the Lower Town, while their sloops had to ride out the worst of the storms at moorings that might frequently be carried away. Hitherto the island’s fishermen had lived heroically, often using their boats as lifeboats, manoeuvring them skilfully through the shoals that beset the island to save some schooner or brig driven aground. The arrival of the coastguards to do this work further strengthened the link of common seafaring experience between Britain and Heligoland.

And yet still there were few in Britain who really knew much about the island. Artistic works were made of it, but for one reason or another the British public seldom got a chance to view them. In 1837 a grotesque etching entitled ‘The Death-boat of Heligoland’, of drowning mariners in a tempestuous sea, was created in the style of the seascape artist J.M.W. Turner, although it only appeared as an illustration in a collection of poems by Thomas Campbell. The exhibits displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace and the 1886 Colonial Exhibition in London gave the general public the opportunity to get some idea of the nature of Britain’s colonies. Heligoland, unfortunately, was too diminutive to be considered worthy of representation at such gatherings. In 1856 a sculpture of Alfred the Great clutching a Heligoland-style Frisian boat was unveiled at the Royal Academy. It was then permanently sited within the confines of the Houses of Parliament, but in a spot so obscure that no one had a chance to associate it with Heligoland. In the 1880s Hamilton Macallum, a distinguished Royal Academician, visited the island and was well received at Government House. The many images of it he painted during his visit were exhibited in London – but in the Grosvenor Gallery where only a privileged few had a chance to view them. During the nineteenth century the few charts the Admiralty produced of Heligoland were seen by only a few seafarers. The nearest the island ever came to ‘official’ pictures were the water-colours and sketches done by Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Frome of the Royal Engineers, who in the 1850s was apparently stationed on the island with the temporary garrison during the Crimean War scare. These were never shown in public, and could only be privately viewed at the Royal Commonwealth Society’s collection in Cambridge (from where they were eventually stolen in 1989).

By Victorian times many more British people knew of the existence of Heligoland and were generally well disposed towards the island. But it really captured the British public’s imagination when Miss L’Estrange wrote a detailed and enchanting exposition of life on Heligoland. She was the daughter of an invalided British officer who had been stationed there years earlier. Her slim book,
Heligoland, or Reminiscences of Childhood
, somewhat surprisingly, became a bestseller and was reprinted four times in the 1850s. Nevertheless, in contrast to the Napoleonic period, when (weather permitting) dispatches from the island would appear in
The Times
twice a week, often whole years would pass without the island being mentioned by any British newspaper.

Somehow there were very few Britons interested in actually making a visit, although the facilities for doing so were well-enough organised. According to a newspaper advertisement of 1836, passengers with the General Steam Navigation Company could travel from the City of London to Heligoland within 30 hours. The company ran a fleet of five ships, one of which would call twice a week to collect passengers from the foot of Lombard Street, at Custom House stairs. Departing down the Thames on a Wednesday morning aboard one of their ships bound for Hamburg, for example, passengers for the island could disembark en route at Cuxhaven and after a short trip on a mail boat, weather permitting, arrive in Heligoland at lunchtime on the Thursday.

In contrast, German curiosity about the island had begun to grow. Ironically, the roots of their curiosity can be traced back to an incidence of British parliamentary meanness. In 1825 Joseph Hume’s persuasive denunciation in the House of Commons of what he insisted was the excessive cost of the island’s garrison had resulted in the removal of the two hundred soldiers later that year.
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It was a move which further required the islanders’ to revive their fishing skills, as well as the trades of their forefathers as pilots, capitalising on their specialist knowledge of the shifting sands and perilous mudbanks of the estuaries of the Bight’s great rivers. Even so, something more was needed to develop the island’s natural resources. Quite unexpectedly it was a Heligolandish carpenter who in 1826 came forward to create the foundations of a scheme that would eventually transform the island’s economic fortunes. Jakob Andersen Siemens had done quite well for himself on the mainland and now began to wonder how he might help his homeland. Could, he mused, a sea-bathing establishment be set up on Heligoland’s dependency, Sandy Island?