The death was announced last week of Oswald Hull who, his son Chris claimed in an obituary on The Guardian, nurtured Dom Mintoff’s interest in politics.

Oswald Hull died aged 88. In an impressive feat of social mobility, he progressed from humble beginnings in the south Derbyshire potteries, via an Oxford education, and on to a career as a teacher and writer.

Born the youngest of three in Church Gresley, his father was a third-generation potter and worked with sanitary ware. With the encouragement of his parents he excelled, like his elder brother Richard (later killed climbing Mont Blanc), to win a county scholarship to Ashby grammar school. The school’s progressive headmaster TA Woodcock entered promising pupils for Oxbridge, when few other grammar schools were so bold.

Studying geography at Hertford College, he was not immune to the political ferment of the late 1930s. Drawn to the left at Oxford, he developed a lifelong friendship with Dom Mintoff, later to become Prime Minister of Malta. Ossie claimed to have nurtured Mintoff’s interest in politics.

His studies were interrupted in 1940 by the second world war when he was called up to the Oxford and Bucks light infantry. With the Ordnance Corps, he landed in Tobruk in 1941, enjoying the bonhomie of its Australian garrison between German raids.

In 1942 he was evacuated first to Cairo and, after Rommel’s invasion of Egypt, to Haifa in Palestine. From that time he retained a particular interest in the politics of the region.