Agriculture and peasant politics in wartime Malta, 1939-1945

Abstract

Following a dogfight sometime in April 1942, Acting Squadron Leader Laddie Lucas’s Spitfire had developed problems of its own. He had been hit and his aircraft motor seized completely. Realising he could not have reached any of the airfields on Malta, a tiny cultivated piece of land on the outskirts of Siġġiewi had to do. He forced a crash landing in the field, landing between 80 to 100 yards away from a rubble wall. Jumping down quickly from the cockpit, he noticed three old Maltese women in long black dresses, almost touching the ground, and black scarves covering their heads, approaching him stumbling over the rough ground, as fast as they could towards him. Each was carrying some scooping implement and a hessian sack in their hands. As they came near, they stopped and, breathlessly, started shovelling earth into the sacks, intent upon getting up onto the wing and emptying the contents on the smouldering engine. Although incapable of understanding English, they turned away after having made sense of his gestures urging caution. The oldest and most senior of the three then walked back slowly to the Spitfire and touched the wing lightly with her hand. Returning to him, she rested her hand gently on his forearm. Lucas went on to describe the exchange: As she did so she looked up into my eyes. A smile of benign serenity spread across that heavily lined, endearing face. Making the Sign of the Cross deliberately across her chest, she touched my arm again. With that, she turned with the others and went back to tending the land. After his close brush with death, Lucas could have been forgiven for indulging in some romantic platitude about two specific types of people coming together as one in the midst of a war. This scene is all too common in texts written by predominantly British authors – mostly military men – about wartime Malta. The ‘natives’ largely entered the scene either when the storyteller had viewed them from afar as a distinct species or when the raconteur had come into contact with the communities living out in the margins of the Colonial State. There is no limit to the amount of works dealing with the military aspect of the War. The dogfights, the bombings and the artillerymen have overwhelmingly taken centre stage in memoirs and publications and there is no sign of this approach ever being exhausted. Going back to Lucas, in painting this somewhat serene picture during a period of great disorder, he had burst upon a social dimension – the rural areas – to which so much attention was devoted by the colonial government during the War itself, yet, which ironically has simultaneously escaped the observation of scholars in mainstream academia. The field in which Lucas landed and others like it, small and insignificant as they may have been to the observer, had a part in dictating the Fortress’s wartime colonial politics vis-à-vis the wider war in the Mediterranean. The food situation had constantly plagued the upper echelons of Government in the late inter-war period, up till and including the harsh blockade imposed by Axis forces at the height of the siege. This dissertation seeks to understand and scrutinize the role agriculture in Malta had played at the heart of the conflict and the changes it underwent as a result of this unwelcome intrusion. The focus on this industry is not intended to exclude other interpretations but rather to add a much overlooked feature to our understanding of a civil aspect of the Second World War. Teodor Shanin declared, ‘It is a commonplace to say that agrarian history as such is neglected – the fact is too obvious to be denied.’ The rural areas and the country folk had never been high on the agenda of the colonial authorities, situated in their palaces and the urban belt around Grand Harbour. Poverty and sickness were all too common, illiteracy was rampant and deaths at childbirth were a normal occurrence. Government’s attention shifted to the country districts seemingly over a few months when logistics, supplies and food became the be-all and end-all of their war. By tackling the war through this prism, the objective is to devote a substantial study of an industry and a way of life which were to change irrevocably between the discharge of the first bomb and the capitulation of the Axis powers.