Forking Britannia: A Love Letter Written on a Sea Fort

By Guest contributor: Joseph Mckinney, Startup Societies Foundation

I read the Memoir of Sealand’s Prince Michael looking for a feud with Britain. I found an outpost.

From a distance, Sealand looks like a prank that got out of hand: two concrete towers in the North Sea, a flag, a title, a story that sounds like it was invented over the third pint and then stubbornly made real out of spite.

Up close, at least as the Bates family tells it, it reads differently. Less “screw you”, and more “this mattered to me”. Less contempt, more grief with its sleeves rolled up.

Sealand isn’t anti‑Britain. It’s Britain distilled, compressed over two concrete towers.

A fork, not a feud.

1) Whitehall, With a Rope Ladder 

The British state has a particular way of taking itself seriously. It likes a file. It likes a queu. It likes a committee. It likes a name for the thing it’s about to do, as if naming it makes it tidier, less absurd, less human.

In Michael Bates’s memoir, the moment the state finally moves against Sealand arrives with the sort of theatrical sobriety you can almost smell: coded messages, stern faces, and a plan titled “Plan B: Operation Gallows.”

It’s an excellent name, and it lasts about thirty seconds.

Because then the men arrive at the physical edge of the world, where plans meet wind. Their sleekness doesn’t translate to salt spray. The ladder slaps against wet concrete. The sea heaves below. The fort rises like a dare.

And the would‑be agents, those trained, competent limbs of authority, have to climb. As Bates tells it, the grand entrance becomes a small slapstick: bodies hauled like awkward luggage, lifejackets bobbing, boots scraping, the kind of undignified flailing you’d expect at a swimming pool, not a sovereignty dispute.

The line Bates drops is almost too British to be real: “If you can’t trust a British Bobby, whom can you trust?”

I laughed when I first read it. Not because it’s mean, but because it’s affectionate. It’s a joke you make when you’re frightened and trying not to show it. A joke that says: I can see the human inside the uniform.

Somewhere in this scene there is a thermos. (There is always a thermos.) Sea wind makes your eyes water. Your hands smell of rope and metal. You learn, with a little jolt of humility, that dignity is not guaranteed just because someone called you sir.

From the start, Sealand reads like Britain arguing with one of its own peculiar children, half comedy, half courage, all salt.

2) The Smirk I Brought With Me

I once made a Sealand joke at a dinner table, something lazy about a micronation and cosplay sovereignty, and it landed like a wet napkin. Someone across from me didn’t get angry. They just looked tired, the way you look when you realise you’re hearing the same shallow joke for the thousandth time. I went home slightly embarrassed and, out of sheer self‑defence, started reading properly.

What I found, in the memoir and the family’s account, was not resentment but loyalty. A fierce attachment to an older British self‑image: common law as shelter, not theatre; fairness as instinct; speech and property and personal dignity as constraints on power, not favours from it.

The Bates family doesn’t sound like people who hate Britain. They sound like people who refuse to deal with disappointment by pretending they never loved it.

There’s a difference between leaving a house because you despise it and leaving because you can’t stand to watch it rot while everyone insists the damp is only the season.

3) Duty, Then Horizon

If Sealand were only floating cosplay, it wouldn’t last. It would collapse under the first hard question.

What holds it together, in Bates’s telling, is a particular kind of British life-pattern: service, then adventure; duty, then defiance; courage treated as ordinary.

Roy Bates is presented as wartime stock. He volunteers young. His war runs through faraway places with the blunt geography of old newsreels, Africa, the Middle East, Italy. He is wounded. He returns, and the returning never quite finishes the story.

The most revealing parts aren’t the grand ones. They’re the understatements. Bates recounts an Italian barber whose garlic breath was, apparently, the worst part of the whole affair. It’s funny, and it’s also a moral temperament: misery gets reported like weather. You don’t dramatise; you carry on.

Even Roy’s adventures abroad (gunfire somewhere in Spain, everyone ducking, Roy staying seated) carry that oddly British blend of bravado and denial. The kind of man who half believes, irrationally, that being an Englishman is armour.

Behind Roy is lineage. The memoir reaches back to a grandfather’s First World War citation—devotion to duty, calm under fire—the language of an island that once made a virtue out of not flinching.

However you feel about war, that inheritance matters. It explains why Sealand’s story doesn’t smell like grievance. It smells like duty, plus the itch for the horizon.

4) The Better Angels, Turning Up Unannounced

One of the strangest pleasures of the Sealand story is how often Britain’s better angels wander into it, uninvited.

In the memoir’s telling, the government considers a violent solution and then doesn’t take it. Not because it can’t, but because it chooses not to. The calculation isn’t only legal; it’s moral, practical, and reputational. Don’t make a mess you’ll be ashamed of later.

There’s etiquette, too. Taking the fort when only a woman is present would be, without anyone needing to say so, bad form.

Then the Navy appears, not as a threat but as a chain of small decencies. Sealanders are warned about weather. Newspapers arrive. A crewman presses a mug into someone’s hand. Bates notes the shipboard tradition: a guest doesn’t buy the drink or the cigarette. It’s a tiny rule, but it contains a whole moral universe: hospitality as duty; generosity as habit, not performance.

There is navy rum, too, because of course there is. The British can be incredibly stern, but they will also feed you, warm you, and then pretend they didn’t notice you needed it.

If you love Britain, scenes like that ache. They show the country as it likes to imagine itself: restrained, fair, quietly competent, capable of humour and mercy at the same time.

5) An Island, a Flag, a Lawyer

The origin story that sticks isn’t the titles. It’s a line tossed into a marriage like a joke.

“Well darling, you now have your own island.”

In the memoir, the response is not a proclamation but practical disappointment: no palm trees, no sunshine–perhaps at least a flag. The romance of empire reduced to weather.

And then, because Britain cannot help itself, the lawyer enters.

Roy Bates, as the family tells it, asks a retired City solicitor a question that only someone who half worships the rules would dare to ask: if I make it my own country, who can stop me?

The answer is not a speech. It’s a paradox. “I don’t think anyone can stop you… but of course, you can’t do it.”

There it is: the strange British love of edge cases. The belief that law is real, and also the suspicion that law contains hidden doors for the audacious.

Sealand blooms in that thin space between you can’t and, apparently, nobody will. It’s the English home-is-his-castle instinct taken offshore and made literal: if the castle is yours, and it’s beyond the line, then perhaps it is yours in a deeper way.

A fork, not a feud.

6) Don’t Look Down

You can talk about sovereignty until you fall asleep. Sealand’s real argument is physical.

It’s the taste of salt on your lips. The way wind makes you blink hard. The rope ladder slapping wet concrete like it’s trying to leave. The small, private panic of height.

In the memoir, a father brings his son to the ladder and gives guidance the way fathers do when they’re trying to pass on courage without calling it that: “Whatever you do, son, don’t look down!”

Of course the boy looks down.

The sea is a moving sheet of iron. Your knees have an opinion about it. Your fingers tighten until they ache. You learn, very quickly, that bravery isn’t a speech. It’s deciding to keep your eyes on the next rung.

When the boy finally steps onto the fort, it doesn’t feel like a country. It feels like a relic; an abandoned wartime throat of corridors and riveted doors, a place with the stale air of men who once lived there and left. Bates describes the interior like a haunted house that still carries human traces: an empty mess, scattered remnants, the sense of a ship whose crew vanished between one meal and the next.

Outside, the birds sit and watch, cormorants lined up like black-clad jurors. The fort is stubborn enough to pretend it can bargain with the sea.

This is where the Bilbo Baggins comparison stops being cute and becomes accurate. The archetypal Briton is not only the conqueror; it’s the reluctant adventurer. The person who loves home but can’t resist the call to go out, risk it, come back changed, and then quietly insist that the world has rules worth defending.

There and back again, but with rust under your fingernails.

7) A Loyalty You Can Put Your Hands On

The memoir doesn’t spend much time making a point. It mostly tells stories, sometimes boastful, sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy, and lets the reader feel the ache in the gaps.

One of those gaps is patriotism.

Not the performative kind, not the kind that needs an enemy to stay warm. The quieter kind: the sense that Britain stands for something worth being proud of, even when Britain doesn’t always live up to it.

Bates is explicit, in his own way, that the family’s project was never hatred. His father, he insists, was no traitor to the homeland; if Roy had been young and fit enough, he’d have fought again for Queen and country. That’s the tone: disappointed, yes, but not disloyal.

It is possible to love a place and still say: something has gone wrong. It’s possible to feel homesick while still living in the house.

You see that homesickness in small objects. In the shipboard mug pressed into a hand. In the stubborn insistence on a flag even when there are no palm trees. In the mock‑Latin motto people repeat with a grin that doesn’t quite hide the grit behind it, nil illigitimi carborundum, because humour is how you carry stubbornness without calling it righteousness.

And yes, you notice the empire sitting in the room. In the Bates generation there’s admiration for imperial confidence: bravery, institution‑building, an island that once believed it could make the world legible. You can acknowledge that without pretending empire was only noble. It did harm, too; it extracted and coerced; it left scars that outlast the flags. Love grows up when it stops needing the past to be spotless.

Sealand, in that grown-up register, reads as a place to put loyalty when the mainline feels confusing. Not a replacement for Britain, but a stripped-down symbol of Britishness: liberty, property, decency, courage, humour. Less about power, more about character.

8) The Shadow

Every family story becomes a handing‑over.

Not a title. A weight.

In Bates’s telling, Roy says to his son: “One day, when I am gone, you will be my shadow walking the earth.”

It lands because it isn’t sentimental. It’s practical. A father admitting, in his own way, that the thing he built is fragile. It will only survive if someone chooses, again and again, to carry it.

A fork, not a feud.

The last image I can’t shake isn’t a proclamation. It’s smaller.

A mug on a naval ship, held out without ceremony.

A ladder in wind, ropes wet, your palms salty, your pride misbehaving.

Concrete underfoot. Rust in the air.

And below it all, the sea, grey, moving, indifferent, making the rope creak against the fort’s skin as if to say you can call this a country if you like. Then the ladder slapped the concrete again, impatient and alive.

E Mare Libertas!

Sealand was never kept alive by spectators. It has endured because people chose to climb the ladder, steady themselves in the wind, and build where others saw only rust and open water. If something in this story speaks to you, bring your unique skills and become a Sealand Builder so you can shape Sealand’s next chapter through ideas, craft, enterprise, and civic spirit. The sea fortress stands. Its next chapter belongs to those willing to climb.