On the 25th anniversary of Mabel Strickland’s death, Victor Aquilina gives a glimpse of her life, focusing on her work as editor of Times of Malta during World War II.
It is not without good reason that Mabel Strickland is often regarded first as a journalist rather than a politician. Of course, she loved politics, but right from the time she started helping out her father when he set up his first printing shop in Republic Street, Valletta, in 1921, the year Malta was granted its first self-government constitution, her heart was in journalism.
It was Mabel who first thought of publishing Times of Malta, not her father, and the newspaper remained her first love throughout the rest of her life. Having risen to no great heights in politics, Times of Malta (her first preferred title for the newspaper was Morning Telegraph) was her most important legacy.
A colourful figure by all accounts, Mabel shared her father’s deep love for the Empire and for Britain but, while Lord Strickland fought for equality of rights, she had once gone a step further and suggested union with Britain, only to backtrack on her proposal when she was told of its implications, including the possible introduction of civil union and divorce.
Union with Britain, or integration, which is what Labour politician Dom Mintoff sought in later years, was actually not her own idea. It was suggested to her by her editor-in-chief, Joseph Olivieri-Munroe. But she had taken it up in earnest in her newspapers until she was persuaded that it was not in the island’s interest.
A secret report on Mabel drawn up for the colonial office was not very flattering about her. Mabel, it said, changed her opinions from week to week, and she just loved intrigue. No doubt, the writers of the report had in mind her intrigue against the Governor, General Sir William Dobbie, whom, she strongly suspected, was prepared to surrender, a belief not shared by many others at the time.
Mintoff, whom she feared so much for his socialist ideas, had once accused her of having been in the British intelligence service and of having played a prominent part in “the internment of pro-Italians among the members of the legislative assembly”. There is no question that she, her father, his party and their newspapers had played a significant influencing role in the hounding of Italian sympathisers, but Mabel had denied she had ever been in the British intelligence service.
One reason given by Mintoff for believing that Mabel had been in the intelligence service was somewhat bizarre, at least in the way he related it, and did not make much sense either. Briefly, he implied that members of the intelligence service and of Il-Berqa used to regularly break into the press of their political opponent, Enrico Mizzi, and print material that was prejudicial to Mizzi. His claim, first made years earlier by the anti-Strickland brigade, was picked up by others, mainly Nationalists with an ancestral axe to grind against Strickland House. It still surfaces now and again.
Despite her deep admiration for Britain and Australia, where she spent her formative years, Mabel never disowned Malta. Her feelings are most tellingly expressed in a letter she wrote to a friend when she was still young after the family returned from New South Wales when her father was unceremoniously recalled from his last governorship post in 1917:
“...not that I want or have as yet any desire to return to Australia, yet in all fairness, I am grateful to the country for its broadness and its breadth, the very vastness that I objected to... yet wanted to love but could only admire; here is a narrow, backward country, rather, island, that in spite of itself or, rather, myself, I love with a strange passion. Odd isn’t it? I no longer hanker for England – it was Malta that was really calling, only I knew it not. Malta with all its history, with all its past, Malta in its smallness, Malta in all her fame.”
She simply regarded her work as a duty. And if she is more known as a journalist than as a politician, it is particularly in her role as editor during the war that she made her mark
It may also come as a surprise to many to learn that Mabel did not care much for the George Cross or, for that matter, for the OBE she had received for her contribution to the war effort as editor of two newspapers, though she did put a representation of the GC in her newspapers’ mastheads. But that was to boost morale during the war. She simply regarded her work as a duty. And if she is more known as a journalist than as a politician, it is particularly in her role as editor during the war that she made her mark.
According to her colleagues at work, Mabel directed the staff like a general. Inevitably, much of Strickland House’s war story is told through Mabel’s own contribution. Much of what had gone on behind the scenes is now lost in the memory of those who have since passed away. Yet, enough of what they had gone through can be reconstructed from the bits and pieces of recorded material still available, from the newspapers, and from Mabel’s letters to so many people, including, of course, her father, at least up to the time he died in 1940.
She may not always have been accurate in the details she gave; she couldn’t have, since first reports in any war are rarely accurate. It took time for the fog of war to clear up. However, her daily account invariably captured the tension that gripped her and her people in those most difficult days for her newspapers.
Right from the start, Mabel set for herself a punishing work schedule. Six days after the outbreak of war, she told her father she was getting accustomed to the change in her work routine and printing times.
She used to wake up at 4.30am, leave home at 5, pick up a linotype operator and a journalist on her way to Valletta, and meet her editor-in-chief, Olivieri-Munroe, at 5.45am. She would get the paper to bed at 9.45am, have breakfast, return to the office to work on administrative matters, and return home. She would sleep from noon to 1.30pm, return to the office and stay up to 6.30pm, blackout time. Dinner was at 7pm and she went to bed at 9pm.
By the time war broke out, circulation of Times of Malta had shot up to 7,000, and of Il-Berqa, its sister Maltese language daily, to 8,000.
Even at the height of the war, Mabel remained very much a hands-on editor. One Sunday, for instance, she cabled Reuters in Fleet Street, London, asking them to repeat Saturday’s football results as heavy bombing had interfered with reception. Could not such a simple task have been done by whoever was responsible for the sports pages?
Hunger and frustration worked their way into the psyche of many of her staff, working day and night shifts. She told the food and commerce control officer that heavy raids meant that men and women “are coming to work without having food, frequently due to their homes having been blitzed”. As it had become necessary to keep emergency rations in a building where so many people worked, she asked for permission to buy a case of corned beef or any other food the office may suggest.
She told the officer: “If corned beef is not possible, margarine or oil would do. It is psychologically impossible for the management to work hungry men. They will stand the bombs but their tempers get frayed when they have had no food.” Mabel’s stepmother, Margaret, was doing her bit too, regularly entertaining wounded soldiers to tea at her palatial Villa Bologna in Attard.
Mabel just hated going down in shelters and usually carried on with her work during raids. She once had a lucky escape when a bomb hit the building in one of the heaviest attacks on the harbour areas since the beginning of the war.
Mabel hated going down in shelters and usually carried on with her work during raids. She once had a lucky escape when a bomb hit the building in one of the heaviest attacks on the harbour areas
Acting on a tip by Andrew Cohen, an assistant to the lieutenant governor, who had advised her not to trust her luck too much, she rushed to the shelter the moment she heard the air-raid sirens. The air inside the shelter was heavy with fine dust and the stench of cordite.
She recalled later: “When the battle eased, I started to go up the steps towards one entrance... it was blocked. Then I knew and valued my father’s wisdom in having a second entrance to the shelter... We went up through the dust and the haze, and up again on the roof. I said: ‘What happened?’ Her night editor replied: ‘The Castille tower has gone and there is a gaping hole in the roof of your office.’ I whistled as I always do on such occasions.’’ It was the second bomb to hit the building.
Despite all her personal intrigue against Dobbie, Mabel’s stand against him did not spill over into her newspapers, and when a bomb hit the Ta’ Qali reservoir, sending thousands of gallons of water rushing down the streets of Attard, he called Mabel to take her stepmother to San Anton Palace “where we stayed for about 10 days at least”.
Still, she was elated when Dobbie was replaced by Lord Gort, whom she simply adored. In her view, governors of the calibre of Lord Plumer and Gort were hard to find. Mabel had special affections for only three men in her life: Mervyn Clive, son of the fourth earl of Powis, Max Horton, and Gort.
Mervyn, a squadron leader, was killed night flying over London in 1943. Admiral Sir Max Horton figured prominently in her life, but she cared more for Jack Gort than for Horton. When Gort died, she sent for a double whisky.
It must have been a moment of grand elation for Mabel when, on the eve of Germany’s surrender, she sat down at Villa Bologna to write to the Governor, Sir Edmond Schreiber, about the morrow’s plans. “It looks like V-Day tomorrow. I write to ask if you are giving any message to Malta – or/and in Fortress Orders – and may we have it in advance to print in the Victory Number. We are standing by to run a four-page special edition just as soon as the PM’s speech is made... I feel a bit dazed and physically weary.”
From a tiny lookout on the roof of Strickland House, Mabel witnessed many dramatic episodes of war in Grand Harbour over a period of two-and-a-half years. “By day, for months on end, we could see the hideous German vultures, the Junkers 88s, lumbering back to Sicily after their attack on the island pursued and brought down by Hurricanes, and a year later, shot out of the sky... by Spitfires. And think of it, from this same roof we witnessed the arrival and surrender of the Italian battle fleet, destroyers, cruisers and submarines – making a great reward for all the island’s suffering.”
Of the many accounts of life in Malta during the war given by Mabel, an interview she gave to the BBC stands out. In it, she gives a good graphic picture of the situation, punctuated with choice descriptive quotes, such as one given by a dockyard foreman when he recounted to her what it felt like when, at the height of the war, the dockyard moved underground into the living rock, soft yellow limestone that trembled and vibrated under direct hits. “Just like a thousand snakes running round my stomach,” he told her.
Part of this anniversary feature is based on extracts from the war chapters of the author’s second book, Strickland House, Times of Malta at War and Labour Party’s Sweeping Victory, expected to be published next year. Besides the war chapters, Book Two (1935-1947) also chronicles Lord Strickland’s obsession to kill the Daily Malta Chronicle as the island’s leading English-language newspaper of the time; his stormy relationship with its editor and, later, his deputy in the Constitutional Party, Augustus Bartolo; unrest at the dockyard in the time between the invasion of Sicily and Italy’s surrender; events leading to the national assembly; early frictions over the General Workers’ Union’s open support to the Labour Party; dissolution of the Constitutional Party; and the Labour Party’s sweeping election victory in 1947.