Men and their mettle

Francis Galea: Miż-Żejtun – l-Għaqda Banda Żejtun; self-published, 2010, 390 pp. HB: €25, SB: €20

Just when the Labour party is about to celebrate its 90th anniversary, out comes this book stuffed to the rafters with interesting chronicles of how the Żejtun band club got involved. Much is latched to the repressive living conditions that stumped people’s lives in the 1920s and well after the war.

This is not another vanity book about a village band club. It’s about class divisions, poverty, political rivalries and the tectonic political and social shifts that eventually ensured the very many basic human rights we now enjoy in Malta. It’s about men and their mettle.

Francis Galea has clinically analysed a trove of documents. The use of outstanding photography, mined from archives thought to have long perished makes it all the more appealing.

At the heart of it all, this book tells the story of a small band of people - maybe 10 at first, in 1926, who made a fist at conservative political thought and copper- bottomed religious tradition – a huge risk then – and won.

They first quit the club they played for (most were musicians), the Beland Band club: then organised themselves into a tiny political organisation, set up the Labour Jazz Band and then plumped for a full blown band club of their own.

They spent the rest of their lives chipping away at the coalface of intolerance, classist arrogance and pseudo canons. Throughout, this tale runs the thread of their involvement in the struggle to improve the island’s working class parlous conditions; people then were little more than chattel, their lives chortled by the elite.

The first two chapters reaffirm the provenance of our nation – where we came from and the history that moulded us.

From then on it’s one sleek enjoyable journey into the history of the Żejtun band club.

Galea’s account couldn’t be more descriptive. What the club founders were really after was a host of radical socio-political reforms. Their demands first flitted around and teased people’s consciousness, then inflamed it.

When their hero, Boffa, arrived, class driven governance and archaic religious domination began to wither on the tree.

The founders, almost all young dockyard workers, might have been mischievous but were hardly wicked. Their ideas were certainly dangerous then but they were nothing more than unabashed lefties. My mother, now 96, can still recite the Red Flag Anthem by heart without missing a beat.

What they certainly set out to destroy was social disadvantage – the result of gross political and clerical patronage and privilege.

Their greater enemy was ignorance, massively widespread in those days and hardly the exclusive preserve of the working class.

The men who founded the Zejtun band club were a cut above the average, certainly politically savvy.

Times changed and Galea reveals chapter after chapter how the club took on new roles. Today, the Żejtun band club continues to flourish, lead for decades by president Joe Attard – also Żejtun’s successful mayor. It is still popularly known as ‘Tal-Labour’.

Galea has produced a dazzling read for anyone wanting to find out more about events that gave the pendulum of political and social change a hefty shove forward.