Speaker 1 (00:05):
Name that country. It's planted opposite Europe, sitting proudly on the other side of the North Sea. It's a monarchy that features its own currency, postage stamps, constitution, national anthem, love of tea, and a pair of handsome princes born two years apart. (00:21) We speak of Sealand, a chrome of real estate off the English coast that declared its independence in 1967. Sealand has a full-time population of one. It has a landmass the size of roughly two tennis courts. Its leading export might be the national mythology, a history of piracy, coups, counter coups, rogues, and offshore internet schemes. It may make tiny Lichtenstein look like China by comparison but, by rights, Sealand is a sovereign nation. Join us as we compile some notes from a truly small island.
Speaker 2 (00:58): The story will continue in a moment.
Prince Michael Bates (01:03): We can see Sealand over there, by the way, now. You see that?
Speaker 1 (01:07): Oh, there she is.
Prince Michael Bates (01:08): Yeah, yeah. On the stubborn bow.
Speaker 4 (01:12): Behold, the world's small state. It's a micronation in the extreme, a principality, which sits or stands only seven miles off the coast of England. It's self-described reigning monarch is this guy, Prince Michael Bates.
Speaker 1 (01:28): Here we are. A platform and a couple of concrete husks, and this is a state.
Speaker 4 (01:37): Enter some countries, you arrive in style. Here, you arrive in what's basically a backyard swing hoisted by a crank 60 feet above the North Sea. And if you're wondering about the safety regulations, yeah, us too. Then again, when you are a sovereign nation, you by definition set your own rules.
Speaker 1 (02:00): That's a hell of a way to get into a country.
Prince Michael Bates (02:00): The only way to travel.
Speaker 4 (02:01): On the plus side, there's no long line at the arrivals' hall.
Speaker 1 (02:05): I'm following you to passport control.
Speaker 4 (02:07): Mike Barrington fills various roles and positions on Sealand. Right now, it's immigration and customs. He also happens to be the only permanent resident.
Mike Barrington (02:18): Are you all set?
Speaker 1 (02:19): So now I'm official.
Mike Barrington (02:21): You are. Welcome to Sealand.
Speaker 4 (02:26): It wasn't always named Sealand and it was never intended to be a country. Originally called His Majesty's Roughs Tower, it was a hastily constructed nautical fort one of several the British set up in the North Sea during World War II. (02:41) Equipped with anti-aircraft artillery, these forts were designed to prevent German bombing raids on London. During the war, more than 100 Royal Marines were crammed into these towers for months on end. Descending the seven-story towers, it feels and smells like a cross between a tree house and a diesel soap submarine. First up, the first class bedroom suite.
Speaker 1 (03:08): It's a nice one.
Mike Barrington (03:09): Yeah, nice TV.
Speaker 4 (03:11): Our claustrophobic tour continued downward.
Speaker 1 (03:13): Now we're underwater at this point, so we've still got a couple floors to go.
Prince Michael Bates (03:19): You hear ships going past. You hear the propellers going, going around ding, ding, ding, ding.
Speaker 4 (03:24): Like many countries, there's a national cathedral.
Prince Michael Bates (03:27): You got freedom of worship in Sealand. I think there's even the Quran here somewhere.
Speaker 4 (03:32): On the bottom floor, the jail.
Prince Michael Bates (03:35): Two days in the brig, bread and water.
Speaker 1 (03:37): I have to look at the Sealand constitution and see what my rights are.
Prince Michael Bates (03:41): Very limited at the moment.
Speaker 4 (03:43): If you're wondering by now how this concrete island constitutes a country, stick with us here.
Speaker 6 (03:49): This is Radio Caroline on 199.
Speaker 4 (03:53): Back in the 1960s, these same waters played host to the burgeoning, unlicensed commercial radio business that operated on ships and old fjords, what the British government called pirate radio. It was the time of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, but the stodgy BBC, which had a monopoly on broadcasting in Britain, gave the rock bands just an hour of airtime a week. (04:22) The younger set in Britain, millions of them, tuned their radio knobs to the pirate stations. In 1965, Prince Michael's father, Roy Bates, an enterprising, swashbuckling World War II veteran, commandeered to fort where another pirate station operated. It was the Wild West on the North Sea.
Speaker 7 (04:42): The DJs may not be highly experienced, but they certainly pull their weight.
Speaker 4 (04:46): Bates set up Britain's first 24-hour outfit. He called it Radio Essex.
Speaker 8 (04:50): You are in tune with Radio Essex broadcasting on 222 meters.
Roy Bates (04:55): We're doing a job that's needed. The public wants to do the job, so do businesses. I think while this demand is here, we'll remain in business.
Speaker 4 (05:03): But not for long. The British government enacted a new law rendering all pirate radio stations illegal. Bates was forced to shut down, but true to his nature, he was something other than scared off.
Prince Michael Bates (05:16): He just would not back down.
Speaker 1 (05:18): Form of surrender if he had said, "You know what? I'm out."
Prince Michael Bates (05:21): He wouldn't know that word surrender. I mean no.
Speaker 1 (05:24): Far from surrendering, bates seized another fort, Rough's Tower, which was outside UK territorial waters. Instead of restarting Radio Essex, he did something bolder still. On September 2nd, 1967, he declared it an independent state, Sealand, and declared himself its prince. It was his wife, Joan's birthday.
Prince Michael Bates (05:48): And it was of course, a hugely romantic gesture to make my mother a princess.
Speaker 1 (05:52): "In addition to taking you out to dinner, I'm going to make you a princess."
Prince Michael Bates (05:56): He didn't take her out to dinner, but he just made her a princess, yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:00): Prince Roy and Princess Joan, along with their two children, Michael and Penny, set up home on Sealand. The sheer novelty of their lifestyle was a constant source of amusement on the mainland. This news reel is from 1969.
Speaker 10 (06:14): The start of another day, even for the new royals, is no different than for millions of others: the request for a common cuppa.
Speaker 11 (06:21): Mrs. Bates, how is it possible to keep looking glamorous in conditions like these?
Mrs. Bates (06:26): It's no more difficult than anywhere else in the world. We're quite comfortable here. We have all the things I want. Look, makeups, brushes and things.
Speaker 4 (06:35): At age 16, Penny was less convinced.
Penny (06:37): It was freezing cold and it had no electricity. To flush a toilet, you'd have to chuck a bucket over the side, drop it down about 80 feet, pull it up and flush the toilet.
Speaker 1 (06:47): That was your toilet?
Penny (06:48): Yes.
Speaker 4 (06:49): The Bates family had big ambitions to turn Sealand into a tax haven, a luxury island and casino. They went all in on the trappings of statehood: fashioning a flag, stamps, currency, an anthem, even a national motto: E mare libertas (From the sea, freedom). (07:12) As teens, Michael and Penny would spend months on Sealand holding down the fort as it were, firing off warning shots, and tossing Molotov cocktails overboard to fend off periodic attempts of invasion from rivals and buccaneers.
Penny (07:27): When the press eventually came out and took photographs, my father called me down and he said, "Now look," he said, "how many times have I told you you do not hold a gun like that?"
Speaker 1 (07:39): You weren't holding the gun the right way?
Penny (07:40): Then actually, if you look at the picture, the way I'm holding the guns is dreadful.
Speaker 4 (07:44): Firmly settled on Sealand, the Bates remained a nuisance to the British government, so much so as a warning to the family, a team of royal engineers blew up a similar North Sea fort. At Sealand's National Archives, which doubles as Prince Michael's dining room table, we were shown declassified plans drawn up by the British Ministry of Defense to take Sealand by force.
Prince Michael Bates (08:13): "The following units are to be available to the execution of the operation: Royal Navy, two Wessex 5 helicopters, crafts from HM Naval base Chatham, Portsmouth, Medway, and a clearance diving team." It's crazy, isn't it?
Speaker 4 (08:29): But it wasn't just the British government that wanted to dislodge the family. In August 1978, a band of rogue German and Dutch lawyers and diamond merchants launched a coup d'état with designs of founding their own offshore casino. They arrived by helicopter with a film crew in tow, taking Prince Michael by surprise and then roughing him up.
Prince Michael Bates (08:51): They tied my elbows together, my knees together, my feet together, my hands down to my knees. They picked me up and this one says to the other in German, "Let's chuck this bastard over the side. He's too much trouble."
Speaker 1 (09:02): You're a full on political prisoner right now?
Prince Michael Bates (09:05): Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:05): Sealand had fallen. After three days, Michael was released. Did Michael and his father then return via helicopter, fully armed and flank by a group of bruisers to stage a successful counter coup? Yes. Yes, they did.
Prince Michael Bates (09:21): But I jumped and landed crash in the middle of the Germans. Saw the shotgun hit the deck, boom, and all the Germans went like that.
Speaker 1 (09:28): They surrender. That's it?
Prince Michael Bates (09:29): Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:29): You've reclaimed your principality.
Speaker 4 (09:32): Disarmed. The plotters were released, all except for one. His name was Putz and he was made to clean the bathroom, make coffee, and impose a fine for treason: $37,000. His imprisonment brought a German diplomat to Sealand.
Speaker 1 (09:49): But if you have German emissaries coming here to try and negotiate the release of this prisoner, doesn't that imply that Sealand is a state that's having relations?
Prince Michael Bates (10:00): Absolutely. It's de facto recognition, isn't it? It happened, yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:04): This diplomatic visit was critical for the Bates family. In international treaty signed in the 1930s, established four requirements for statehood. One is recognition by another state. Sealand had already met the other tests: a government, check, a defined territory, check, and a permanent population, check, thanks to Michael Barrington. So what's your position here?
Mike Barrington (10:30): Well, I do most of the engineering work electrically and whatever. Apparently I'm head of Homeland Security.
Speaker 1 (10:36): What are you protecting this place from?
Mike Barrington (10:38): Well, British government or anybody else that decides to take us over. We are a country after all, a small nation.
Speaker 1 (10:44): You're ready to use weapons if you have to?
Mike Barrington (10:46): If need be, yes. No hesitation.
Speaker 4 (10:48): But in recent years to keep Sealand afloat, the Bates family has updated their pirate radio sensibilities for the times. In the early 2000s, they partnered with fringe internet entrepreneurs who invested millions with designs of turning Sealand into an offshore data haven. Prince Michael's son, Prince James, showed us the old server room.
Prince James (11:10): We used to run things like gambling sites, porn sites. We had a few dubious people asking us to do things that we didn't really agree with. There was an organ transplant company, like human organs, that wanted to host out here, which my father was against.
Speaker 1 (11:28): Gambling and porn is okay, but we draw a line at harvesting human organs.
Prince James (11:31): Yes, exactly.
Speaker 4 (11:33): That venture failed dismally. But today, James and his younger brother, Prince Liam, are still harnessing the power of the internet. The Bates family won't disclose the size of the national debt or the yearly budget, but it is serviced through the online sale of noble titles. Become a Lord or Lady for $30, 600 bucks will make you a Sealand duke or Duchess.
Speaker 1 (11:57): People are buying these titles. What is that all about?
Prince Liam (12:00): I think it means so many things to so many different people. Some people love the act of political defiance. Some people love the love story that ran through it with my gran and grandpa. Some people love that David against Goliath.
Speaker 4 (12:15): That national myth, the very idea of Sealand, has now far outgrown the country itself. As for the House of Bates, well, Roy and Joan have passed on, and the rest of the lineage lives in the small English resort town of Southend-on-Sea. (12:33) Princes James and Liam run a business harvesting cockles. Princess Penny runs a Botox clinic nearby and, seven years ago, Prince Michael married and welcomed a new princess, Mae Shi, a former artillery major in China's People's Liberation Army. Six decades after founding their private little country, the royal family remains committed to the bit.
Speaker 1 (12:59): Is this a golden age for land?
Prince Michael Bates (13:01): Hopefully.
Speaker 1 (13:02): If the British Navy rolled up tomorrow and said, "It's time to reclaim Sealand," how do you respond?
Prince Michael Bates (13:09): Well, first of all, I'm sure they wouldn't, but if they did, I'd just get the best China out and make them a nice cup of tea.
Speaker 2 (13:19): Getting to and staying on Sealand.
Speaker 1 (13:22): I'd be lying if I said it was the most comfortable night's.