I am the monarch of the sea,
The ruler of the Queen’s Navee,
Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants.
And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
When at anchor here I ride,
My bosom swells with pride,
And I snap my fingers at a foeman’s taunts;
And so do his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
Sir Joseph Porter, HMS Pinafore, Gilbert & Sullivan

It may be hard for post-baby boomer generations with their iPods and iPads, smartphones, Spotify and You Tube to imagine the halcyon days of pop-music when radio, vinyl, and badly mic’ed, ramshackle live performances were the only pop music media available to the fans, when the venerably ‘square’ BBC ruled the airwaves, when teenagers broke the musical shackles of the predictable and unthreatening ‘forties and fifties with its big bands, comic songs and crooners by tuning-in, often under their bed-covers,  to the new ‘sounds’ broadcast by Radio Luxembourg, and when enterprising and adventurous rebels endeavoured to throw off the cultural chains of the monochrome ‘Aunty’ by setting up shop for themselves.

Fifty years ago last September, a new state was born in the North Sea just off the English coast. Its genesis lay in the herculean struggle of the English pirate radio stations to establish free and independent airwaves – events so memorably portrayed in the rock ‘n rolling, all singing and toking The Boat that Rocked.  Check the soundtrack – it’s fab!

Five years ago, newspapers around the world published the obituary of one of the world’s longest reigning but least known monarchs.  This is his story.

Welcome to Sealand

“Sealand is the smallest country in the world. The country‘s national motto is E Mare, Libertas (From the Sea, Freedom), reflecting its enduring struggle for liberty through the years. Sealand has been an independent sovereign State since 1967. Upon the declaration of independence, the founding Bates family raised the Sealand flag, pledging freedom and justice to all that lived under it”.

So goes the Sealand homepage.  That’s the vision. The reality is a little less exalted. But the Principality of Sealand does exist. Its a real-life, royal family, passport-issuing, micro-nation that has been around since 1967, and it is arguably the most credible place like it in the world,, as a browse through the Wikipedia lists of micronations will show.

Roy Paddy Bates was a bit of a buccaneer. A war veteran who had risen to the rank of major in the British army, he’d fought in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and had been  wounded in action several times. After the war, he started various enterprises, including an import-export business, a wholesale meat business, and a thirty boat fishing fleet. Nowadays, we’d call him an entrepreneur and throw buckets of public money at him.

In 1965, the the Major Bates family embarked on a project that his wife Joan cheerfully described as “pioneering commercial radio.” Others called it ‘pirate radio’ because at that time the BBC was the only licensed broadcaster in England, Inspired in part by the success of the outlaw Radio Caroline, Roy established a his own pirate radio station on Fort Knock John, one of many abandoned WWII sea forts, a complex of no-frills anti-aircraft forts that were used for shooting down German planes on bombing runs to London, and broadcast pop music and paid advertisements. Radio Essex broadcast to a quarter of England, until HMG summonsed Roy in September 1966 for operating a transmitter without a license – he’d picked a tower just inside England’s three mile territorial limit. He was fined one hundred quid and shut down.

But Roughs Tower, another of the forlorn forts, lay just beyond the pale – six miles out and beyond the limit. This old battle station stands still,  in twenty four feet of chilly North Sea brine, six miles east of Felixstowe, an industrial port on the southeast coast of England. Abandoned like its siblings after the war, it was occupied in 1965 by Jack Moore and his daughter Jane in the name of Wonderful Radio London.

But, in September 1967, the Moores were evicted by Major Roy who wanted to use it to for his own station. On Christmas Eve that year, Roy and his son Michael, then aged fifteen and home from boarding school, dismantled Radio Essex and hauled it to Roughs Tower. The government was snookered – but the Royal Navy blew up another old fort that stood beyond the three mile limit to prevent another hijack, pour décourager les autres.

Shortly afterwards, Roy and Joan were out with friends in a local pub when Joan said that she’d like to have “a flag and some palm trees” to go with the “island” her husband had won for her. The company canvassed the things Roy and Joan could do with a sovereign property, so Roy hired a lawyer to check it out. And yes, there was loophole in international law whereby the Bates family could claim Roughs Tower as its own: “dereliction of sovereignty” – in effect, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

On September 2, 1967, Major Roy renamed the tower Sealand and declared its independence from Great Britain with himself himself as its ‘prince’ and Joan, his princess. In 1975, His Highness introduced Sealand’s constitution, followed soon afterwards by a national flag, a national anthem, currency (pegged to the US $)  and passports,  and printed a series of postage stamps honouring great explorers like Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh (both of whom, ironically spent their last days in jail, and Sir Walter ending his lfe on the executioners block).

Officially, the UK doesn’t recognize Sealand, and except for “diplomatic” incidents every now and then, HMG  left this strange little fief alone. Until 1968, that is, when, in a move that helped force the sovereignty issue, Michael fired warning shots at workmen who were servicing a navigational buoy near the platform. When Michael and Roy next set foot on British soil, they were promptly arrested for weapons violations, only to be acquitted in October of that year since as Sealand was “about three miles outside territorial waters,” the Crown’s firearms laws didn’t apply there. The authorities, perhaps sensing an embarrassing precedent, chose not to appeal.

The British government extended its territorial limit to twelve miles in 1987, but Sealand has been allowed to plod on. Over time, other legal cases have appear to have have bolstered the Bates’ sovereignty claim, and the government’s stance remains one of hands-off. In 1984, the Department of Health and Social Security issued a written ruling that Michael Bates did not have to pay his national health insurance for the periods he resided on Sealand. In 1990, Sealand once again fired shots at a boat that came too close, and although local authorities investigated, the matter was quickly dropped.

Sealand was never used for pirate broadcasting. Changes in English law and the broadcasting environment saw Prince Roy lose interest in the pirate radio scene by the late ’60s. He explored other investment opportunities in the ’70s and ’80s, but little came of them except misadventure. Prince Michael has said that that a number of “undesirables” had contacted the family over the years hoping to use the place for various schemes – from setting up some sort of “pleasure island” to smuggling, and Roy has claimed that he was approached during the Falklands War by a group of Argentinians who wanted to buy Sealand and set up camp “on Britain’s doorstep.” “Of course I sent them away,” he told The Independent in 1990. “I’d never do anything that would pose a threat to the UK”. And indeed, he has said that in if Britain has another hour of need, he would rally to the call. Old soldiers never die…

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of  war!”

The most momentous moment in Sealand’s history occurred in 1977. when the royal family were approached by a German and Dutch consortium of shady lawyers and diamond merchants who had plans to build a luxury casino on the platform. “They wanted to be part of what we were doing, and they wanted to develop it as well,” Princess Joan recalls. “Then they asked us to go to Austria” for a meeting. Roy was wary, but Joan persuaded him, saying, “What have we got to lose?”

A lot, it would seem.  When they landed in Austria, five men met them and arranged to meet later. They never showed, and the suspicious, highnesses endeavoured to contact the mother ship. “In those days it was very difficult,” said Princess Joan. “We had no radio communication and no telephone communication. We phoned different people who worked in the area – fishermen and the Coast Guard. One of them said, ‘I saw a big helicopter hovering over Sealand.’ It didn’t feel right.”

And it wasn’t. Crown Prince Michael was at Sealand when the helicopter showed up. As he remembers it, the mystery party lowered down a man who claimed to have a telex (remember those?) from Prince Roy confirming that a deal had been done. Prince Mikel didn’t buy that. Then the helicopter lowered a man who whinged that “he was sick and needed a glass of whiskey.” The Prince let the chopper land, but it was ruse : a bunch of Dutch and German mercenaries led by one Alexander Achenbach, a German lawyer who held a Sealand passport, disembarked. Once on the deck, they locked the prince up without food or water for three days. He recounts that his assailants finally put him on a Dutch fishing boat that they “controlled,” took him to Holland, and left him there without passport and money.

He made his way back to Southend, where he met up with his folks. They hired a helicopter and a dashing pilot who’d worked on a few James Bond movies, gathered a posse and set forth to reclaim the fiefdom. When they arrived, Michael, shotgun in hand, slid down a rope and fired a shot – apparently by accident – and the mercenaries surrendered.

Achenbach was taken captive. The governments of Germany, the Netherlanda and Austria petitioned the British Governmet for his release, but HMG declined to intervene, citing its 1968 ruling. Germany sent a diplomat to Sealand to negotiate Achenbach’s release, and the ‘prisoner’ was eventually freed, with Roy asserting thereby that Germany had effectively recognized Sealand as a sovereign nation. Achenbach returned to Germany whereupon he established a government in exile, the Sealand Rebel Government. His successor, Johannes Seiger, continues to claim that he is the one true prince. The SRG too is one of those quixotic micronations. In 2009, another German, calling himself King Marduk I, after the old Babylonian deity, declared that he had claimed Sealand for his own nation, The Kingdom of Marduk! The days of Europe’s dynastic  squabbles are apparently not over. But, honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up!

Nowadays, when Sealand blips on the geopolitical radar, it has more often than not been a kind of low comedy that makes it a tabloid favourite. In 1997, for example, when the killer of celebrity Gianni Versace’s assassin committed suicide on a Miami houseboat, police discovered that the man who owned the boat was in possession of a Sealand passport. Nothing eventuated, but as it turned out, it would appear that lots of people have Sealand passports who shouldn’t – these apparently self-replicate without the Bateses’ knowledge. There were an estimated 150,000 in curculatiuon, and in 1997, their majesties revoked all of them. 2000, Sealand made the news again when law enforcement officials in Spain busted a Madrid-based gang allegedly tied to international drug trafficking and money laundering. It appeared to be using a fake Sealand website and thousands of phony Sealand passports as part of its criminal activity. In

Questioned by Interpol, Prince Roy bewailed the injustice of anyone using the Sealand name for black deeds. “[Sealand] has all been a game, an adventure, and it is very unfortunate to see it take this turn,” he told one reporter. “Nobody is more honest than my husband,” Joan said at the time. “He’s so honest he creaks.”

But as the Bates admit, life on Sealand hasn’t always been a thrill, and in recent years the tiny country has been sliding into obscurity. The biggest challenge for Roy was always that of figuring out what to do with their patrimony.  Over the years, Prince Roy, Princess Joan and Michael, the dauphin, earned their keep with humdrum pursuits – like commercial fishing and fish processing – while shuttling back and forth between their royal seat and the mainland as dual citizens of Sealand and the UK. They’d ponder all sorts of moneymaking dreams and schemes like pirate radio outposts, tax havens, pleasure dens, casinos, and internet havens. In January 2007, The Pirate Bay attempted to purchase Sealand after harsher copyright laws in Sweden forced it to look for a base of operations offshore. WikiLeaks is said to have considered moving its servers there – a plan that came to nought when Julian Assange became enmeshed in his Swedish quagmire and his diplomatic quarantine as Ecuadorian Embassy house-guest.

An article in Wired in 2000 entitled Welcome to Sealand – Now Bugger Off! describes a project to set up Sealand as the world’s first truly offshore, almost-anything-goes electronic data haven – a place that occupies a tantalizing gray zone between what’s legal and what’s possible – outside the jurisdiction of the world’s nation-states. Simply put: Sealand won’t just be offshore. It will be off-government. The HavenCo initiative came, saw and collapsed by 2007, but the Wired story is a fascinating insight into the world of geeks and gigabytes.

But in reality, Sealand has been a quixotic financial sink-hole. Whilst none of the Bateses live on Sealand, they did visit and provide upkeep, and say they’ve spent huge amounts on supplies, legal fees, and improvements A caretaker usually occupies the place, which includes modest living quarters, a kitchen, a chapel and an exercise area. Sealand was abandoned briefly after a fire in 2006 but later repaired. Prince Michael has said in recent years that the family would consider selling the place — or, given the complications of selling a supposedly sovereign nation, leasing it –  from 2017 to 2010, a Spanish real estate company offered Sealand for sale for €750,000.

Michael lives in Southend, where he runs his own business. Roy spent most of the ’90s living on Sealand by himself, ready to defend its sovereignty with rifle and shotgun until his was physcially unable to keep his lonely watch. Joan, afflicted with arthritis, retired to Southend, keeping in touch with Roy by cell phone. Roy Bates died on 9^th October 2012 after suffering from Alzheimers disease for several years. He was succeeded by his son Michael. On 15^th March 2016, it was announced that Princess Joan had passed on, at the age of 86, in an nursing home in Essex.

These events have made Sealand more than a little depressing: a geriatric experiment in nation-building, doomed to die a slow death, beaten into the sea by wind and waves. But Prince Michael, now the Prince of Sealand, said on the patriarch’s passing that their descendants would preside over Sealand for many generations to come.  “The family,” he said, “plans to continue the legacy.”

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Great Gatsby,  F Scott Fitzgerald

Prince Roy holding the fort

Roy Bates, Bigger-Than-Life Founder of a Micronation, Dies at 91

William Yardley, The New York Times

Roy Bates, who commandeered a former British military outpost in the North Sea nearly 50 years ago and declared it a sovereign nation, died on Tuesday in Essex, England. He was 91. He had had Alzheimer’s disease for several years, his son Michael said in announcing the death. Make that Prince Michael.

Members of the Bates family still claim dynastic dominion over what they call the Principality of Sealand, a rudimentary platform of concrete and steel rising out of the water seven miles southeast of the main British island. And they are looking to expand the royal family.

Even if you never get the chance to visit — the trip requires a helicopter ride or a willingness to be hoisted by crane from a boat — you, too, can join the royal court of one of the world’s most enduring and entrepreneurial micronations. The official Sealand Web site sells titles (the “Count/Countess Title Pack”: about $320), identity cards, stamps, wristbands and e-mail addresses (just under $10 for six months). “It it helps pay for the whole Sealand thing,” Michael Bates said.

In the 1960s, Mr. Bates, a former major in the British Army, was among a group of disc jockeys who tried to avoid England’s restrictive broadcasting regulations by setting up pirate radio stations on some of the country’s abandoned offshore outposts, which had been used to fire ground artillery at German aircraft during World War 2. Mr. Bates began broadcasting from one outpost within the three-mile limit of England’s territorial waters, and when he was driven from there in 1966 he planned to start a station at Her Majesty’s Fort Roughs, which was in international waters. Instead, he founded Sealand.

On Sept. 2, 1967, Mr. Bates declared it an independent nation, himself its royal overseer and his wife, Joan, its princess. It was her birthday. “They had a huge love affair,” Michael Bates said. “He really worshiped her.”

Mr. Bates was emboldened the next year when, after he faced weapons charges for firing warning shots at an approaching British vessel, a British court ruled that it had no jurisdiction over the case because the exchange had occurred in international waters.

A decade later, a greater drama ensued when a group of Germans with plans to build a luxury casino on the platform tried to take control of Sealand while Mr. Bates and his wife were away. They held Michael Bates hostage for several days before Roy Bates stormed Sealand and retook it in a dramatic helicopter raid. He imprisoned one of the men there. When the German government sought Britain’s help in freeing him, Britain declined to intervene, citing the 1968 ruling.

Germany sent a diplomat, the man was eventually freed, and Mr. Bates asserted that Germany had effectively recognized Sealand as a sovereign nation.

Even after Britain expanded its territorial waters to 12 miles from shore, it mostly left Sealand and the Bateses alone. The family has explored various means of economic development, including housing an Internet company that wanted to create a financial haven without government oversight. It is still considering playing host to an online casino. WikiLeaks is said to have considered moving its servers there. [This plan came to nought when Julian Assange became enmeshed in his Swedish quagmire and an Ecuadorian house-guest]

For now, most of Sealand’s trade is driven by Roy Bates’s grandson James — Prince Royal James — who oversees the Sealand Web site.

“The history of Sealand is a story of a struggle for liberty,” the Web site says. “Sealand was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation-states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity.”

Paddy Roy Bates was born on Aug. 29, 1921, in London. His father served in the Royal Artillery in World War I and suffered lung damage from being gassed. The family moved to Essex with the goal of improving his health. According to an account on the Sealand Web site, Roy Bates was the only one of five siblings who survived childhood, and he barely survived his 20s, suffering several war wounds as a British soldier.

“He once said that despite the paradox of him breaking away from the U.K. with Sealand, he would do it all again if his mother country needed him,” the account said.

Besides his son, his wife and his grandson, Mr. Bates’s survivors include a daughter, Penelope Hawker, who has not been especially involved with Sealand, and a granddaughter.

Roy Bates was not just a self-made prince, he was a self-made man. After the war, he imported beef and ran butcher shops. He built fishing boats in Essex, and some family members still fish commercially for cockles, mussels, oysters and other seafood. None of the Bateses live on Sealand, though they do visit and provide upkeep. A caretaker usually occupies the place, which includes modest living quarters, a kitchen, a chapel and an exercise area. Sealand was abandoned briefly after a fire in 2006 but later repaired.

Prince Michael and Family

Michael Bates has said in recent years that the family would consider selling the place — or, given the complications of selling a supposedly sovereign nation, leasing it — but he said on Thursday that no sale was planned. He expects his descendants to preside over Sealand for many generations to come.

“The family,” he said, “plans to continue the legacy.”