Strickland House: The Standard-Bearers And The Launch Of The Times Of Malta
Book One, 1921-1935
Victor Aquilina
Allied Publications pp374
ISBN: 978-99909-3-154-9 (paperback)
978-99909-3-154-8 (hardback)

I rather blush to begin this review by admitting that I have visited Malta only once, and that was in the previous rather than in the present millennium. But it was on that vacation that I went to the cathedral at Mdina, where I encountered the appropriately over-the-top memorial slab to a controversial and many-sided nobleman who had died in 1940, and one of whose names was Lord Strickland.

But in addition to being a British peer, he had also been a Maltese count, and he was the owner of extensive estates in both countries. At different stages in his variegated career, Lord Strickland had been an imperial proconsul in the West Indies and in Australia, and a member of the British House of Commons and of the Malta Assembly.

He was passionately devoted to Malta itself, to Britain, and to the British Empire; he disliked Italy, Maltese Nationalists and the papal hierarchy (though he was a practising Roman Catholic), and thanks to the fortune his second wife brought into their marriage, he was able to promote these views through the newspapers which he founded, of which the two most famous were for a long time known as the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times of Malta.

In the 70 years since Lord Strickland’s death, much of his world has vanished, despite the devoted and determined efforts of his redoubtable daughter Mabel, who inherited his newspaper ventures and shared his views, to keep them alive.

The British Empire is no more, the Royal Navy has vanished from the Valletta harbour, Malta has been independent for nearly half a century, and even The Times and The Sunday Times have been compelled to drop the words “of Malta” from their mastheads.

To these developments, both Lord Strickland and Mabel Strickland were temperamentally – but in the end vainly – opposed. He fought against what he saw as Italian irredentism and papal interference in the affairs of the island. She was a staunch supporter of maintaining the imperial connection with Britain, and was a determined opponent of then Labour leader Dom Mintoff.

But in addition, Lord Strickland was notorious for his rages, his vindictiveness and his self-importance, while Mabel was denounced by Nationalists for her haughty demeanour and for her unwavering – but in the end unsustainable – belief in the “divine right” of her family to rule Malta.

In their lifetimes, they were both deeply controversial figures – and not only in Malta, but in Britain, too, where their intransigent imperialism and belligerent outspokenness meant they rarely enjoyed the support of those in power whose Empire it was their dearest wish to safeguard.

Nor has controversy ceased since their deaths, for it is still easy (although scarcely the whole truth of things) to present both Lord Strickland and his daughter as die-hard reactionaries who were viscerally opposed to everything that modern, independent Malta has become and now stands for.

Under these circumstances, it was a brave act for Victor Aquilina, himself a former and long-serving editor of The Times, to undertake a full, frank and detailed history of the Strickland publishing ventures; and it was equally brave of the Strickland Foundation, which owns The Times and The Sunday Times, to grant him unrestricted access to the appropriate archives.

Moreover, this initial instalment is very much a prologue, since it ends, rather than begins, with the first appearance of the Times of Malta on a daily basis in August 1935, and it will clearly take several more volumes to bring the story down to the present time.

Nevertheless, this is an enthralling account of the three figures who, between them, were the creators of The Times and The Sunday Times, and also of the earlier publishing ventures that preceded the establishment of these iconic island titles. Mr Aquilina’s portraits of Lord Strickland, of his second wife, and of Mabel are both vivid and judicious, catching their extraordinary, outsized, bizarre and obsessive personalities, and also taking a balanced and even-handed view of their positive achievements (which were substantial), as well as of their controversial politics.

The result is a many-sided contribution to the history of the British Empire and to the history of Malta, as well as to the history of the newspaper industry.

And there is so much more to come, including the epic years of World War II, when Mabel bravely kept the presses going despite the siege and the bombings; and the no less belligerent peace that followed, when Mabel was locked in another titanic struggle, this time with Dom Montoff over the island’s future.

These later volumes will surely be eagerly awaited; and this first instalment certainly makes me want to visit Malta again – and again.

☐ Professor Sir David Cannadine is currently Whitney J. Oates senior research scholar at Princeton University, and chairman of the Trustees of the National Port-rait Gallery of London. He is the author of many books, and was knighted in 2009. He wrote about Strickland (Lord Strickland: Imperial Aristocrat and Aristocrat Imperialist) in his Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain.