The early years of the British domination had conferred on Malta one extraordinary distinction: visitors, without exception, considered the island to be the poorest country anyone had ever seen. Not poor, not one of the poorest, but the most damningly destitute in human experience. “Never have I seen elsewhere so much squalid wretchedness, beggary and woe as everywhere one meets in Malta,” recorded Charles Rockwell, a widely-travelled American summarising his frightening experience of the indigence of the Maltese in the first decades of British rule.

I bet you will not have read about this in any other ‘history’ book, those whose agenda mostly tended to make us forget, rather than remember, the sordid achievements of colonialism.

Virtually all those who happened to come to our shores in the first half of the 19th century attested to Malta’s unique record of poverty. Another intelligent and perceptive visitor, James Webster, felt compelled to compare at length “the pampered and wasteful luxury” of the colonial masters who were leeching on Malta, and the Maltese themselves.

I bet you will not have read about this in any ‘history’ book, whose agenda mostly tended to make us forget the sordid achievements of colonialism

He gives this heart-wrenching account of the poor he saw everywhere in Malta: “Their situations and prospects are really frightful. Numbers die of starvation – many are brought to the hospital ill of fevers arising solely from want of food, and the faithful and well-disposed population of this once-flourishing island (under the Order of St John) are, it seems, to be offered as living victims on the altar of pampered and wasteful luxury.”

He attributes the utter destitution of the Maltese to the “devastating influence of misrule in possessions which have too long been left to the mercy of heedless delegates”.

Another visitor who came to know Malta thoroughly and wrote about it extensively, Andrew Bigelow, was also petrified by the swarms of starving Maltese he met everywhere in the towns of Malta and elsewhere – impressive numbers “who seem to have no visible means of subsistence, and where they lay their heads at night, I know not”.

“A large part of the people are without money, without employment and, so far as I can see, without bread or habitations. How they live by day or dispose themselves by night are matters of mystery. Hundreds of them, it would seem, can have no other bed than the cold bare pavement.” And not the towns-folk alone: “The peasantry looked very impoverished”.

Although famine and beggars appeared to be a predominantly urban bane, the rural areas suffered no special privileges. In the mid-1830s, beggars were estimated to be 2,500, and that was in the villages alone, excluding the towns and cities.

Most of the Maltese found themselves unemployed, and those who worked as manual labourers received an average wage of three tari a day – equivalent to one American dime – about three euro cents. “With this pittance they have to support themselves” – and that only for the really lucky ones was “a tolerably good pay”. The Governor pocketed a salary and allowances of some £7,000 a year, all charmed off the Maltese revenues, while the natives swotted a whole day for one dime – and had to be thankful.

Bigelow, not one to hide a fondly-nurtured anti-clerical streak, felt outraged seeing the clergy, well-fed and clothed, smoking a pipe or cigars, “while so many miserable fellow beings are strewn along the streets without clothing, food or the means of occupation”.

With no work and no income, how did the Maltese survive at all? “They live by fishing, begging – I had almost said, by fasting”. Bigelow draws some mortifying pen pictures of what he encountered on the island – recurrent episodes which never allowed him to forget that he was in Malta:

“I look out of my window and there I behold a wretched family group, a mother and several children, all in tatters, nay, with scarcely tatters enough to cover their nakedness – stretched on the side pavement by yonder wall. The mother – I have frequently dropped a carlin into her hands, and that heart must be of stone that would not have done it – looks the image of famine and despair.

“Why talk of petty inconveniences and magnify them into troubles, when there is perfect misery? Her home is that spot which she occupies. For her children she can hope no better lot. One is a baby lying on her withered arm, the other a feeble child with only a thin cotton wrapper about it, asleep on the cold, hard pavement.” Nothing, rues Bigelow, will ever make you forget you are in Malta.

This compassionate traveller compared beggars in Malta to those of London or Dublin. The Maltese are discreet, thankful and likely in future to remember your past charity with a blessing, whether you give them alms again or not. In the UK, the beggar who you favoured today expects as of right that you will give him again tomorrow, “or else you are liable to be insulted”.

The trenchant finding of one modern historian: “Judged by European standards, Malta in the first half of the 19th century exhibited all the symptoms of economic retardation for which no remedy appeared to be forthcoming.”

Almost without a single exception, all the contemporary observers of the Malta scene attributed the flawless misery of the Maltese to the greed and mismanagement of their new colonial masters. With the start of the British connection, Malta was overrun by British immigrants seeking employment, advancement and money – all hoovered from the scarce resources and revenues of Malta. Within a short while, the new settlers had edged the Maltese out of almost every lucrative employment or job which had so far always been the preserve of the local population – ever since the times of the Knights.

Politicians in England who had hangers-on – “many penniless or, worse, in debt” found Malta the ideal place where to accommodate them: remove a Maltese from his job and place a faded British parasite in his stead. A Royal Commission sent to investigate Maltese affairs waxed indignant at the quality of the British civil servants who had cheated the Maltese of their livelihood, and had elbowed in to replace them.

Positions previously always held by Maltese had been “abandoned for the most part to persons who had been unable to succeed in their respective professions in England”. With the result that notoriously smashed British losers took the jobs and incomes of competent Maltese, but then had all the actual work done for them by a Maltese underdog.

In most cases “the business of a principal office filled by an Englishman had been performed by one of his Maltese subordinates – so the revenue had been burdened by a high salary paid to a useless principal”.

The English ‘useless principal’ received an average salary of £415 per annum. A lesser Maltese employee of the civil service who actually did all the work for him, had to be happy with £31 a year. Manual workers – those lucky enough to find employment – received three euro cents a day.

One protest memorial lists some of the jobs that has been usurped from the Maltese by incompetent Englishmen: “Besides the Jurats for the Grain Department, four administrators of public property, the Governor of Gozo, the president of the Courts of Justice, the heads of the Police Establishments, of the Custom-house and of other departments, all with very moderate stipends, were replaced by Englishmen of Sir Thomas Maitland’s choice, with enormous salaries.” This, in the higher public service alone.

The same applied to the armed forces: “The several Maltese military corps, altogether about 2,000 men, were reduced to a small number; officers who had exposed their lives during the siege were dismissed with only a few months’ pay. This number has subsequently been still further diminished and brought down to the present number of 500 men (whose Colonel is a Corsican) paid from the island’s revenue.”

These were Maitland’s ‘reforms’ – but then, what else did anyone expect from him?

“Sir Thomas Maitland was a military man of an arbitrary and despotic disposition: he had all the powers of an absolute sovereign; he was the Governor, the legislator and the judge. His arbitrary example was communicated to all those who surrounded him and who have continued to oppress us up to the present time.”

Maitland, “it would appear, had decided from the first moment to reduce to beggary, if not to despair, the whole people of Malta”.

Maitland believed religiously in the civilising mission of starvation.

In summary, colonial rule had resulted in the Maltese witnessing “their island loaded with insupportable burdens, their trade annihilated, disorder and mismanagement in various branches of the local government, the people impoverished and reduced to beggary and persons dead through starvation”.

The colonisers could not make up their mind whether to favour famine or despotism. Not to be accused of bias, they promoted both equally.

This abject poverty seemed to be all the worse as the first years of the British connection had been characterised by a huge economic boom – not through the benevolence or any enlightened policies of the colonial masters, but wholly accidentally and artificially – through the concurrence of international tensions and strategies that tangentially enriched Malta.

When Napoleon in 1806 imposed the ‘Continental System’ against all British goods, Britain responded by banning any trade by neutral powers with France, her allies and her dependants. Malta, as a result, became the natural emporium of the Mediterranean, the centre of all British goods carried or smuggled into French-controlled Europe.

Many British commercial enterprises set up their headquarters in Malta, importing goods from Britain and elsewhere, and finding alternative routes for them into blockaded Europe. The spin-off of this intense mercantile activity raised levels of employment in Malta, and local merchants and manpower prospered too.

With the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the continental blockade, this huge, but wholly artificial prosperity vanished almost overnight, and Malta plunged into the most abject poverty it had ever known since recorded history.

Even an unrepentant colonial worshipper like Adolphus Slade had to concede that the penury of the Maltese under British rule had reached alarming levels. Slade was one who would not even try to hide his sincere conviction that British DNA was the absolute masterpiece of creation, nor how low he believed the Maltese figured on that same scale. Yet he too accepted the facts:

“Poverty is the prominent feature in Malta – the habitual mendicity is truly painful. Beggars appear to grow in the streets. You know not whence they spring. You give to one and instantly a wailing crowd, of all ugly conditions, gather round you. You hold out your hand to one little fellow, but ere you can open it, 20 pairs of claws are scratching at your mite.”

Such was the desperate penury the population had sunken to under British rule that the colonial government had no option but to resort to desperate measures. London felt forced to mint a special coin exclusively for Malta – the smallest denomination to circulate in the whole British Empire.

While everywhere else, the least valuable coin was the farthing (one-fourth of a penny), for Malta that beggarly smidgen became a luxury not many could afford.

A large part of the people are without money, employment, bread or habitations. Hundreds can have no other bed than the cold bare pavement

From 1827 onwards, the London mint issued a large amount of copper ‘one-third farthings’ (one-twelfth of a penny) to circulate exclusively in Malta, as many Maltese could afford no better on the market of hunger and deprivation. Bigelow remarked that the Maltese ħabba represented in value about one-fifth of the smallest coin in any other monetary system in Europe.

One-third farthings (ħabbiet) went on being minted continuously and exclusively for Malta right up to 1913. That coin became the badge of shame for the Maltese, the testimonial of misery, the certificate of uncaring, exploitative colonialism. King George IV had no qualms displaying his quite fleshy portrait on that infamy targeted to the seriously undernourished.

In 1822, a British private, William Wheeler, stationed in Malta, observed in a letter back home, the same destitution: “The greatest part of the Maltese are very poor. The place swarms with beggars of the most miserable description; some of these will follow you the whole length of a street.”

The endemic wretchedness of the Maltese townsfolk left its mark on Valletta’s streetscape too. A flight of steps leading from the Grand Harbour landing quay to the Porta di Monte (or della Marina), close to what is now Victoria Gate, with the British take-over, changed its name to Nix Mangiare Stairs, as it is still known to this day. That street name, in a corrupt jumble of German, Italian and English, symbolises the innumerable tragedies of Maltese families who starved to death. It was not known by any demeaning name at the time of the Knights.

Several versions of the formulaic pleadings by Maltese beggars have survived. Slade heard them so often he learnt them by heart: “Cartità nix mangiare – nix padre – nix madre – nix pane per i piccoli in casa”. He found himself immersed in it everywhere, not only on the beggars’ steps from the marina but “from the sea-worn stone you first set foot on, to the gate of the Palace... the same assemblage, chaunting the same burthen, lay wait at the door of the café, at the entrance of the theatre, at every gate you are beset.”

An 1830s lithograph of a Maltese beggar by Brocktorff has him pleading “Carità!!! much miserabli Signor nix mangiari today!!!!”. That street name looms in the collective memory as another monument to the long years of famine and utter destitution the clerical and working-class Maltese suffered in the first half of the 19th century.

Inevitably, there was always the compulsory sniggering fool who found the lethal famine of the Maltese populace to be unbearably funny – one big joke to be laughed at and turned into comedy. The London-born Frederick Chamier, who stayed in Malta in 1810, dismissed all the poverty and the beggars he saw as part of an elaborate mise-en-scène by wealthy professional scroungers, members of a closed-shop sinecure retained and handed down the generations, to the detriment of soft-hearted Britons duped by the faux destitution of the Maltese. For a laugh, he transcribes a third version of the beggars’ cry: “Oh! Signore, mi povero miserabile, nix padre, nix mader, nix mangiare for 16 days per Jesu Christo.”

It was callous insensitivity such as his that really pierced the tragic heart of Malta.

I like to believe I am not mostly to blame if between Chamier and me it was not love at first sight. He had an abysmal view of the Maltese and did precious little to hide it: “The men are low in stature and lower in intellect, the women are dirty, slovenly and ugly. If ever a pretty girl in encountered, she is invariably Sicilian.”

And that dump which the Maltese passed off as St John’s Co-Cathedral he found anything but striking: “I confess I was rather disappointed at the interior of St John’s church. I expected a much finer sight and more splendid altar piece.” From inside the sarcophagus of a Grand Master in the crypt he stole a handful of black powdered bone, which his friends on board later inhaled and sneezed as snuff. Hilarious. I’m in stitches.

Why is it that English has no proper word for kiesaħ?

To be concluded.