Heligoland

If you are someone to whom the name of Heligoland merely recalls the Shipping Forecast - it is indicativecof a certain kind of desperation when you listen to that as a landlubber - then a new video from The History Chap is quite an eye opener.

I knew something of the history of this British North Sea - or perhaps I should call it the German Ocean as it was often then termed - which was administered from 1814 until 1890 when it was ceded to the German Empirein return for Zanzibar and parts of Kenya and Uganda.

In many ways I regret this exchange. Heligoland could well have continued to develop into something like the Channel Islands or Gibraltar, combining local and British identities in an engaging cultural synthesis.

What was new to me was its role as a refuge for German liberal exiles, and of the writing there of at least one famous set of verses. In that respect it is similar to Victor Hugo’s exile in first Jersey and then Guernsey.

The video can at Heligoland, The Tiny Forgotten Outpost of the British Empire