It is sad but not altogether surprising that a number of students sitting for the Secondary Education Certificate examination showed such a dismal lack of knowledge of history. I have been noticing the slide for many years, but it looks as if the situation is getting worse.

Is it not unbelievable that students of that age do not know who Winston Churchill was? I have come across candidates doing job interviews not knowing who the archbishop is, or even when Malta became independent.

I will not go into the reasons why so many young people today know so little, if at all, of our historical background, because I am simply not aware of how history education is being tackled in our education system today, but someone should.

I was naturally particularly intrigued at the way a number of students considered Lord Strickland. Confusing Strickland with Maitland and Mintoff is preposterous, to say the least, though, funnily enough, Strickland did have, in some ways, some of Maitland’s and Mintoff’s traits.

But what is most striking is the description of Strickland by some of the students as “a Protestant who was all out to eradicate Catholicism in Malta”.

This shows how the brainwashing that went on interruptedly for so many years against Strickland in the 1920s and 1930s has psychologically travelled in the minds of successive generations.

Strickland may have been cantankerous as a politician, but he was certainly no Protestant, and eradicating Catholicism was far removed from his mind. In fact, he was born into a staunch British-Maltese Catholic family, and one of his ancestors was even expelled from the House of Commons for being a Roman Catholic.

It was his clash with the Church over its interference in politics that cast a shadow over his faith. But Strickland never disowned his religion. All manner of accusations were levelled at him to project him as anti-clerical and a Freemason.

Through his energetic drive to anglicise the country, he was seen to have favoured Protestantism both at the time he was chief secretary to the government and, later, when he propelled himself into Maltese politics four years after his return from his last governorship post in New South Wales in Australia. But he never actually did.

It was his clash with the Church over its interference in politics that cast a shadow over his faith

The fact that he was half-British, that he was an aristocrat by birth, that he lived in a palatial villa next to a governor’s palace and that, to boot, he also had a castle in England, added fuel to his political opponents in their attempts to identify him, particularly among the working class, either with the establishment in Britain or with all that was alien to the Catholic religion.

In a fervent Catholic environment brimming with exuberant public manifestations of faith and colourful displays of loyalty to the Church and its leaders, any move perceived to favour Anglicanism, such as, for instance, through the promotion of the English language at the cost of Italian, was grist for the mill of his rivals.

At one time he was accused that, as head of the ministry (prime minister), he had allowed three Anglican bishops to give a series of lectures at the Palace in Valletta. What his opponents, including the Gozo bishop, did not know was that the holding of the lectures had the approval of the archbishop.

In the heat of arguments, Strickland may have said things which would have been better left unsaid, but he never betrayed his Catholic beliefs, and he was never a Freemason, either.

Indeed, his adherence to his faith nearly lost him the premier vice-regal post in Australia.

The stiff opposition put up in New South Wales to his appointment as governor is – or ought to be – considered as possibly his strongest defence against the claims that he was a Freemason.

When the Grand Lodge of Orangemen in NSW learned of the impending appointment of Strickland, they lost no time in lodging an “emphatic” protest specifically on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic when the population of the state was overwhelmingly Protestant.

After all the opposition and obstacles he had gone through, including an assassination at-tempt, when he died in 1940, the Church opened the doors of its Mdina cathedral to welcome him in its arms.