Fifty years ago today – 30 April 1960 – a Maltese resident in London, CARM ZERAFA, pioneered the first chartered flight from London to Malta of the Maltese Movement in UK. Later Zerafa was instrumental in bringing over to Malta an estimated 500,000 visitors to Malta between 1972 and 1988. This interview with Mr Zerafa by Henry Brincat and another story by Dominic Attard will show how the Maltese Movement in UK came to being. It is also the success story of Carm Zerafa, whose charter flights at reduced prices became so popular that the British Civil Aviation in Malta had declined to grant him permission to increase the number of his flights. It was also perhaps a first step towards what we know today as the low cost airlines. The success came later in the following decade when Air Malta was born.
The birth of the Maltese Labour Movement in London was the idea of Carm Zerafa and the late Turu Scerri. They wanted to get the Maltese community and their friends in the UK to give their support to the Malta Labour Party.
It was founded on 1 May 1958 during a meeting at the residence of Mr and Mrs George Fava in London. It was attended by more than 40 persons, among them the other co-founders, Gerry Zammit, Joe Sammut and Jean Barbara. The Movement became so popular that it claims to have had more than 46,000 members during the 1970s and early 1980s.
More than a decade later, it was decided to drop the word Labour from the name.
It was 50 years ago today – 30 April 1960 – that the first charter flight to Malta left Blackbush Airport at 10am. After stopping twice for re-fuelling, the flight continued at a speed of 250 miles an hour and at an altitude of 24,000 feet. It was a packed 36-seater Dakota aircraft belonging to Pegasus Airlines.
It finally arrived in Malta eight hours later, welcomed at Luqa Airport by hundreds of Labour Party supporters, “among them two of my friends, Lorry Sant and Dr Anton Buttigieg, who later were appointed Ministers in a Labour Government in 1971 and with Dr Buttigieg also serving as President of the Republic.”
The group who flew to Malta consisted mostly of Maltese people resident in London who came over to visit their relatives and friends.
Zerafa said that after this inaugural flight, word soon spread around that one could travel from UK to Malta and back for half of what BEA used to charge those days.
He added: “After that experience, I soon applied for three more flights, that is in June, July and August 1960, but BEA realised that this could result in more flights for the future, resulting in financial losses on their part. Of course, they were right. At that time, Malta was still a colony and Civil Aviation was a reserved matter. In a few words, the application was turned down.
“We realised that as long as the political status quo remained, we would not be able to operate flights in the near and distant future.”
Independent Malta
Malta obtained its independence on 21 September 1964 under the Premiership of Dr George Borg Olivier – a gentleman and, above all, an honest politician.
Zerafa said: “Without doubt, I was disappointed that it was not my friend Dom Mintoff who was Prime Minister at that time – he had worked so hard to see Malta free once and for all. But between 1966 and 1971, Turu Scerri, who represented the Malta Labour Party in the UK, managed to organise two flights a year to Malta.
“In June 1971, together with my wife Sheila and our two children, Claire and John, we went for a whole month to Malta. The Labour Party won the General Election by the slightest of margins and we went to Buschetto Road House to celebrate. There I met Scerri who gave me the expected good news that he was to become the next Maltese High Commissioner for the UK.
“He asked me to take over the running of the UK Maltese Movement. At that time, I worked as an inspector at Waterloo Station, besides being a Union official representing 280 members,” he said.
Zerafa went on to say that his target was to see the Maltese Movement getting bigger and stronger. “I knew this could only be achieved by organising charter flights to Malta for the benefit of the members and their families. In life, one cannot stand still, you either go forward or backwards.
“By imposing a 50p subscription fee we got help from Malta House – they supplied us with the names and addresses of the Maltese people resident in the UK,” he said.
Zerafa is convinced that was the best decision in the circumstances. “The next step was the buying of the telephone directory and electoral register to look for Maltese surnames. It was a difficult task, but with my wife’s help and Joe Sacco, who used to type out the membership list during the evenings, we managed.
“But we encountered a hitch when the Civil Aviation told us that to operate we must have an ATOL (financial protection scheme for holidaymakers) and that a member must belong to an organisation for more than six months, apart from the fact that advertising flights was not allowed those days.
The birth of Air Malta
Air Malta started operating – their first flight – on 1 April 1974 on the initiative of then Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, whom Zerafa describes as a wise man.
In 1977 Paul Attard, director of Civil Aviation at that time, informed him that he (Zerafa) had to submit a list of addresses where their members would be staying in Malta. He added: “Paul informed me afterwards that he had been disgusted with that instruction and said that it was ‘an order from above’ as they wanted the business for nothing.
“I became very tired and worried as I thought I would be helping the Maltese and the country’s economy. Fortunately Dan Air allowed me to use their ATOL upon a payment of £20,000.”
Air Malta’s part
In 1977, Air Malta started a tour operator company called Medallion Holidays having its own ATOL. With the assistance of Albert Mizzi and the late Helmut Beg, Zerafa was allowed to use their licence provided that Air Malta had 51 per cent of the shares, Untours 24 per cent and he and his colleagues 25 per cent.
He said: “In the late 1970s, in a meeting I had with the General Workers Union, it was agreed that as associate members, they would participate through travelling from Malta. In 1979/80, I was appointed Managing Director of Medallion Holidays for three years. This was besides the Maltese Movement. In the same period, at a shareholders’ meeting of Medallion Holidays, we were told by Albert Mizzi that an increase of the share was necessary. We did not have the required cash in hand. We were only receiving a salary. So Air Malta took over the two companies without compensation to all those who worked so hard.
“I was naïve as I did not ask for a service agreement if I were to lose my position through no fault of my own.
“The bombshell came on 19 September 1988 when I was told that I was no longer wanted. A good number of Maltese who benefited from my services wanted to organise protests outside Air Malta’s building. My answer was ‘No, No’ even if I was seriously hurt that Air Malta did not offer me the same amount of money (Lm45,000) like the two other gentlemen who lost their job when the Nationalist Party was voted into office in 1987,” he said.
To summarise all that had been done in the years that Carm Zerafa operated the service, he estimates that he brought over to Malta more than half a million tourists, including members of the Maltese Movement, and 10,000 Medallion Holidays passengers. In 1980 alone (his record year), between April and October the Maltese Movement flights carried 50,260 persons as follows:
Air Malta
Scheduled seats: Heathrow Airport 2500.
Chartered seats: Gatwick Airport 8,450, Birmingham 3,380, East Midlands 3,380, Manchester 4,940, Newcastle 5,070, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol and Cardiff 1,690 each.
Dan Air
Chartered seats: Gatwick Airport 9,880.
Britannia Airways
Chartered seats: Luton Airport 3,900.
More disappointment
More disappointment was in store for Zerafa when the Malta Labour Party won the Maltese General Election of 1996. He says that various Labour politicians had approached Prime Minister Alfred Sant to offer Zerafa the job he had lost. But the answer had always been a No, whether as a managing director, a director or a consultant.
He says he thinks the reason behind all this was because of his close links with Dom Mintoff who he supported since 1949, when he was still 17 years old.
Zerafa is now a retired man. “Life has been great to my family and myself. I never imagined that I would be so successful in this trade after spending my boyhood in an orphanage. It is not the destination we reach that is rewarding – it is definitely the journey along the way.
“At the end I cannot but thank the many people, including Albert Mizzi, Tony Meilaq, Harold Harris, Joe Capello, Dominic Attard, Philip Pullicino, Alfred Quintano, Joe Sacco, Doris Jones and especially my wife Sheila and Martin Werks who helped in the design of the brochure.”
Carm Zerafa can be contacted at the following e-mail address: [email protected]
The success of the UK Maltese Movement
DOMINIC ATTARD
World Aviation Group CEO
The drive, focus and dedication which Carm Zerafa injected into the Maltese Movement in the 1970s was the single most important element which made the Maltese Movement one of the principal pioneers of tourism to Malta as well as a significant contributor to the growth and development of Air Malta in those early days.
The following is the story of how the Maltese Movement came into being with Carm Zerafa’s involvement turning it into a big travel business during the years, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s thanks to the cooperation of Air Malta.
Tourism to Malta started being actively promoted in 1964 after independence. The beginning was difficult and slow but in the early 1970s an important development took place which helped enormously the movement of people between the UK and Malta.
The Maltese Movement came into being on the initiative of a number of protagonists which were involved in the Maltese Labour Party in 1958. Among these there was Carm Zerafa, a young entrepreneurial person with drive and enthusiasm who organised the Movement into a huge travel organisation.
At the time, the operation of flights between countries was rigidly controlled by governments who used to designate specific airlines to fly each and every route. The evolution of charter flights was still in their embryonic development. Malta was mainly served by British European Airways (BEA) which eventually merged with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), today’s British Airways.
The Maltese Government had designated a Maltese company called Malta Airways which was too small to operate directly its own aircraft. BEA owned 30% of Malta Airways and it had in place a commercial agreement to cover some UK/Malta routes operated at the time by Vanguard, Comet and Trident aircraft. The Maltese company which had a leased aircraft from BEA, a Vanguard, operated routes between Malta and Rome and Malta and Tripoli.
Zerafa had the vision to understand that there was substantial potential in organising flights to Malta to cater mainly for Maltese nationals living in the UK. He understood that there was a need to provide affordable travel to this market segment. However things were not easy as permits had to be obtained and the authorities were not, at the time, very liberal in their approach to the proliferation of air transport for the masses.
However an important development took place in 1973 when Air Malta was set up by the Government of Malta and which was immediately designated as the Maltese carrier on the Malta-UK routes. The airline commenced operations with two Boeing 720B aircraft (147 seats) leased from PIA.
By that time, the Maltese Movement was already operating a number of flights using aircraft operated by British carriers. However his entrepreneurial spirit and his deep love for Malta and for everything which is Maltese pushed him to get closer to Air Malta.
In the meantime global developments started to create the foundations for the liberalisation of the air transport industry worldwide. Changes to the regulatory environment started to take place allowing for radical changes in policy to allow for the proliferation of travel by the masses. Many countries in Western Europe and the US began to ease restrictions and the regulatory framework. In this scenario charter flights to Malta began to be classified under two different categories, Inclusive Tour Charters and Affinity Charters. A Charter Policy was implemented by the Maltese Government to regulate these developments and growth of such flights.
Maltese Movement’s flights which by now were mainly operated by Air Malta were categorised as Affinity Charters and were restricted to members of this Movement or club managed by Carm Zerafa and a few of his collaborators. This development strengthened the bond between Carm Zerafa and Air Malta which resulted in huge benefits to the development of both Air Malta and the tourism industry to Malta.
Although initially the Maltese Movement was a travel club for Maltese nationals which had settled in the UK, in time this club was extended to British nationals who had friends or relatives here in Malta which included also those who, at the time, were described as “residents”.
In the mid to the late 1970s the Maltese Movement was the single biggest client of Air Malta with hundreds of flights operated to Malta from a good number of UK airports bringing to Malta tens of thousands of passengers many of whom were accommodated in apartments which started mushrooming at the time.
Carm Zerafa was the man who planned, negotiated and managed these large programmes of dedicated flights and which involved huge sums of money and transactions with the suppliers of the Movement.
The Maltese Movement also started to support the regular scheduled services which Air Malta was also operating out of UK airports.
By the late 1970s the Maltese Movement had grown beyond the capabilities of the structure of a club, as it was originally designed, and Carm Zerafa and Albert Mizzi once again put their heads together to ensure the sustainability of this business model. Air Malta already had a small tour operating company providing Inclusive Tours to Malta called Medallion Holidays which, in turn, had a ground handling company called Medallion Services which, at the time, was managed by today’s designate chairman of Air Malta, Sonny Portelli.
The business acumen of Albert Mizzi and Carm Zerafa resulted in the acquisition by Air Malta of the Maltese Movement with Carm Zerafa retained to continue to manage the business, a clear sign of the respect and recognition for Zerafa’s abilities.
At the same time Air Malta bought out another British tour operating company also owned by another Maltese pioneer in this industry (Vic Mizzi). Therefore the airline formed a large travel and tour operating group which was structured in a way as to maintain a strong presence in both the inclusive tour market and the direct sell market which by mid 1985 was becoming the norm. The setting up and development of this travel and tour operating group (which in 1988 became known as HolidayMalta) supported the success which the Maltese airline enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Maltese Movement today is inactive.
Carm Zerafa’s connections with the game of snooker
Carm Zerafa was not only well known among the Maltese Movement members. He also became a well known personality in Malta, especially through his sponsorship of the then 15-year-old Tony Drago, who is still a professional snooker player today.
It was thanks to Zerafa’s involvement that Drago could start a professional career which gave him a good number of satisfactions. Zerafa also sponsored former Malta champion Joe Grech as the latter took part in some international tournaments in Britain in the 1980s.
Apart from the sponsorship of Drago and Grech, Zerafa was also instrumental in organising what must have been the first Invitation Snooker tournament in Malta at the Ta’ Qali pavilion, in May 1981. He organised that tournament funded by Medallion Holidays, of which he was managing director, and the prize money amounted to £10,000 – quite a considerable amount that time.
It was a tournament which brought over to Malta some of the world’s top class players of those days, including Ray Reardon, Doug Mountjoy, the legendary Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn. Maltese top amateur players Paul Mifsud and Joe Grech also took part.
A year later, Zerafa teamed up with Henry West to organise a snooker tournament for players aged 10 to 16. In the magazine Baulkline of April 1982, it was said that there was so much interest in this event that 490 entries had been received. It was a number which exceeded Zerafa’s expectations.