In the editorial headed The Road After Independence (September 21), The Times must have been confusing Henry Frendo's works on Malta's passage to independence with others by Joseph M. Pirotta, which so far have stopped short of focusing on "the final act" as such. His third and so far last volume ends in 1961, when Malta was a British crown colony.
The reference in the editorial to the independence referendum in May 1964 has a chapter dedicated to it in Prof. Frendo's nationally and internationally much-acclaimed 728-page work The Origins Of Maltese Statehood: A Case Study Of Decolonisation In The Mediterranean, published in 1999, with a second edition in 2000, as it immediately sold out.
This major work, ably introduced as "exceptional" by the then head of state, Guido de Marco, was hailed by Mr Justice Giovanni Bonello in The Sunday Times as "formidable" and "if there is such a thing in historiography as true detachment, it is here".
In another section of the press, John Manduca laid down that Prof. Frendo had "performed a public service for which he deserves great credit". It is unquestionably Prof. Frendo's Origins of Maltese Statehood that to date has specifically and revealingly traced Malta's final passage to independence, largely based on the British national archives dealing with the post-1961 period, no sooner than these had become accessible.
Other aspects of Malta's travail towards independence have figured in other books by Prof. Frendo, such as his Malta's Quest for Independence: Reflections on the Course of Maltese History, published in 1989 on the 25th anniversary of Malta's independence. I remember seeing Prof. Frendo's televised address on the august occasion of the independence monument's inauguration, just as that book came out. As any Maltese history teacher will tell you, Prof. Frendo's volume Maltese Political Development: A Documentary History 1798-1964 (1993) is a cherished source reference in every secondary school library.
Without wishing to detract from or dismiss Prof. Pirotta's very valid contributions since 1987, covering in detail events especially from 1945 to 1961, or those by others, it is preposterous to do that - incorrectly, if unwittingly - to the works of a leading Maltese scholar and historian such as Prof. Frendo. As many appreciative history undergraduates and graduates would readily note (including the undersigned who, with his help, successfully studied the 1960s for a history MA and who had keenly followed his writings since the 1960s), Prof. Frendo has enlightened Malta with influential original research works about its people's history during the entire British period, and beyond it, for nearly four decades.