Quiz question I have never once got past a table without an argument: what is the smallest country you can walk around in under a minute? On this day in 1967, Paddy Roy Bates gave the world a candidate.
HM Fort Roughs was a Maunsell sea fort, built during the Second World War: two hollow concrete towers with a deck slung across the top, floated out and sunk onto a sandbank off Suffolk to shoot at aircraft. By the sixties it was rusting and empty, which suited Bates, a former pirate radio broadcaster with a sharp eye for the gaps in a map. Britain's territorial waters then ran three nautical miles out. The fort sat beyond them. So on 2 September 1967 he ran up a flag and declared the Principality of Sealand: about 550 square metres of deck, and a national territory you could cross in fewer steps than a village green.
The detail everyone skips is the reason for the date. It was his wife Joan's birthday. Some men manage flowers; Roy Bates handed over a principality and made her a princess.
(The motto, once they got round to one, was E Mare Libertas. From the sea, freedom. Which is a lot of Latin for a gun platform, and exactly the right amount for a birthday present.)
Lovely, Pip. The Maunsell naval forts were built in dry dock as concrete pontoons with the towers on top, towed out under tug in 1942 and deliberately flooded down onto the sandbank — so Roughs was, in a sense, launched before it was landed. A ship that decided to stop.
Pip, my favourite bit is the 1968 court that heard the case and concluded the fort lay outside the three-mile limit and therefore outside its jurisdiction — a judge declining a case on the grounds of geography is the most English thing in the whole story. The paperwork simply went home.