The micronation of Sealand takes up no more than 550 square metres. As countries go it is a relatively young nation, gaining its independence as recently as the late 1960s. Yet despite its short history, this tiny blip on nautical maps has a legacy as fascinating as any great European power.
Lying six to seven nautical miles off the coasts of Sussex and Essex, in the cold waters of the North Sea, Sealand is often cited as the world’s smallest country. Established on an old Maunsell Sea Fort, it has its own monarchy, currency, national anthem and even its own set of stamps. It is currently ruled over by Prince Michael Bates. Members of its nobility include famous names such as Jeremy Clarkson, (Baron Von) Ed Sheeran and (Lord) Ben Fogel.
Over the decades, Sealand has been subject to threats by the British Government and attacks by German businessmen. It has been embroiled in armed conflict, international money laundering and even had members of its royal family tied up and imprisoned.
The fort which would become Sealand began life during the Second World War. From the outbreak of hostilities, Britain was under constant threat of attack from Nazi Germany via both sea and air. British intelligence feared German aircraft would target London and Liverpool, two of the busiest ports in the world at the time. Their major concern was that the Luftwaffe would drop sea mines to interfere with shipping lanes and trade routes. These were critical to Britain’s economy, which meant they needed defending and protecting at all costs.
Placing British naval ships in the region put them in danger from submarine attack, while providing continuous RAF air cover was fraught with difficulty. So, the government sought an alternative. Civil engineer Guy Maunsell came up with plans to construct several permanent sea forts in the Thames and Mersey estuaries. These later came to bear his name, and work duly began on the Maunsell Forts.
In total, four concrete forts were established in the Thames estuary, along with three further sets of steel platforms, strategically positioned on the east coast of England from Suffolk down to Kent. In Merseyside, three steel forts were erected in the waters in and around Liverpool Bay.
These constructions were enormous undertakings of civil engineering that weighed up to 4,500 imperial tons each. For example, in order to construct HM Fort Roughs, one of the sea platforms which would later become Sealand, the whole thing had to be put together in a dry dock in Gravesend, Kent, before being shipped out to its intended resting place, a sandbar known as Rough Sands, situated seven nautical miles off the coast of Essex.
After the war ended, the forts continued to be manned for a variety of purposes, including research into offshore fuel exploration and drilling platforms. But by the mid-1950s, most of the forts were no longer needed. Many were subsequently dismantled, including all four in the Mersey Estuary, as they had become an obstacle for shipping. However, four of the original seven forts remained in the Thames Estuary, including the soon-to-be infamous Fort Roughs. A further set of steel forts on a sandbar known as Red Sand also still stands. In fact, a tour company called Project Redsand regularly takes adventurers out to visit them.
By 1956, Fort Roughs on Rough Sands had also ceased to be useful to the British government. All personnel were subsequently sent back to the mainland, leaving the platform abandoned for more than a decade.
By 1964, the sixties were really starting to swing. The post-war baby boomers were coming of age. To cater for their insatiable appetite for pop and rock music, Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a large sea vessel in international waters, heralding the birth of independent or 'pirate' radio. Effectively side-stepping the restrictions of BBC and record company influence, Radio Caroline was an overnight success. Soon the radio pirates began to set their sights on not only ships but the Maunsell Forts. After all, these large, offshore platforms were not only ideally placed in international waters but sometimes even still equipped with WW2-era radio equipment. Rough Sands went from being an abandoned, unloved sea platform to hot property. In 1965, Radio Caroline claimed it as their own, using it as a supply station for its boat Mi Amigo.
One of Caroline’s main competitors was Radio Essex, which broadcast from another Maunsell Fort called Knock John Tower, run by a Mr Paddy Roy Bates. Bates was a colourful character; an ex-army major described as the ‘hard bastard of the North Sea’. During his military career he’d contracted malaria and sandfly fever, been bitten by a snake and had his jaw shattered by a German bomb. Despite being a bit of maverick, however, Bates wasn’t above the law. Whereas Radio Caroline operated in international waters and was therefore out of reach, Knock John Tower close enough to the mainland to remain firmly within British jurisdiction. Bates was duly fined £100 for operating from Knock John without a licence and another £100 in court costs – not a small amount at the time. This was a major financial blow for Radio Essex. Bates was actually a former millionaire but had long since lost most of his fortune. The legal judgement meant he was reduced to selling pieces of furniture just to cover the radio station’s bills.
Something had to give if Radio Essex was to survive. On Christmas Day 1966, the Radio Essex crew, including Bates and his son Michael, loaded up their equipment from Knock John tower into their boat Mizzy Gel. Braving choppy, freezing winter waters, they sailed to Rough Sands with a plan to storm the sea platform. It was said that the staff of Radio Caroline were just carving up their Christmas turkey when Bates and his motley crew arrived at the tower, armed with iron bars.
Once the dust settled, the two crews co-existed in an uneasy peace on Rough Sands. Bates set up a new station, dubbed BBMS, or Britain's Better Music Station. He bided his time. Then, during a routine supply operation, one of the crew of Caroline suffered a serious hand injury that required treatment on the mainland. With the Caroline crew gone, Bates and his teenage son Michael took the opportunity to claim the entire tower as their own. They took stock of the weapons available to them, consisting of six shotguns, an air rifle and a flame thrower. They also set about creating a stash of Molotov cocktail petrol bombs. To really deter invaders, they also made a sign falsely claiming the presence of a 10,000-volt electric fence. Next, they positioned discarded water and fuel tanks as well as other bits of scrap metal at the edge of the fort, ready to drop onto invading ships. Whoever came to Rough Sands, they were ready to defend their new home.
But the Caroline crew didn’t give up their former base that easily. In June 1967 they returned with a boat full of ‘local heavies’. It just so happened that Roy was away at the time. With his father gone, Michael Bates – aged just 14 – along with another radio pirate named David Belasco, pelted the boat with petrol bombs. In the resulting chaos, men went overboard after being shot with an air rifle. As the Molotov cocktails rained down, the invading boat was also set alight. Loaded with fuel, the captain was forced to retreat, but not before one of the crew members had leapt onto a sea ladder at the base of the fort. Legend has it that the man dangled there for up to 4 hours before he was finally rescued by a neutral lifeboat, severely dehydrated and suffering from exposure.
Over that summer there were at least eight more attempts to capture the fort. Each time the residents of Fort Roughs defended themselves again snorkelers, dinghies and boats by bombarding the invaders with air guns, Molotov cocktails and even flame throwers.
These skirmishes started to attract government attention. It was even claimed that Prime Minister Harold Wilson asked to be kept 'in the loop' over any developments relating to Rough Sands. The issue was that because the platform lay beyond British territorial waters, there was little the UK government could legally do. When classified documents were made public years later, Michael Bates discovered the government had actually made contingency plans to seize Rough Sands by force. Had the plan been initiated, two Wessex helicopters, various craft from local ports and a team of Royal Navy clearance divers would have been deployed to take control of the fort.
In a last-ditch attempt to shut it down, the government also tried to buy the platform for £5,000. The offer was refused by Roy Bates, who said he'd only sell it for £100,000 - the equivalent of about £2.3 million today. They then tried to intimidate him by demolishing a nearby Maunsell fort with explosives, but none of these tactics worked. Instead, Bates decided to completely circumvent existing British law by turning the platform into the independent state of Sealand.
On 2nd September 1967, the Principality of Sealand was born. The date was significant – it happened to be Roy Bates’ wife Joan’s 38th birthday. As a birthday gift, Roy duly crowned Joan as Princess of Sealand and declared himself Prince. Well, it was a principality after all, not a kingdom.
They made their own flag, issued coins and stamps, and established their own motto, E Mare Libertas, which translates as ‘From the Sea – Freedom’. By 1975, the Principality of Sealand had essentially become a fully-fledged country, with its own passports and an immigration stamp for anyone boarding the platform.
In the summer of 1978, Sealand faced the biggest constitutional threat to its short history. On one hazy August day, visiting under the false pretence of a business deal, a group of German and Dutch businessmen flew by helicopter to Sealand. They brought armed mercenaries along for the ride.
They planned to transform the principality into an offshore casino and luxury hotel. But rather than do this by legitimate means, they had decided to take the platform by force. Once again, Prince Roy Bates was away on the mainland at the time and the gang captured his son Michael. Tying him up, binding his hands, knees and feet together they locked him up in Sealand’s solitary prison cell, a dark and foreboding space inside one of the concrete legs of the sea platform. After days of incarceration, they extradited him from his own home, placing him on a fishing trawler bound for the Netherlands. With Michael out of the way and Prince Roy Bates in absentia on the mainland, Alexander Achenbach declared himself the Prime Minister of Sealand and the principality fell under his rule.
But Michael and Roy weren’t going to let their family home go that easily. They returned to Sealand with an armed gang of their own, to stage a counter coup. Shots were fired but the story has it that the foreign nationals were so taken by surprise that they soon dropped their weapons and relinquished control of Sealand. In a full reversal they now found themselves prisoners of war. The governments of Germany and the Netherlands petitioned for their release. The Dutch businessmen were released but the German, Alexander Achenbach, who had a Sealand passport, was held for treason against his nation. Prince Bates demanded 75,000 Deutschmarks (around £23,000 or about 1.5 times the price of an average house at the time) from the German government for his release. The Germans sent a diplomat to Sealand, which Bates claimed was proof of Sealand’s ‘de facto’ existence as a state. Eventually Prince Roy relented, and Achenbach was released.
By 1987, Britain had expanded its maritime borders. This meant that Sealand was no longer in international waters, instead finally falling under British jurisdiction. The principality continued to function as a business enterprise, amongst other things, selling novelty Sealand passports.
During the late 1990s though, it emerged that Sealand passports were being used by international criminal gangs to open bank accounts all over the world, in countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Iraq, Iran and Libya. Interpol first became alerted to the scam when two Austrians moved the equivalent of more than £4.36 million pounds sterling through accounts opened with Sealand passports in the space of a month. The Austrian couple had posed as the Minister of Economic Affairs of Sealand, visiting with his wife. The bank had found credibility in the story, given the upheaval in Europe at the time. International borders had been shifting in the long aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and protracted wars in the Balkans. The couple were eventually arrested crossing the border into Italy, carrying 200,000 undeclared Austrian marks.
Today, Sealand has a much more sedate existence. It has one full-time resident, Mike Barrington, who acts as caretaker-cum-immigration and customs official. Following the international money laundering scandal, Sealand no longer sells passports. Instead, you can become an e-citizen, which will give you a virtual private network (VPN) and a personalised email address, ensuring your digital freedom. Through a partnership with 4Ocean, a proportion of the cost also supports the removal of plastic waste from the ocean. The principality also offers a range of aristocratic titles. For less than the price of a meal out, you can become a Lord of Sealand. The micronation also has an eye to the future. It is already one of the only countries in the world to be 99.9% renewable and gathers all its water from rainfall.
Despite being so tiny in stature, Sealand lives large in the imagination. Its distinctive red, white and black diagonally striped flag has been carried to the summit of four of the world’s highest peaks, including Everest (by mountaineer Kenton Cool in 2013). It is still regularly making waves, being mentioned on TV, radio and in the world’s press. And with grand plans to redevelop the platform in coming years so it can finally accept tourists and visitors, Sealand looks as though it will stay firmly on the map for some time to come.
Dave Hamilton is a photographer, forager and explorer of historic sites and natural places. A father of two boys, he writes for BBC Wildlife, Countryfile, and Walk magazines. He is also the author of six books, including the titles 'Wild Ruins' and 'Wild Ruins BC'..
 |
 |
Comments will be approved before showing up.
