On July 9, 1938, British Governor Sir Charles Bonham-Carter, sitting in the Palace, received a visitor who needled him no end. Frederick W. Ryan came to waste his precious time with “his dreams for a great university in Malta to act as a Mediterranean centre of learning and as a bridge between Eu­rope and Africa and to train Maltese for the service of the Empire”. In his private diary, the Governor pooh-poohed the deluded visionary with a curt “dreams... quite impractical”.

Portrait of Frederick W.Ryan.  Courtesy of Marquis Nicholas De Piro.Portrait of Frederick W.Ryan.  Courtesy of Marquis Nicholas De Piro.

That turned out to be a grim day for a particularly tetchy Bonham-Carter. Ryan was followed by Dun Edgar Salo­mone, the anglophile parish priest of Mġarr, who worshipped anything British but was unhappy with the proposed regulation of ground-water extraction. His Excellency be­liev­ed Salomone’s criticisms to be “the most ridiculous attacks” on the government. The priest “talks so much he is difficult to deal with”, but the garrulous native, overall, meant well, so no imperial penances for him.

Bonham-Carter and Ryan died within months of each other, having, rather ironically, worked closely together some time after this ill-fated meeting, as president and vice-president of the Malta League in London.

Ryan is today, exactly 60 years after his death, completely forgotten, and he certainly does not deserve to be. Except for a road in San Pawl tat-Tarġa bearing his name, very little keeps his memory alive. Bookworms may just barely remember him for his two volumes about Malta, both ground-breaking, both valuable.

The first he published in London in 1910, a sort of extended memoir and informal travel book of the islands he had settled in and loved. Few authors had attempted anything like that be­fore. The 200-page book differs from any English-language work that had appeared that far. Though never challenging the imperial connection, it is particularly sympathetic to the inhabi­tants. Rarely condescending, censorious or patronising, it gives a well-rounded picture of the land, its trea­sures, numerous quirks, its journey through time, and its people. When Ryan praises, it is, at times, gently tongue in cheek; when he decries, it is benign, malice-free criticism.

In a way, his 1910 book ends up being a rather unusual blend of reticence and exposure, of intimate remembrance and tourist salesmanship. Though exclusively drawn from his personal readings and experiences, he never, not once, opens up on anything personal about himself.

When I started researching Ryan’s life and thoughts, I was rather confident that his ‘memoirs’ would yield an abundant autobiographical harvest. How wrong I was! He gives away absolutely nothing about himself. That had to be ferreted out, and quite laboriously too, from other sources.

Even his title page turns out to be an exercise in understatement: “Malta – painted by Vittorio Boron – described by Frederick W. Ryan”. In fact, the work contains 20 colour images of Malta by the Italian painter, and 200 pages of text by Ryan. He would have been more than justified in inverting the order of the credits, putting himself first. Self-effacing would be the least one could call the author. This restraint about his private ego characterises Ryan in many aspects of his life.

Boron, a near-intangible meteor, shines once in Ryan’s orbit and then almost fades in cosmic ob­scurity. Son of a judge and a lawyer by profession, he never practised law, but preferred spending his life as a painter, a writer and a traveller. He was born in Turin in 1859, and never married.

His charming, luminous paintings of Malta, which Ryan obviously liked, today constitute his main claim to fame. In the Italian ottocento tradition, only superficially disturbed by French impressionism, graphically clean and forceful, and a few notches above the average level of the gifted amateur, those in Ryan’s book also assert some merit as a rather early exercise of good printing in full colour.

They hardly escaped criticism when the book first appeared. One reviewer thought that “Mr Vittorio Boron’s illustrations are decorative, but they convey no effect of light or atmosphere and are often marred by the use of an unsatisfactory yellow”.

Far heavier strictures come from a second anonymous critic: Ryan had done his best to present Malta and the Maltese in a favourable light, but “we cannot say as much for all of the coloured pictures of scenes and scenery in Malta. Some are passable, but others, such as that of the Porta Reale, are not satisfactory. The pictures of byways in Valletta crowded with Maltese and goats are all too painfully clean and polished to recall the scenes and smells they represent”.

A Street in Victoria, Gozo, by Vittorio Boron, from Ryan’s 1910 book Malta.A Street in Victoria, Gozo, by Vittorio Boron, from Ryan’s 1910 book Malta.

This particular book reviewer sounds like one who would resent indignantly being accused of impartiality; certainly towards anything Maltese. Very matter-of-factly he agrees “that the Maltese are not a very pleasing race”, and that describing anything as “Maltese” had become a term of reproach anywhere in between Gibraltar and the Levant.

He quotes with evident approval the saying “Next to the monkey, the nearest thing to man that God created was the Maltese”. Yes, of course. One must never overlook these immutable distinctions between deluxe races and nature’s inferior sweepings.

This contemptuous hostility was quite far from Ryan’s overall estimation of the Maltese population: “Possessed of any tact and some regard to the traditions and ideas of others, he [the English visitor] will soon find himself at home, making many lasting friends among the Maltese, who, rich and poor alike, will be found polite and courteous to the stranger... the Maltese are a light-hearted, merry-making race, ever ready to put aside their work and join in the gaieties which accompany the many festas in their calendar”.

Another reviewer, on the other hand, remarked favourably on Boron’s “20 watercolour drawings, excellently reproduced... The reproductions strike us as even more satisfactory than usual”. The painter died in San Giorgio Canavese, on September 15, 1940, three months after Italy entered World War II.

What had brought the Italian artist and the Irish writer together in Malta is unknown. They shared a passion for drawing and both had studied and graduated in law but never practised it. It seems as if Boron went out of his way to make sure to leave no traces behind of his stay in Malta.

Ryan’s lifelong, consuming interest remained the systematic study of history and its dissemination

After I started tentatively researching Ryan, I also came to the point of almost giving up – all the more obvious sources I tapped yielded nothing. Then, suddenly, serendipity really took over with a vengeance. By sheer accident I discovered that many of Ryan’s papers had, after his death, been left in the safe custody of Marquis Nicholas de Piro – how and why is another incredible coincidence that he may like to reveal himself.

And, almost at the same time, David Elyan let drop that his old friend Rose Mary Craig would shortly be holidaying in Xlendi. Ms Craig is a trustee of the Irish Georgian Society – and her late mother had been really close friends with Freddie and Bimbo Ryan.

The bonanza did not end there. Leonard Callus cursorily remembered he may have handled some files relating to Frederick Ryan at the National Archives in Santu Spirtu, Rabat – ah, yes, actually he had. The problem now turned on itself: how to sift through this rather daunting glut.

Frederick William Ryan was born on December 6, 1883, to William Leeson Russel Ryan in Dublin. His mother, Maria Tagliaferro, of Maltese descent, was granddaughter of Biagio, synonymous with the bank ‘B. Taglia­ferro & Sons’, president of the Bank of Malta, and daughter of Col. James Tagliaferro. On his maternal grandmother’s side stood Elena, daughter of the Hon. Vincenzo Mamo, CMG, the registrar of the Supreme Council of Justice. As well-heeled and connected on the Maltese side as could possibly be, though Frederick claims that even on his father’s side the Ryans were Lords of Owney and Arra, and that Queen Elizabeth I had qualified them as “captains of their nation”. Ryan’s father, the son of a surgeon, was Protestant, but when he married Maria Tagliaferro he undertook to bring up his offspring in the Catholic faith. Maria did an intensive job there.

Though Ryan, half-Maltese, never reneged on his Maltese ancestry, he clearly considered himself predominantly Irish. Never, in his first book, a long and varied monograph about Malta, does he hint at his Maltese an­cestry, or give any indication that he spoke or at least understood Maltese.

As a boy he was sent to the prestigious Jesuit college of Clongowes, Co. Kildare, and obtained an MA at Trinity College, Dublin. He graduated as a barrister in his native city, though he never seemed to have exercised his profession or sought employment; the MA, LL.D, after his name sometimes came handy. Throughout, he lived in his Dublin homes, 13, Clyde Road, then at 86, Lower Leeson Street, and later at 4, Clifton Terrace, Monks­town. In Malta, he resided at Villino Leeson, San Pawl tat-Tarġa. Now where is that?

Throughout his life, Ryan remained an active Roman Catholic, taking a prominent part in a number of religious initiatives and organisations. He started the Dublin Catholic newspaper Boys’ Club; in 1925 he was the secretary of the Catholic Working Boys Technical Aid Association, and in 1937 he co-founded, with the renowned Jesuit scholar Stephen Brown, the Catholic Association for International Relations. Towards the end of World War II he volunteered as an Irish Catholic neutral to work under the International Red Cross with Italian prisoners-of-war.

Frederick W. Ryan with his wife Bimbo. Courtesy of Marquis de Piro.Frederick W. Ryan with his wife Bimbo. Courtesy of Marquis de Piro.

One of his proudest moments must have been when he petitioned to be accepted in the ultra-Catholic organisation of the Knights of Malta in 1947 and was inducted into that Order by the Grand Master, Prince Ludovico Chigi Albani, as Friderico Ryan, Knight of Magistral Grace, and henceforth styled himself Chev. Frederick Ryan. Though an intelligent realist in his evaluation of the pros and cons of his faith, I could detect not a streak of anticlerical bias through the whole span of his career.

His friends in Malta seem to have been either imperialists, freemasons, or both. He frequented Sir Harry Luke, Sir Temi Zammit, Sir Hannibal Scicluna, Olof Gollcher, Sir Augustus Bartolo, William Hardman – the rabidly colonialist apologist, Prof. Owen Fogarty – another Irish Catholic who believed his mission in life was to mould whole generations of Maltese youngsters into empire-obliging university undergraduates, and others transparently associated with the Palace British clique.

But he also had contacts with men like Colonel Alexander G. Chesney, who entered politics on the Nationalist ticket, and the historian Joseph Darmanin Demajo, not remarkable for his colonialist leanings. Ryan does not seem to have been a freemason himself; in fact, by disposition and upbringing he would have been averse to that organisation, then perceived in Malta as religiously secret and secretly irreligious.

Though passively imperialist at heart, Ryan made no effort to underestimate the abyss that separated the British, owners of the native populace and of their homeland, from their Maltese underlings. They lived in disconnected and different worlds and showed no interest whatever in getting any closer.

“The fact remains that, with the exception of a few high officials, the two nationalities do not mix... the chasm that still divides the two nationalities”. Ryan obviously meant his book to be his earnest contribution to bridge the gulf between the tiny natives and the thundering Raj.

Ryan seems to have known my father Vincenzo Bonello, eight years younger than him, though how closely I cannot guess – in fact, until recently, the only photo of Ryan I could lay my hands on was a 1930s one of him with my father and two other historians, which I found quite accidentally in the Hannibal Scicluna archives at Palazzo Falson. I don’t remember father ever mentioning him, though a common passion must have united them – the study of history. Ryan also had a good hand at drawing and sketching, and that too would have endeared him to father.

In 1932, the International Committee of Historical Sciences commissioned Ryan to write a treatise about the constitution of Malta for a book on various basic laws worldwide, a Recueil des Constitutions. This Ryan did, and no doubt his legal training stood him in good stead. He claimed it cost him four months’ research at Trinity College and at the National Library in Dublin. But before forwarding the outcome of his efforts to his editors, he felt the need to obtain the seal of approval from the Maltese government, not wanting to “unnecessarily add to the difficulties of all parties in Malta at the present juncture”.

Frederick W. Ryan (right) with three Maltese historians. From left: Hannibal Scicluna, Vincenzo Bonello and Giuseppe Darmanin Demajo. Courtesy of the Palazzo Falson Archives, Sir Hannibal Scicluna bequest.Frederick W. Ryan (right) with three Maltese historians. From left: Hannibal Scicluna, Vincenzo Bonello and Giuseppe Darmanin Demajo. Courtesy of the Palazzo Falson Archives, Sir Hannibal Scicluna bequest.

Malta had just come out of a bruising electoral campaign which the Nationalists had won by a 61 per cent popular majority, to the combined opposition parties’ 39 per cent – the greatest win of all time in the island’s political history. Ryan mailed a draft of his article to his friend Harry Luke in Malta for vetting and correction.

Luke thought that the final section of the study, which dealt with the judgements of the Court of Appeal ought to be rewritten, and instructed him how. Various constitutional issues had been litigated in the Court of Appeal between 1929 and 1932, so it is not clear which cluster Luke actually had in mind. The Lt Governor addresses his interlocutor as “Dear Ryan”, while Ryan persists in the more formal “Dear Mr Luke” throughout.

Ryan’s lifelong, consuming interest remained the systematic study of history and its dissemination. He was a competent, meticulous historian himself, as evidenced by his second book, which dealt with the Order of Malta in France at the traumatic times of the French Revolution. The House of the Temple, published in London in 1930, remains an invaluable, well-re­searched work to this day, one of the first to deal in great breath – over 350 printed pages – with a rather narrow subject related to the history of Malta and its rulers.

At a time when so few cultivated historical research and so many scoffed at those who did, Ryan’s stands out as a major achievement. It must have cost him considerable time and effort to collate and write up the documentary evidence he had uncovered – no google searches then, no short cuts.

As the promotion blurb says: “the book depicts much of the historical background to the many problems which agitate Malta today”. Ryan thought the events of the French Revolution highly relevant to Church-State conflicts that erupted in Malta in the late 1920s. He noticed “the present political and ecclesiastical condition of Malta internally, together with the development among the Maltese people of an active racial and national consciousness. There is in question a conflict of authority between the Prime Minister and the Archbishop, and universal attention has been drawn to Malta by the fact that the Pope, appealed to by the British government in London, has sent an apostolic delegate to the island.”

The 1930s Church-State clashes in Malta, according to Ryan, were carried over from the parallel conflicts that overran Malta during the latter years of the rule of the Order and the upheavals of the French Revolution.

(To be concluded)

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