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. 6 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?
The winters were usually stormy. May and even June were often wet and foggy. Even so, a few visitors came in the first summer season between early July and late September. In 1828 they numbered just a hundred. In a decade that figure had become a thousand, and the number kept rising until by the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was nearing fourteen thousand. The salubrity of the summer climate and the excellence of Sandy Island’s sea bathing assisted Heligoland’s evolution into one of the most fashionable and fun-loving bathing resorts of northern Europe. The visitors were from every rank in society, from
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. 6 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?
The winters were usually stormy. May and even June were often wet and foggy. Even so, a few visitors came in the first summer season between early July and late September. In 1828 they numbered just a hundred. In a decade that figure had become a thousand, and the number kept rising until by the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was nearing fourteen thousand. The salubrity of the summer climate and the excellence of Sandy Island’s sea bathing assisted Heligoland’s evolution into one of the most fashionable and fun-loving bathing resorts of northern Europe. The visitors were from every rank in society, from
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