From 1830 to 1871 there were public gaming-tables in Heligoland, and the Concessionaire paid such a high price for his permit that the colonial finances were in the most flourishing condition.  In 1871, Downing Street stopped this, with disastrous effect on the island budget.  Fortunately, Germans took to coming over in vast numbers for the excellent sea-bathing, and so money began to flow in again.  The place attracted them with its glorious sea air; it had all the advantages of a ship, without the ship’s motion.

I paid a second visit to Heligoland three years later, when I was Attache at our Berlin Embassy.  Sir Fitzhardinge Maxse, the uncle of Mr. Leo Maxse of the National Review, was Governor then.  Sir Fitzhardinge had done his utmost to anglicise the island, and the “Konigstrasse” and “Oststrasse” had now become “King Street” and “East Street.”  He had induced, too, some of the shop-keepers to write the signs over their shops in English, at times with somewhat eccentric spelling; for one individual proclaimed himself a “Familie Grozer.”  How astonished the Governor and I would have been to know that in twenty years’ time his much-loved island would be transformed into one solid concreted German fortress!  Sir Fitzhardinge had a great love for the theatre.  He was, I believe, the only person who had ever tried to write plays in two languages.  His German plays had been very successful, and two one-act plays he wrote in English had been produced on the London stage.  He always managed to engage a good German company to play in the little Heligoland theatre during the summer months, and having married the leading tragic actress of the Austrian stage, both he and Lady Maxse occasionally appeared on the boards themselves, playing, of course, in German.  It looked curious seeing a bill of the “Theatre Royal on Heligoland,” announcing Shakespeare’s tragedy of Macbeth, with “His Excellency the Governor as Macbeth, and Lady Maxse as Lady Macbeth.”

There is a fine old Lutheran Church on Heligoland.  It is the only Protestant church in which I have ever seen ex votos.  When the island fishermen had weathered an unusually severe gale, it was their custom to make a model of their craft, and to present it as a thank-offering to the church.  There were dozens of these models, all beautifully finished, suspended from the roof of the church by wires, and the fronts of the galleries were all hung with fishing nets.  The singing in that church was remarkably good.

It was a pleasant, unsophisticated little island; a place of fresh breezes, and red cliffs with great sweeping surges breaking against them; a place of sunshine, and huge expanses of pale dappled sky.