Heligoland (8 page)

Nationalists within the German government saw their chance in February 1871, when a peace treaty was being negotiated between Germany and France. Their thoughts turned to an extraordinary place called Pondicherry. Known as the ‘Paris of the East’, Pondicherry was the capital of ‘French India’ and consisted of a beautiful enclave of some 115 square miles not far from Madras on the south-east coast of India.
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Their idea was that Germany should deprive France of Pondicherry in the peace talks, and then offer it to Britain in exchange for Heligoland. It was a bizarre scheme, and it did not get far. On 6 June 1871, when rumours of the Pondicherry scheme were brought to the attention of Parliament, Lord Enfield, a Foreign Office spokesman, declared: ‘No proposal has been received for the cession of Heligoland to Germany, and there is no correspondence on the subject.’ Hansard records the chamber’s approving response to that dismissal with hearty growls of ‘Hear, hear’.

At that time Count Bismarck was vigorously opposed to the acquisition of Heligoland, or indeed of any colony. When the prospect of overseas territories for Germany was urged upon him, he famously replied: ‘I want no colonies. For us colonial enterprises would be just like the silks and sables in Polish noble families, who for the rest have no shirts.’ Colonies were, he was convinced, a meaningless distraction from his ambition of unifying and expanding Germany. Various difficulties in the 1870s had left him no time even to overcome the resistance to his pet project, the Kiel Canal, in the imperial councils.
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But by the 1880s Bismarck was well established as the ‘Iron Chancellor’ and he had Kaiser Wilhelm I’s support.

In February 1886 the Reichstag was considering a bill on the subject of the Kiel Canal, which it was widely expected to approve. The 61-mile shipping waterway was to be constructed between the Elbe above Brunsbüttel and the Baltic Sea at Holtenau above Kiel, thus linking the North Sea and the Baltic. As well as gratifying the political wishes of the ‘extenders of the realm’, who envisaged it as a tangible demonstration of Prussian imperial power, it would also reduce dramatically the sailing distance between Kiel and Wilhelmshaven from 480 miles to just 80. An entire fleet of ironclads could be quickly and safely moved across German territory from one sea to the other, and would no longer have to sail through the Skagerrak and Kattegat on the ‘Great Belt’ route along the Danish coast, where they were at risk of attack from other vessels and mines. Actual construction of the canal would begin in 1887, but in the meantime, to remove the potential risk of a British blockade of the Elbe estuary (and thereby the western end of the canal), Bismarck became convinced that Germany must somehow get control of Heligoland.

On 5 May 1884 he had written to Count Münster, the German ambassador in London, instructing him to invite Gladstone’s government to consider abandoning the island. Münster, who had long advocated Anglo-German cooperation, was delighted with this instruction and replied on 8 May: ‘During my appointment here I have always, although the possession of Heligoland lay near my heart, carefully avoided discussing the question with the statesmen here.’ The only time the ambassador had had any discussion on the subject with any English statesman was in a conversation with the present Colonial Secretary, Lord Derby, who himself brought up the question. Münster was shooting with Derby at Knowsley when the minister happened to receive some official letters, including one from Colonel O’Brien, the Governor of Heligoland. Lord Derby remarked: ‘This perfectly useless piece of rock in the North Sea, the smallest of our colonies, gives me the most trouble of any.’ To which Münster replied: ‘If the rock seems so useless to you, you should make it useful by building a harbour or else hand it over to the Germans.’ Derby quipped: ‘If Germany would undertake to build a harbour of refuge, which would cost at least £250,000, there might be some use in talking about it.’ Münster pretended to attach little importance to the matter, but now assumed his new instruction from Bismarck gave him an easy opening for a more serious discussion at a convenient opportunity.
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He decided the most effective tactic would be to play upon Britain’s evident disinclination to spend money on fortifications.

On 17 May 1884 the veteran Foreign Secretary Lord Granville met Münster at the Foreign Office for a routine, if formal, discussion on various matters of mutual concern. Towards the close of the conversation, the German ambassador said he wished to have a further talk with Granville, on a subject that he said might startle the Foreign Secretary. From a memorandum left much later by Lord Granville, we learn that Münster said:

Inauspiciously, he had made no mention of the wishes of the islanders.

‘I suppose that the cession of Gibraltar would strengthen our good relations with Spain!’ retorted Granville gruffly, quite astonished by this audacious request. Nervously, Münster took his words to mean that Granville was ill-disposed towards the scheme. Granville declined to commit himself to any expression of opinion upon a question so controversial, and it was agreed that the matter should, for the present, go no further. Münster begged Granville not to discuss his request with any other British ministers, and believed that his request had been adhered to. In fact, Granville reported it to Gladstone. On 24 May, just a fortnight after the meeting, Bismarck told Münster to drop the request because the timing did not seem right. At the time he remarked confidentially to an assistant, Count Hatzfeldt, that Germany had no legitimate claim to the island. Bismarck wrote: ‘I pressed Count Münster strongly today to say no more about Heligoland, for a desire of this kind can only be presented to a nation when it is in friendly mood towards us. Our wishes regarding Heligoland rest on
no legal basis
and would drag down our justified demands regarding overseas affairs to the same level, if they were lumped together for public discussion.’
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Bismarck too failed to mention the well-being or the wishes of the islanders. Lord Derby had an inkling that Bismarck might offer Britain a certain part of Africa in exchange for Heligoland.

The sudden and unexpected death that week of Lord Odo Russell, a popular British ambassador in Berlin for the past thirteen years, caused a serious break in the functions of the Embassy because the good understanding between Britain and Germany had tended to hinge on his personality. In January 1885 the question of Heligoland was again opened by Münster, acting on instructions from Berlin, but with the same result. What Bismarck did not know was that had he persisted he might have achieved what he wanted. Granville wrote to Gladstone, regarding this repeat request: ‘Count Münster said that he would put the question to us in a few days. I was prepared with an answer had he done so. I should have told him that I had mentioned the subject to Mr Gladstone alone, and that when current political questions were settled we should be prepared to give a friendly consideration to the question.’
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Evidently then, in 1885, the Liberal government was contemplating a graceful surrender. But the time did not seem quite right and so nothing happened.

The island thus remained caught between the two powerful nations with their widely contrasting perceptions: Britain saw no necessity at all to spend money on fortifications and a proper harbour, while Germany saw every need, to ensure its security. And yet Heligoland itself was progressing from strength to strength. By 1890 the island was free of debt. Sir Terence O’Brien, an energetic and popular governor, presided over a period of economic success, albeit as a consequence of the sound fiscal foundations established in Governor Maxse’s time. The key to Heligoland’s new prosperity was the now established ability to collect revenue through local taxation, which meant the colony’s debt could be eliminated. As its financial position improved, O’Brien even succeeded in extracting a £2,000 grant from the UK Treasury for much-needed capital projects and public works.

The large bathing establishment had fallen into decay and had been purchased by the community from its previous owners; it was rebuilt in a modern form with swimming baths added. A vertical lift was built to carry passengers and goods between the lower and upper towns. All the principal streets were re-paved and public lighting was improved; a new pier was erected for £700, which provided visitors with something of a promenade. Also built were the Conversation House, where balls and concerts were frequently held, and an excellent reading room, amply stocked with newspapers and books for the islanders that used it – especially in winter. Taking shape were a new hotel and casino. The submarine telegraph cable that had been laid in 1859 to link Heligoland with Cromer in Norfolk and Busem in Schleswig-Holstein now had added to it – at the colony’s expense – a telegram office, while a conical-shaped Lloyds shipping signal station was built around HMS
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’s old mast high on the red cliffs near the lighthouse. Alone of all Britain’s smaller colonies, Heligoland was free of debt by the late 1880s; indeed, it even boasted a secure reserve fund (of £2,500). So why was the constitutional future of this sophisticated possession about to become a subject of feverish speculation?

Knowing the strategic importance of their island, the Heligolanders could not have been totally surprised by the speculations about its prospects as a naval base, but they could never have anticipated that its future would be linked to rivalries in Africa. Ironically, for a people whose homeland rarely produced any people of noticeable leadership qualities, the character who was to play a vital part in that international power struggle in Africa had been born near the Elbe in 1856.

Since leaving the river as a youngster, Karl Peters had developed a passion for adventure; he had successfully studied for a science doctorate, and became a campaigning journalist. Not content merely to advocate German colonisation overseas, Dr Peters was determined to be at the forefront of the process. Eventually he became Germany’s foremost explorer. In 1882 he was an inaugural member of the German Colonial Association but he soon perceived it to be insufficiently adventurous and in 1884, with a few friends, he founded the Society for German Colonisation, the function of which was to acquire, as urgently as possible, new lands for Germany’s overseas empire. Their initial scheme for colonising the interior of Angola was dismissed by the German Foreign Office because it would impinge upon territory claimed by Portugal, so Peters and his associates fell back on their alternative: a momentous expedition to East Africa.
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This was notionally organised on behalf of Peters’s German East Africa Company, for which he sought a charter from Bismarck; it would prove a bitter rival to Sir William Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company.

Germany was astonishingly late in getting into the colonial business. When Wilhelm I was declared an emperor in 1871, Germany was in the curious position of claiming to have created an empire within Europe, without yet having started to establish one overseas. It might easily have acquired an extensive, ‘readymade’ empire that year had it not been for the opposition of Chancellor Bismarck. For during the peace negotiations at Versailles he turned down the chance to seize not only Pondicherry but also many other French colonies, including Cochin-China, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, Reunion, Madagascar and Algiers.
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Over the next few years Bismarck consistently resisted all the proposals for overseas annexation that colonial enthusiasts continued to press upon his attention. When the rulers of Fiji and Zanzibar, in 1872 and 1874 respectively, asked for the protection of the German Empire, he promptly declined to give it. Much occupied with domestic and military questions, and above all with the problem of Germany’s consolidation, he was unwilling to give any thought to projects of colonial expansion. To him it was folly to talk of an overseas German Empire before the German Empire in Europe had been properly established. In 1873 he remarked to Lord Odo Russell, the British ambassador in Berlin, that colonies would be a source of weakness, because they could only be defended by powerful fleets and Germany’s geographical position would not assist her development into a first-class maritime power.

There is no doubt that Bismarck was wise to adhere to that policy for many years, but by the mid-1880s the political and commercial pressures to endorse the acquisition of colonies had become too great. In 1885 Germany established island colonies in the Marshall, Caroline, Marianne and Solomon Islands in the West Pacific, and in April that year acquired a large slice of New Guinea and some adjacent islands which it renamed the ‘Bismarck Archipelago’. Nevertheless these new colonies were economically unviable, as were the territories it had acquired the previous year in Africa, namely Togoland and the Cameroons and, most notably, German South-West Africa.

Bismarck was persuaded that German South-West Africa was immensely mineral-rich, even though at the time scarcely anything but sand had been found there. The strategic key to the colony was Angra Pequena, a tiny coastal settlement at the mouth of the Orange River. German contact with Angra Pequena had commenced in 1883 when a Bremen entrepreneur established a factory there. The Foreign Office in London was soon asked if Britain had any intention of claiming the settlement. For several months the Gladstone government refused to bother to reply. In April 1884 Bismarck arranged to endorse Angra Pequena as a German territory. Then finally, in late May, the Colonial Secretary Lord Derby declared that even if Britain did not wish to take formal possession of the place herself she considered that she had the right to prevent other nations from doing so.