The Pint-Size Nation off the English Coast
On Christmas Eve of 1966, Paddy Roy Bates, a retired British army major, drove a small boat with an outboard motor seven miles off the coast of England into the North Sea. He had sneaked out of his house in the middle of the night, inspired with a nutty idea for a perfect gift for his wife, Joan.
Using a grappling hook and rope, he clambered onto an abandoned anti-aircraft platform and declared it conquered. He later named it Sealand and deemed it Joan’s.
His gift was no luxury palace. Built in the early 1940s as one of five forts that defended the Thames, the HMF (His Majesty’s Fort) Roughs Tower was a sparse, windswept hulk. “Roughs,” as the abandoned platform was popularly called, was little more than a wide deck about the size of two tennis courts set atop two hollow, concrete towers, 60 feet above the ocean. But Roy claimed his brutalist outpost with the utmost gravity, as seriously as Cortés or Vasco da Gama.
In its wartime heyday, Roughs had been manned by more than a hundred British seamen and armed with anti-aircraft guns, some of whose barrels stretched longer than 15 feet to take better aim at Nazi bombers. When the defeat of the Germans rendered the station obsolete, it was abandoned by the Royal Navy. Unused and neglected, it fell into disrepair, a forlorn monument to British vigilance.
British authorities, not surprisingly, frowned on Roy’s seizure of their platform and ordered him to abandon it. But Roy was as daring as he was stubborn. He had joined the International Brigades at age 15 to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. When he returned, he signed up with the British army, rising quickly through the ranks to become the youngest major in the force at the time. During World War II, he served in North Africa, the Middle East, and Italy. He once suffered serious wounds after a grenade exploded near his face. In a later incident, he was taken prisoner by Greek fascists after his fighter plane crashed, but he managed to escape. He consumed life with two hands.
Initially, Roy used Roughs for a pirate radio station. The BBC, which had a monopoly over the airwaves at the time, played the Beatles, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and other pop bands only in the middle of the night, much to the frustration of young audiences. Defiant entrepreneurs such as Roy answered the call by setting up unlicensed stations on ships and other platforms to play the music 24 hours a day from beyond Britain’s borders. After taking over his platform, Roy stocked it with tins of corned beef, rice pudding, flour, and scotch and lived on it, not returning to land sometimes for several months at a time.
After establishing his new radio station on the gunnery platform and formally giving it to his wife for her birthday, Roy was out for drinks at a bar with her and some friends. “Now you have your very own island,” Roy said to his wife. As was often the case with Roy, no one could tell whether the gift was sincere or tongue-in-cheek.
“It’s just a shame it doesn’t have a few palm trees, a bit of sunshine, and its own flag,” she replied.
A friend took
