George Sammut, a leading journalist of his time, was close to completing his autobiography when he died in 1984. This is the first part of a two-part series extract taken from his writings in which he briefly writes about Dom Mintoff’s early political career and how Mabel Strickland used to deal with the Labour politician. Mr Sammut was editor of The Sunday Times of Malta from 1956 to 1965. He was best known for his Roamer’s Column, which he began and wrote exclusively until his dismissal from the paper in 1972. This column was very popular and gave Mr Sammut his nickname ‘Ir-Roamer’.
The first impressions of Dom Mintoff reaching us at St Paul Street were of a cross between the anti-Christ and a creature from outer space radiating soul-destroying beams in the form of obnoxious leading articles, one of which compared the Swastika to the Cross. They were published in the Labour Party newspaper edited by Arthur Colombo who became a fellow minister in Paul Boffa’s Labour Government.
Mabel, a self-styled Queen of Malta, was somewhat erratic in her approach to Mintoff. She didn’t quite know what to make of him
Mintoff graduated MA at Oxford, and before returning to Malta after the war, married a fellow member of the Fabian Society, Moira de Vere Bentinck.
It was a civil marriage and therefore not recognised by Malta’s laws of the day. He decided it was wiser in Malta to conform and they were remarried in Church.
The couple had their usual formal wedding photo taken and it must be said that Dom’s morning coat wasn’t exactly the ideal fit. The Times of Malta editor Tom Hedley carried a large close-up on three columns on the local news page and Mabel blew him up for tactlessness and bad taste.
Mabel, a self-styled Queen of Malta, was somewhat erratic in her approach to Mintoff. She didn’t quite know what to make of him.
There were two great conflicting elements. First, he went to university in England, and nothing could stand higher in Mabel’s esteem than an English educational background. Yet on the other hand, there were all the things that were being said about him – a Fabian, a rebel, an unbeliever, an agitator – all attributes that clashed horribly with the staid, Conservative, northern Catholic landed gentry (four Jesuit priests in the family through the centuries) to which she owed her origins. It is my opinion that she decided there was no reason to antagonise him and that she would be friendly unless circumstances warranted otherwise.
It was in Mintoff’s interest that he should reciprocate. The island was still in the full throes of colonialism just after the war, the Mediterranean Fleet rode proudly at anchor in Grand Harbour and Sliema Creek, and Mabel was a power in the land.
Furthermore, she was the sole owner of almost all the newspapers – English and Maltese – in the island, whose columns he sorely needed.
The first time I met Mintoff was as his guest (indirectly!) at dinner at the Royal Hotel, which was later to become the present Hotel Corinthia in Attard. The occasion was the visit to Malta of four of Mintoff’s British Labour MP friends, among them Maurice Orbach, and he decided it would be a good idea if he had Mabel and some of her friends to meet them. She was asked to take a party of four with her, and the lot fell upon a young naval officer and his wife, my wife and myself.
I hardly remember anything that was said at that dinner so it was either unexciting or beyond me. I remember that either on the way there or on the way back, Orbach put the accent on the second ‘a’ of Agatha Christie, when referring to his addiction to the famous thriller writer – the only time I heard anyone do so before or since.
But what I do remember most vividly is that towards the end of the dinner, Mabel who, after all, was herself a guest, appointed me a sort of aide-de-camp for the occasion and kept calling out, “George, see to the liqueurs”, “George, see to the cigars!” which orders I promptly passed on to the waiter in attendance.
Now whether an understanding had been reached before between the host and guest that she should ‘act mama’ or whether Mabel had arbitrarily decided to take over, which was very much in keeping with her character, I was never to find out, but if it was the latter case, then my host might well have spent more than he had originally intended to.
At one time Mabel told Mintoff that whenever he needed anything from the office he should ask for me. He thanked her and agreed. Sure enough the opportunity arose a couple of weeks later when there had been some incident in the House involving Deputy Speaker Guzè Attard Bezzina. He wished his version of it to go into the paper. I told him I would ask the editor. Hedley refused. I passed the message on to Mintoff and that was the last time he rang me up. Mabel had made her ‘conti senza l’oste’.
I have never sat at table with Mintoff since, but from what I hear from those who have, at his L-Għarix, overlooking Delimara, his repasts, which guests share with thugs, are not exactly haute cuisine (one not seeing the fish for the bones), cutlery and crockery do not match and, as for liqueurs and cigars...
It is obvious that with the means at Mintoff’s disposal all this is bravado, comparable to the outsize buckles on his belts and his short-sleeved shirts in Parliament, in winter. It is significant that his own colleagues, who normally surpass themselves in their efforts to follow in his footsteps, wear jackets and ties. This buffoonery is one of the several unattractive traits in Mintoff’s character.
When Boffa, the Labour leader, was returned to power, in Malta’s first election under the new post-war Constitution, he made Mintoff his Minister of Works and Reconstruction. Mabel decided she would play safe. So she called me and a man from Il-Berqa called Joseph Ellul and took us down to the Auberge d’Aragon under the pretext of congratulating the Prime Minister on his assumption of office.
Boffa kept looking at his desk – as if to tell Mabel to keep her visit short as he was busy – his habitual cigarette hanging from his lips. She introduced us and told him that we would be his liaisons with the two newspapers. As was her wont, she did this without informing our respective editors, Hedley and Ninu Zammit, who were, of course, fully entitled to ignore this arrangement, as Hedley had done when it concerned Mintoff and me.
But then she came out with the sterner stuff – “What’s this man Mintoff like? They say he’s a Communist.” Without raising his head, Boffa told Mabel she should see the pile of fat files on Mintoff’s desk – there was so much war damage to be seen to, he had little time for other matters.
What’s this man Mintoff like? They say he’s a Communist- Mabel Strickland
With that we left. Boffa could hardly have foreseen that in two years Mintoff would be ousting him from the leadership of that party and that subsequently Boffa would not even be accepted as a member.
All this came long before the shirt sleeves and buckles we know today and the un-approachability that in turn puts people off, and I had a sneaking liking for Mintoff as I have for anyone who goes against the establishment and doesn’t toe the line.
One day he decided that the Mandraġġ should be demolished. This was a peculiar slum not without its historic aspect.
People had nestled in this wide hollow going down 12 feet above sea level in the vicinity of Marsamxett Harbour for hundreds of years. The Knights of Malta had started excavating to build an inner harbour for the safety of their galleys. The project was abandoned when the Order decided that Grand Harbour itself did well enough for this purpose.
Knocking down the Mandraġġ (from the Italian mandracchio) obviously meant moving its inhabitants, some of whom, it seems, were happy enough with their lot. They had always lived there, rent was infinitesimal, and they lived in Valletta, many close to their place of work.
One of them was Mabel’s machine-room foreman. She was eternally indebted to him, for it was due to him, to a great extent, that, notwithstanding the direct hits on the machine room during an air raid, her papers had never missed an issue during the war.
The Mandraġġ was a festering sore in Malta’s capital city but Mabel’s paper criticised its removal on the grounds of the hardship it would cause its inhabitants. It goes without saying that Mintoff carried the day, and I considered this as a victory for the whole of the island.
There were already houses in the Mandraġġ by 1600 and it had to wait for Mintoff 350 years later to clear the place, fill it in and build blocks of flats and a playing field overlooking the harbour, in its stead. I decided, nonentity that I was, to ring up and congratulate him, and he sounded pleased at my gesture.