John G. Dacoutros: Ships, Wine and Wars

Self-published

2013

288pp

 

Languages, cultures and civilisations apart, the peoples who live around the Mediterranean are moiré homogeneous than one thinks. Wherever one goes around the White Sea, the people’s physiognomy is so similar, so too the general outlook on life, despite the different religions, history and past conflicts between them.

The weather is relatively the same, so the manner in which houses are built and the general lifestyle that the weather imposes.

Before this era of states and frontiers, passports and Schengens, people migrated from country to another with the minimum of fuss. They quickly adapted to the new country of residence, set up families and many times prospered.

This book is the story of one such family – the Dacoutros family. It tells the story of a rather poor beginning in the Greek island of Santorini in the Cyclades.

In 1881, 10-year-old Giovanni Dacoutros was sent by his father with family friend John B Sorottos on a ship carrying volcanic pumice stones to Tunisia. En route, they stopped at Malta for water and food. Young Giovanni, fleeing the threat of volcanic activity in Santorini and even more the threat of an Ottoman invasion and dire poverty, took one look at Valletta and its style of life and never looked back.

The family had already suffered too much. Giovanni was one of three sons. His elder brother, Nikita, married and had children in Santorini but then, being a sailor, he left and never came back. Years later, the family discovered him in Smyrna (Izmir) and had children from a new girlfriend. His cousin was taken prisoner in one of the many Greek – Turkish wars and all prisoners were ordered to be killed because the invaders were approaching. But the soldiers did not have any more bullets, so they cut his head off using empty corned beef cans – a very messy affair.

Anyway, Giovanni, just 10, with a Greek passport, landed at Fuori le Mura in Valletta and just across the road saw the warehouses of the Portelli wine family, who had been trading in wine since the days of Grand Master Pinto. Despite his young age, Giovanni had some winemaking experience from his childhood in Santorini and he soon found employment first as a wine courier.

Soon, he found that the Maltese wines that the Portellis were selling was not as good as the wines back in Santorini. He wrote to his father and soon a consignment of high quality Santorini reds and whites was sent with the next trip of the JB Sorottos boat. The Maltese population suddenly discovered good quality wine and winebars soon sprouted everywhere and wine started to be imported in bulk and not just from Santorini.

Eventually, Giovanni partnered with the Portelli family and the Dacoutros and Portelli Wine Merchants was set up, importing wines from Santorini and Kalamata. Giovanni soon both out his partners, paying the Portellis £2,800. The firm Giovanni Dacoutros was born in 1913 based in Archbishop’s Street and later also in East Street and Fuori Porta Avvanzata (later Pinto Road)

The author adds: “Giovanni rented warehouses next door to the ones rented to the brothers Henry and George Simonds, beer importers since 1880. All these new warehouses had just been finished being built by a priest, Luigi Farrugia Busuttil in 1879. The priest had inherited a sum of money and spent it in building the whole street. He had a secret girlfriend to whom he bequeathed all his properties. The girl later became the girlfriend of the famous Sir Hannibal Scicluna, who was Malta’s chief librarian and who finished up also inheriting all her property at Marsa and Wardija and elsewhere.”

Giovanni never forgot his family back in Greece. In 1906, he travelled in incognito to Santorini because he could be drafted into the army and sent to the Turkish border to fight. He visited his family and bought arable land and a 12-room house in Thira (that was to be destroyed by an earthquake in July 1956.

To further his business, Giovanni began to buy ships to carry wine casks from Greece to Malta and to carry out general trade. He was doing so in the great Greek tradition of ship building and owning. Some got lost in storms and others became victims of war. Others were sold off. The best-known one was Maria Dacoutros which became the training ship for all the port managers and carried mail to Gozo and to Sicily.

Giovanni married his wife, Lucrezia Theuma, first in the Orthodox manner in 1894 and they had two children. Then, after some years, the Catholic permits arrived and Giovanni re-married her and they had seven more children.

The book gives us many details regarding the wine business in Malta. Wine consumption was widespread: in 1856 in Valletta alone there were 250 wine shops (and about 50 small hotels), especially in Strait Street (The Gut). There were also 81 wine bars in Qormi alone, many times a bar for every 74 persons in Malta, fuelled no doubt by the British servicemen stationed or visiting Malta.

The book also describes the genesis and some unknown details about the 1919 Sette Giugno (or Bread) riots. The key figure, or rather victim, is Anthony Cassar Torreggiani, ship owner and grain mill owner. Later accounts and tendentious accounts have portrayed the mill owners as a grasping breed of profiteers but the fact is that in 1918 Mr Cassar Torreggiani imported a shipload of durum wheat from Philadelphia. When the ship arrived in Gibraltar, there were reports the seas were still infested with German submarines and a London insurance company added a 60% premium which would have raised the price of bread by three pence a rotolo, about a week’s wage.

Mr Cassar Torreggiani risked everything and did not insure the ship. The convoy from Gibraltar consisted in 17 ships, of which 15 were sunk by enemy action, but Mr Cassar Torreggiani’s ship arrived safely. Mr Cassar Torreggiani received no gratitude and in fact, his house in Old Bakery Street was looted on Sette Giugno and some fine oil paintings by Giuseppe Cali were torn and trampled upon.

The author says: “Dockyard workers, general worker unrest, the high cost of living, the cost of bread, violent articles in the press, university students’ protests, police inaction and, above all, the constitutional question, all contributed to the riots which at the end cost the lives of four Maltese men.

But that came late in the day, after an orgy of rioting and looting. The offices of The Daily Malta Chronicle in Old Theatre Street (conveniently near Palace Square) were broken into and machines damaged. Then came the house of politician Francesco Azzopardi in St Lucia Street. Then, as said, the Cassar Torreggiani house and then the Francia house facing the Opera House where despite the presence of 100 policemen all the furniture was thrown out of the windows.

At about 8.30pm about 700 people gathered near the Hamrun parish church and attacked both the house and the mill belonging to Luigi Farrugia, father of Is-Sur Gig, in the main street and in what later became Farsons Street respectively.

It was after all this and more looting that the crowd began taunting the British soldiers at the Main Guard who responded with live fire.

Nevertheless, after three days rioting, Mr Cassar Torreggiani was invited to London where he suggested to the British authorities that a form of self-government could help in the imposition of local taxes by local representation. So was done in a few months’ time.

He also suggested that bread be subsidised, which it was by the new Parliament. Mr Cassar Torreggiani’s stand for the suspension of the tax on bread was not supported by other millers but later on a subsidy on bread was introduced all over Europe and still existed in Malta up to 30 years after the end of World War II.

There was also another consequence: following the Bread Riots, tax on wine enabled the government to subsidise bread. Nevertheless, wine was sold in ever increasing quantities, and sales of 100,000 hectoliters of wine were sold in 1927, a record equalled only when Malta joined the EU.

There is much else in the book. Details of the Dacoutros family, their homes and business, their tragedies and venture, and the alliances they established with the rest of the Greek community and the wine importers, later producers, of Malta. Being of foreign origin but living through all those years in Malta enabled the Dacoutros family to develop a special viewpoint about everything. Yet they never forgot their Greek origin. Most of the Greek community were buried at the Braxia Cemetery and the Greek president, who recently visited Malta, made it a point to go and pray on the tomb of a family relative.

One of Giovanni’s daughters married Giovanni Felice who became Minister of Finance in the Borg Olivier Cabinet, and one of their four children, Mario, later became chairman of the Malta International Business Authority (today the MFSA) and also president of the Malta branch of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Together with his father he negotiated the purchase from the Central Government of a vast property in St Julian’s where eventually the first Hilton hotel in Malta was built. The latest offspring of the family are John G. (spoken about in the third person even if he is the author of the book) and gourmet Peter Dacoutros.

Apart from importing wine, the Greek families in Malta were also known for their tobacco business – the Marich, Charles Grech, Cousis, Colombos, Sorottos, Sclivagnotis, Condachi.

One special chapter in the book tells the convoluted story of beer and soft drink production. In the 1920s, beer making was of the garage variety. It was cheap and cost a few pennies a pint but it could also cause what became known as the ‘Maltese tummy’ and could even cause chronic liver disease and even delirium tremens.

Otherwise, beer was imported  from William Younger (later absorbed into Heineken and Carlsberg), Blair & Co, The Medway Brewery and Simonds Hop Leaf (Curiously, Simonds found itself embroiled in a trademark dispute with Boss Charington which claimed the red Hop Leaf trademark was too similar to its Red Triangle trademark and had to change it. But in Malta, the red Hop Leaf had already been registered as a trade mark and thus it was allowed to continue using it.)

Obviously, speaking of beers in Malta necessarily entails speaking about Farsons, and the author, although coming from a different family, describes the genesis and development that led to Farsons. Originally, the Luigi Farrugia family imported grain and were based in Senglea. Then they moved to Hamrun first as grain importers and later as gas producers. Luigi’s youngest son, Lewis V Farrugia (Is-Sur Gig) created a small brewery inside the grain mill in Hamrun in 1926, calling his first beer Farsons Light Pale Ale in competition with the more established Simonds Hopleaf Pale Ale. It was Is-Sur Gig who hit upon the idea of portraying the Neptune’s statue on its label.

Meanwhile, Cikku Portanier, a lemonade manufacturer, tried to brew Pilsner and Munchener beers but he faced innumerable problems and went into receivership with the business and the building taken over by Scicluna’s Bank. Just one month after the launch of the Farsons Pale Ale, Scicluna (called ic-Cisk from a mispronounciation of ‘cheques’, launched two German style beers from his brewery (later to be the Umberto Calosso school) just a short distance away from Farsons.

Two local breweries and others being imported were too much for Malta’s small market and Is-Sur Gig negotiated a merger with Ic-Cisk. But the business ran into shoals and was about to close down were it not for an anonymous worker who came up with an idea for a watered down beer, Tal-Blu (Blue Label) which sold so well it saved the company.

Farsons then branched off into other ventures, notably the Verdala Hotel, which cost twice what its budget said, and was never finished and never made a profit and was eventually declared bankrupt.

Meanwhile, soft drinks entered the Maltese market – Pepsi Cola, Coca Cola and the like. Tellingly, the author says that Kinnie, Farsons’ bittersweet drink was always perceived as being suitable for diabetics and many Maltese diabetics drank huge quantities of it. But in fact, KInnie, Coke and Pepsi all have the same amount of sugar in them. While sales increased, in the mid-1960s, Malta was declared the country with more diabetics per capita than anywhere else in the world.

The book, as can be seen from this synopsis, is a chatty and lively book. But this book suffers from the bane of all self-published books – it badly needs pruning and organising, as well as proof-reading. Many times, the author says something and he then proceeds to say the same thing in a different format, making the end result rather confusing.