Looking at Filfla from afar, warmed by rays of sunlight, hardly evokes images of its tumultuous past as a training target for British bombs.

But the little rock jutting out of theMediterranean Sea some five kilometres off the Żurrieq coastline was a constant source of dispute between Maltese authorities and the British colonial power.

A glimpse of this can be found in a Cabinet memo dated November 16, 1962, by then justice minister Tommaso Caruana Demajo in the Borg Olivier administration, which had came to power nine months earlier.

The memo forms part of the Cabinet papers released by the government for the Borg Olivier and Mintoff administrations of the 1960s and 1970s until 1981.

In his memo, Dr Caruana Demajo gives details of an agreement the previous Mintoff administration of 1955 to 1958 had reached with the British naval authorities to grant Filfla on a temporary emphyteusis for 150 years.

The concession would terminate automatically when Filfla was no longer required for defence purposes.

Although the government had wanted public access to be guaranteed, this was rejected by the naval authorities. Dr Caruana Demajo welcomed the agreement because it put an end to a source of continuous dispute between the government and the British Services on the use of Filfla for bombing practice.

The British always considered Filfla a reserved matter on which the Maltese government had no jurisdiction.

This agreement was a compromise that allowed the British forces to continue using the little rock for training but as a concession granted to them by the Maltese.

However, Dr Caruana Demajo had a major gripe with the token rent the British were asked to pay for using Filfla, which amounted to one shilling a year.

The memo noted that the Mintoff administration originally intended to charge a ground rent of £100 but the Legal Secretary decided it should be “a peppercorn one of one shilling per annum”, Dr Caruana Demajo wrote.

The reasoning for the token payment given by the Legal Secretary was that the UK side would appear to be compromising its principle that it should not pay for the use of defence facilities in Malta if it had to pay such a high ground rent.

But Dr Caruana Demajo insisted this was “not acceptable” and asked Cabinet to approve changing the ground rent to £100.

The memo was discussed by Cabinet a month later, a day after Christmas.

Cabinet agreed not to continue with the signing of the deed.

However, it also decided to allow the British forces to continue using the island “until further arrangements were made”.

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