The ‘Sette Giugno’ in British eyes

Part 11 ‘Blue-water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean since 1800’

Author: Robert Holland Publisher: Allen Lane / 2012 Pages: 439

Internal political tensions died down. At its outbreak there was a loyalist demonstration in front of the Governor’s Palace, the usual festive bands and all. Italian neutrality at the outset also avoided a painful clash of identities for some Maltese. The King’s Own Malta Regiment and the Royal Malta Artillery helped to replace the regular British garrison called home in September 1914, and one commentator remarked that this innovation led “politically to a valuable link between the garrison and the civil population”.

One test of the reconsolidation of Anglo-Maltese ties under war conditions was whether local volunteers would be accepted for combatant service in the war. A sticking point was the refusal of the War Office to pay Maltese recruits the “British” rate for the job. This refusal was naturally a disincentive to join up, as was the awful state in which casualties arrived from Gallipoli, understandably raising the query of whether Maltese would qualify for a British “rate” of care.

Even in the spring of 1918, when military manpower was at breaking point, the War Office would not budge on the matter of pay for the Maltese, by which time the issue had become highly charged. Nonetheless, around 15,000 Maltese served under one or other of the British armies during World War I, including the Royal Naval Air Service. Maltese aviation history, indeed, commenced when a Short Seaplane took off from Grand Harbour on 13 February 1915.

There were four navies using the harbour in these years (British, French, Italian and Japanese), and in 1917 the Admiralty reckoned that the dockyard was working at a higher pressure than any other outside the United Kingdom itself. Malta’s contribution to the war of 1914-1918 was not so obviously heroic as it was to be between 1940 and 1943, but it was certainly substantial in shipping and logistical terms.

Political questions also remained largely under wraps so long as the war lasted. The colonial administration left sensitive language matters severely alone. The “abstentionist” politicians did not alter their critical stance towards government, but the edge came off their attacks and there was even some disarray in their ranks.

Enrico Mizzi, whose deceased father had been so prominent in opposing anything smacking of Anglicisation, was tried for sedition in 1917 and sentenced to a period of hard labour, shortly commuted. Notably, this did not cause much of a stir.

The real danger was of industrial action triggered by such grievances as the increase in taxes and persistent inflation.

During 1917 there was a strike at the dockyard, but this was soon solved with the mediation of Archbishop Caruana.

The Maltese Catholic hierarchy showed no signs of wishing to make life difficult for the civil authorities. Caruana himself had spent most of his life in Scotland before elevation, and struck up a close working relationship with Field-Marshal Lord Methuen once the latter became Governor in 1915.

Between 1914 and 1918 the island did not enjoy the booming prosperity of the Napoleonic and Crimean conflicts, and worries set in as to what would happen when peace came. But for the duration food and jobs, especially for workers associated with the British services, were plentiful, while the economy modestly diversified along the lines recommended by the 1912 Royal Commission.

In Egypt, an ex-minister, Saad Zaghloul, who had drifted steadily apart from the British Residency, began a campaign for an Egyptian delegation, or wafd, to represent the nation at the Peace Conference in Paris. (Wafd became the name of the Zaghloulist party).

The background was one of accelerating prices and food shortages, and general fears that the British were contemplating changes to make Egypt into a straightforward colony following the demise of the Ottoman Empire; any link with the Sultan had disappeared in November 1914.

Such concerns were not illfounded. The leading British legal official in Cairo was pressing for the law courts to be Anglicised while an opportunity presented itself. The Residency failed to detect an underswell of popular feeling. A senior official even assured Balfour in London on 24 February 1919 that the agitation was quiescent. Just getting Zaghloul out of the country was judged sufficient. On 9 March he was arrested and sent to Malta.

What was to become a classic pattern, then unfolded: a rowdy protest of students got out of control in Cairo, their professors joined in, the trouble spread from street to street, and then town to town, claiming lives, including foreigners.

It reached Upper Egypt, where a group of British soldiers and the country’s Inspector of Prisons were taken off a train and brutally killed. Since Allenby himself was in Paris, the commanding officer in Syria, General Edward Bulfin, rushed to Egypt to restore order. Armoured cars, aircraft and mounted troops were used to disperse the crowds. By the end of March quiet descended.

The pasha-politicians had no desire for a social revolution, nor were the British in any danger of being driven into the sea. But during the outbreak, and the spluttering violence over the summer, 75 Europeans were killed or seriously wounded. Egyptian fatalities were about 1,000 and 57 were executed.

These events were a serious shock. The British government dispatched Allenby to Cairo as “Special High Commissioner” in the hope that his great name would have a calming effect. He immediately recommended the release of Zaghloul.

This was not something London wanted to hear. To set Zaghloul free from Malta was to admit that Egypt had become uncontrollable without local co-operation; in effect, that the Protectorate in its current form was dead. This was exactly what Allenby thought.

Meanwhile the Sultan Fuad – who had succeeded Hussein in 1917 – warned that if Zaghloul was allowed back to Egypt, trouble would erupt. This is what happened in March 1921. Alexandria again sank into chaos. On 23 May, at its nadir, 14 Europeans and 30 Egyptians were killed in disturbances.

Expatriates criticised Allenby for not cracking down harder through the summer of 1921. He had his reasons. The British garrison was down to 20,000 troops (though this was still significantly above pre-war levels). Above all, he hoped that Zaghloul, or some Egyptian “moderate”, would strike a deal with the Residency. In the end he despaired and in December 1921 Zaghloul was arrested and deported once more, this time to the Seychelles, suitably more remote than Malta.

In 1919 Malta, like Egypt, had been rocked by disorder. The background was not wholly dissimilar: rising prices, student discontent, resentment of new taxes and fear of the future. In Valletta dockyard the great increase in wartime employment made layoffs certain.

Pent-up anxiety fed into a desire for a real constitution rather than what the Colonial Secretary, Leopold Amery, admitted was the existing “camouflage system”. In February 1919 a National Assembly was organised by the Comitato Patriottico, with its pro-Italian ideals.

When Lord Plumer had set out to take up the post of Governor of Malta, he carried instructions to consider a constitutional advance to encourage moderates to come forward, a recognition that the war had changed things substantially. It proved, however, too late to avoid trouble. He was held up at Gibraltar as news came on 7 June that Valletta was gripped by an open riot.

On that day a large crowd gathered at an Italianita club and proceeded to Strada Reale in the city centre. Shops promptly closed. A few Union Jacks were pulled down; soldiers were insulted at the Main Guard in Palace Square and the offices of the pro-government Malta Daily Chronicle wrecked.

Because the police could not be fully relied upon, military reinforcements were rushed from the Floriana barracks. Drawn up in front of the protesters, the soldiers had strict instructions not to shoot. But when a shot was fired from a window, a volley resulted, causing several fatalities. Six Maltese were killed during the disturbance.

Afterwards it was felt in the War Office that the affair “was an excellent example of how not to deal with a riot”, on the grounds that complete control should have been taken immediately. This was typical of the way that Whitehall shovelled blame onto those handling trouble on the ground.

Suggestively, most violence during what became known as the Sette Giugno was not directed at British emblems, but at other unpopular elements, such as millers responsible for bread prices. The Sette Giugno became a notable event in Maltese history through the contingent circumstance that British soldiers opened fire on a Maltese crowd when a riot was already under way.

Order was restored within days and British rule would never face another similar upset. Yet the events revealed subtle inflections. The Church had kept a discrete distance. When Plumer arrived a few days later he immediately reduced the number of bluejackets around his Residence as a sign of unbecoming nervousness.

Thereafter his approach as Governor was to reform the “rotten” police, improve wages for the King’s Own Malta Regiment, minimise job losses in the dockyard, not upset the Church and spend as much money as possible (“Plumer’s deficit” as the Treasury complained).

But such things on their own were no longer enough. When settling into his post, Plumer found that senior British officials in Valletta were mostly convinced that the time had come to risk a move towards real responsible government.

The new Governor described the goal of an advanced constitution as “in mid-Mediterranean an active loyal community”, rather than a sullen discontented one. Leopold Amery in London expressed it even more tellingly: “We must give up thinking of Malta as a curious little old-world dependency, living in the outskirts of a British fortress and providing cheap labour for a British dockyard. We must regard it rather as an outlier of the British islands... its people in a very direct and intimate sense our fellow citizens and fellow countrymen.”

The outbreak of 1919 in Malta, like the more violent troubles in Egypt, was a sharp setback, but its effects were not similarly lasting. While Plumer was sceptical of Amery’s desire to see the Maltese become British in a cultural sense, he subsequently put a lot of effort into encouraging such institutions as the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, with their “imperial” connotations.

In the same vein Maltese students were made eligible for Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University with their focus on the English-speaking world (one beneficiary was to be Dom Mintoff, later to loom large in Anglo-Maltese controversy).

Of all the Mediterranean populations the British ruled over, the one that came closest to being regarded as “our fellow citizens” were indeed the Maltese (the civilian inhabitants of Gibraltar being too polyglot for that, however much loyalty they professed). How far such fellow feeling might go, however, was to become a central question.

It followed that if the British were ever going to experiment with genuine self-government in the Mediterranean, Malta provided the most favourable conditions. Under the resulting arrangement, known as a “diarchy”, there was to be a Maltese Government, responsible for internal administration, and a Malta Imperial Government looking after “imperial” business.

From London’s vantage point, the beauty of this lay in two characteristics. The first was that, since Maltese politicians would now exercise real power, with real spoils attached, none of them would refuse to join in. The old abstentionism would be killed at a stroke.

Secondly, although public squabbles would be as intense as ever, they would be between the Maltese themselves, leaving the British free to get on with their own affairs uninterrupted. The trick was to keep the two parts of the government from tripping each other up and to remain above the political fray.

On 1 November 1921, the Prince of Wales proclaimed the new Parliament in Valletta.