by Carlo Bonini
When the British stepped in they knew better than to repeat the mistake of placing themselves on the wrong side of the Catholic Church. So they used the bishop’s influence with the native population and in exchange, they protected his authority as a local prince.
The local British authorities resisted pressure from Anglican missionaries to convert the Knights’ grand 16th century church of St John, which the state had inherited from the Knights’ civilian government of Malta, into a white-washed Anglican church. Instead in the 1820s they invited Malta’s Catholic bishop to bring down half of his cathedral chapter from Mdina and sit on a throne in Valletta’s state-owned ‘co-cathedral’ of St John.
That was far more authority than the local bishop had ever enjoyed during the days of the Knights. In effect the British made the Catholic Church the established religion in Malta after the fashion of the Protestant Church of England. It was a clever scheme.
Whether you were pro-British or pro-Italian became the fundamental fissure of politics in Malta, at least until suffrage was extended to the industrial working class. The workers were less interested in cultural conflicts than bread and money, but the ‘Language Question’ remained the divisive issue right up to the 1930s. The British had left Malta’s established legal tradition, inherited centuries earlier, to run its affairs in the Italian language. But was it still acceptable? Should English be the language of compulsory learning instead, as the first universal schooling system was being introduced?
Malta’s traditional political parties coagulated around these divides. Malta’s Partit Nazzjonalista, or Nationalist Party (PN), was formally founded in 1880, a cadre party with a secular attitude but identifying Catholicism as key to Maltese national identity.
In Hobsbawmian terms, their ‘invented tradition’ for Malta was firstly that it was European, white, and Christian. This implied that the ‘white man’s burden’ of colonialism as a civilising influence on backward people from other races did not apply. Also, Malta was Catholic rather than just Christian, and while this was more of a cultural mindset than a matter of orthodox theology, it created an otherness from the British Protestant rulers, or ‘the English’ as the colonisers were collectively known. The Italians, on the other hand, were closer and shared the island’s Catholic identity.
The PN remained vague on the idea of a political and legal unification with Italy. But it was reasonable for the Anglophiles to suspect that such an outcome would not be unlikely if the Nationalists held sway.
The PN’s opposite number was the pro-British Constitutional Party led by an Anglo-Maltese, Gerald Strickland. His party was essentially a vehicle for his personal charisma. He was born of a marriage between a British naval officer with an ancient aristocratic pedigree and an heiress of equally ancient Maltese nobility who gave him the title of Count della Catena.
Gerald Strickland was a classically Victorian scion of the Empire. He served the British administration as Governor of the Leeward Islands, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New South Wales. He sat as a member of the House of Commons and was later elevated to the British peerage. He mobilised politics in Malta around loyalty to the British crown and the concept of modernisation and Westernisation to promote Malta as a successful part of the Empire.
In times of plenty, that politics found broad support.
There were moments of deep crisis, however. The end of the First World War brought about massive redundancies with cuts in military and naval services leaving many homeless and destitute. The price of bread, the survival staple of the island, increased heavily, making unemployment a hungry state of affairs.
When a protest was called on 7 June 1919 in Valletta in the square facing the headquarters of the British government, troops were ordered to keep the crowd in line. Shots were fired and four men, some of them innocent bystanders, were killed on the spot. Two others died of their wounds in the following few days.
The events of the 7 June (known locally in Italian as Sette Giugno) were Malta’s own mini-Amritsar massacre when the British lost their moral authority over the country.
Sette Giugno became the platform for demands of political autonomy and attempts to bring about self-government that would plan for Malta’s economic needs in the absence of British military spending.
The British response came in 1921 when Malta was granted ‘dominion status’, ostensibly modelled on Canadian and Australian autonomy. But the devil was in the detail. The British retained the option to cancel constitutional rights and revert to colony status.
Fairly quickly, the British pulled the plug on Maltese autonomy.
The biggest crisis of all came with the onset of Fascism in Italy and the conversion of romantic, cultural irredentism to an official policy of territorial enlargement. Benito Mussolini’s Italy claimed the right to dominance of the Mediterranean Sea which they called mare nostrum or ‘our sea’. Malta was described as l’estremo lembo del nido italico or ‘the furthest tip of the Italian nest’.
When Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain on 10 June 1940 in a speech from his balcony in Palazzo Venezia, the Maltese were listening on the radio. They knew precisely which part of the vast British Empire was within flying range of Italian bombers. The next day the first bombs were dropped on Malta and the first casualties suffered.
So began the Second Siege of Malta. The story is best told by Nicholas Monsarrat, a Royal Naval officer, in his novel The Kappillan of Malta. Kappillan means ‘chaplain’ or ‘parish priest’. The book is a must read for anyone visiting the island.
Received British military doctrine in the 1930s was that Malta was indefensible, so only six obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes were on the island when Mussolini declared war. No more than three of the biplanes flew at once. The islanders nicknamed them Faith, Hope, and Charity. Early on, one of the biplanes was shot down but the other two, astonishingly, managed to knock out some of the Italian aircraft. The indefensible island could, it turned out, be defended. Winston Churchill, newly installed at Number Ten, reversed British policy and set out to defend the island come what may.
The best German general knew the strategic importance of Malta. Erwin Rommel, the leader of the Afrika Korps, said ‘without Malta, the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa’. The bombing campaign against Malta was brutal, probably the most terrible across all the allied territories. Italian bombers had only to fly 60 miles to a sitting duck in clear blue skies. London was being blitzed at the same time and it took an age before the Royal Navy was able to set up successful convoys carrying Spitfires to organise a fightback.
Those British naval officers who at the dawn of the 18th century argued for holding on to Malta were proved right a century-and-a-half later. Malta was heroically described as ‘an unsinkable aircraft carrier’ from which the RAF and the Royal Navy could harass the supply lines supporting Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa. The cost in Maltese casualties was high.
The war against Malta ebbed and flowed. In the first stage the enemy was Italian but in the spring of 1941 the Luftwaffe arrived in Sicily and the bombing grew heavier. When Adolf Hitler attacked Russia, many of the aircraft targeted at Malta flew east. Then, as the Russian winter set in and flying became virtually impossible in the East, the Luftwaffe returned to Sicily to hit Malta once again. In 1941 and 1942, the island suffered more than 3,000 bombing raids, and the worst hit were the heavily-crowded streets surrounding Valletta’s harbour. In the first six months of 1942 there was only one day without an air raid. As Monserrat describes so powerfully in The Kappillan of Malta, people took sanctuary underground, even among the dead in the catacombs. But living in these grim conditions led to dreadful sanitation problems and eventually a typhoid epidemic. 1,493 civilians died and 3,674 were wounded. As ever in war, the very young and the very old suffered the most.
The assault from the air was only part of the story. Italian and German submarines sank dozens of naval and supply ships approaching from the British base of Gibraltar so that sup
plies of food were under massive pressure. Axis minefields and enemy aircraft added to the toll. Between 1940 and 1942, 31 ships were lost. By the early summer of 1942, the island was cut off and ordinary people were suffering from malnutrition.
The pivot of the siege was in August 1942. By then, the fortnightly ration on Malta for one person was 14oz (400g) sugar, 7oz (200g) fats, 10.5oz (300g) bread, and 14oz (400g) of corned beef. An adult male worker had a daily intake of 1,690 calories and women and children received 1,500 calories. Such was the desperation of the authorities that a mass slaughter of livestock began on the island. A convoy from Alexandria bringing food made it through, and the near-starving civilian population could eat. From the West came the tanker SS Ohio and, although it was bombed repeatedly, it managed to make it to Valletta and with it precious fuel supplies for Malta’s Spitfires. Without these supplies, Malta would have fallen.
In the autumn, the Luftwaffe were back but by then the war was turning and by the following summer the Axis had been booted out of northern Africa and the siege was lifted.
Such was the courage and defiance of the people of Malta that King George VI awarded the George Cross to the Maltese nation, an honour borne on the country’s flag to this day.
The war put paid to any sympathy to the Italian cause in mainstream opinion. Italy had made itself the enemy and any sympathisers became traitors and enemies.
During the war, leaders of the Nationalist Party (PN) were rounded up and imprisoned in a low security internment camp. Eventually they were deported to Uganda to wait out the war fought over the skies of their country. They were presumed traitors and enemy collaborators despite there being no evidence that they were sympathetic to the Fascist cause.
But there was evidence aplenty against Carmelo Borg Pisani. He was Maltese but a believer in Italian Fascism. In May 1942 he was smuggled to the island but bad weather wrecked his plans and he ended up in a naval hospital. There, Pisani was recognised by one of his childhood friends, Captain Tom Warrington. In November 1942 he was tried, sentenced to death for treason, and executed.
Malta’s experience of the war is particular to its own circumstances. The Maltese people perceive it as a collateral incident of their colonial experience and believe they would not have been dragged into the conflict were it not for the fact that they were part of the British Empire.
The heroism of a generation is not remembered in the same vein as people in Italy think of the partigiani or the French of the résistance. Nor did they experience the mortifying heritage of collaboration, whether with the strategic interests of the enemy or, for example, with the denunciation of the Jews or ‘degenerates’.
Like Britain, Malta was never occupied by the enemy, though it came close. But, unlike Britain, Malta did not quite see itself as a valiant defender of democracy because it had none it could call its own.
Instead it could pride itself on its endurance and a quasi-fanatical and certainly religious belief in patience being rewarded.
At least in good part, because of the planes flown from Malta to sink ships supplying the Afrika Korps, the Axis forces ran aground in North Africa and that front was abandoned. The tide would turn and, from a defensive outpost held in extremis, Malta would become a platform for the invasion of Sicily and the beginning of the end of Italian fascism.
Within months of the end of the war, Britain had to rethink its global role as colonial master. The leaders of the PN came limping back from Uganda and slowly regrouped, promoting an explicit agenda for independence. Unification with Italy was no longer on the cards. The Italian language was dropped from the public space and replaced with English, no longer the language of the philistine colonial masters but rather the language of the victorious side of the war, and alongside it Maltese, a language spoken since the Arab invasion but codified as part of the ‘invented tradition’ of Maltese identity in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As Britain adopted a formal policy of decolonisation and the dismantling of Empire, the vocation of the pro-British party in Malta, now led by Gerald Strickland’s daughter, Mabel, became unclear.
Some of its traditional support, the urban middle and upper classes, flocked to the PN not because they were particularly attracted to it but more because of the fear of the alternative.
The Malta Labour Party, originally the ‘Malta Workers Party’, grew out of industrial trade unionism in the harbour districts that employed thousands of people in the shipyards and ancillary ship-repair industries. Its leadership was inspired by British Fabianism and as such was culturally, if not socially, closer to the Anglophile Constitutionalists than to the decidedly bourgeois Nationalists.
The Labour Party (PL) would, by the end of the Second World War, absorb the remaining support formerly enjoyed by the Constitutionalists. They won three-fourths of all votes in the first post-war election of 1947 which the Nationalists, still dazed from their years of exile in Uganda, did not contest with any vigour.
Labour established itself as the party of the masses, adept by design at universal suffrage.
A young ideologue, Dominic Mintoff, emerged from the labour movement, and challenged its urbane, moderate leader by founding the Labour Party, a paradoxical mix of mass support, mobilisation machine, and para-religious cult built around his personal charisma.
Dom Mintoff designed his image around the decolonisation moulds of the time – Kenyatta, Nasser, Tito, and Nehru. He projected the image of a strong man, ambivalent in his allegiance to either West or East in a Cold War context but professing willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with friendly countries that would support his revolution.
He first became prime minister in 1955 and held office for three years until he fell foul of the Catholic Church. Dom Mintoff led the opposition to Malta’s independence negotiated by the Nationalist government of 1962-1971 of prime minister George Borg Olivier. His objections were unspecific and mostly irrational, apparently grounded in the frustration that he was not the one in the pictures. He sat out independence but finally returned as prime minister in 1971. Mintoff was energetic, clever – he’d been educated at Oxford – and radical. Under his rule, Malta was the first country to recognise Chairman Mao as the leader of the legitimate government of China, a switching of sides that would prove visionary. But that was from the same vein of foreign policy that would replace Malta’s long-standing affiliation with NATO and the West with the tight embrace of Libyan strongman Mu’ammar Ghaddafi.
When Mintoff took over power in 1971, he extended the lease the Nationalists had agreed with NATO for military forces’ bases in Malta that was due to expire in 1974. When that extension expired again in 1979 and the British forces left for good, their departure was celebrated by Mintoff as the day Malta truly became independent, rebranding the Italianate term for Malta’s sovereignty to the more semitic Ħelsien or ‘Freedom’. His guest of honour at the freedom ceremony was Mu’ammar Ghaddafi.
By now Malta had become a two-party country. The PN and the PL fought fiercely to get the few thousand votes either party needed to exceed the 50% support threshold and secure exclusive and unassailable political power for five years.
No MP has been elected to Malta’s parliament since 1962 unless they ran on the ticket of one of the two main parties. Independent candidates were and are seen as a loony footnote, comic relief for profoundly confrontational politics.
As the 1970s wore on, politics became violent. Beatings of protesters were an expected outcome of any anti-government manifestation. Discrimination and industrial scale clientilism were mainstream. Things came to a head in 1981 when a close election returned the PL with a majority of parliamentary seats despite gaining fewer votes than the losing PN.
In the early 1980s, Malta’s constitutional court was not convened so that the government could avoid answering legal challenges. Armed gangs of the PL would tour PN clubs on Sunday afternoons, shooting in the air, sometimes at the door. A fatality was recorded. The Catholic Church was forced to shut down it
s schools and its pupils were driven into underground classes in their teachers’ homes as the Labour government forced a choice between closure or the abolition of school fees. Malta’s economy was pushed into iron-curtain isolationism that created scarcities and discontent.
The PN won the 1987 election by 5,000 votes. It campaigned on the Europeanisation of Malta, normalising its politics, and applying for membership of the then EEC, the predecessor organisation of the European Union.
The programme of reforms that started in 1987 was overtaken by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Malta was suddenly at the back of the queue of other countries desperate to join the EU. Eddie Fenech Adami, the PN leader through the violent 1980s and reforming 1990s, left the premiership on the eve of accession to the EU in 2004.
Securing EU membership was no straightforward political task. Labour had resisted independence in 1964 for no clear reason. Resistance to EU membership came in a very similar vein. Dom Mintoff and his successors as PL leaders, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant, all forcefully argued that the EU was an immoral, capitalist behemoth which would gobble up a small country like Malta for breakfast.
It was for Alfred Sant, prime minister 1996-98, PL leader 1992-2008, to lead the charge against EU membership, mouthing arguments about absorbed national sovereignty, uncontrolled and overwhelming immigration, and an inescapable European army returning Maltese soldiers in body bags.
His right-hand man was Joseph Muscat, a young propagandist of the PL who became a prominent ‘No’ campaigner, hosting a prime TV slot on the PL’s TV station called, with little irony, Made in Brussels.
Joseph Muscat’s campaign for Alfred Sant was very nearly victorious. Of the 10 accession countries that joined the EU in 2004, Malta was the first to run a referendum on the matter and the majority supporting membership was the slimmest, barely 54%.
As it happened, a general election immediately following the referendum elected the PN and EU membership followed.