The story of Sealand – a most improbable sovereign state

In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never Pitch Any of These Things to Us Again’. Among a list of no-nos that included burlesque dancing and art made of bodily fluids was the principality of Sealand. They wrote:

OK, so an independent sovereign state floating just outside the UK sounds great, right? Except, well it’s not really, is it? I mean, it’s not an independent sovereign state like, say, France. It’s more like a big, floating turd of mental illness in the North Sea.

Unsurprisingly, Dylan Taylor-Lehman, the American author of this doggedly respectful account of how an abandoned, rusting former second world war naval fort in the North Sea became ‘the world’s most stubborn micronation’, hardly subscribes to this point of view. A 12-page appendix is supplied to support Sealand’s legal claim to a France-like stateness.

Yet both turds and madness do put in appearances here. The author believes that those islands covered in seagulls’ droppings which were seized by ‘turd-harvesting’ colonists following the passing of the United States Guano Island Act of 1856 can be seen as historical forebears of Sealand. ‘Navy grunts’, meanwhile, who had the misfortune to be stationed on what UK government officials still scrupulously refer to as ‘Roughs Tower’ during the war, frequently suffered ‘fort madness’. ‘At least one soldier,’ we are told, ‘jumped to his death in despair, preferring to drown in the North Sea than stay another moment on the fort.’

Insanity, it appears, was therefore baked in at the start, and present long before the retired army major and self-described self-made millionaire Patrick ‘Paddy’ Roy Bates, in the heyday of the pirates, ousted a crew from Radio Caroline to take possession of the fort for his own rival radio station in 1967.