The only time I ever met Sammy Meilaq was in a very different context. I was invited, many years ago, to baptise a child of a friend of mine at St Publius Church in Floriana and the second child at this baptism, which I baptised as well, was that of Sammy Meilaq and his wife.

Otherwise I glimpsed Mr Meilaq at the many public activities he took part in and I covered but we never met properly.

This book is his autobiography and it reveals aspects of his life that may not be known to many. It is also, in a way, a self-justification of his actions in the public life.

In many ways, the book is as confrontational as Sammy was. For better or for worse, many associate him with the attack by dockyard workers on the Archbishop’s Curia on 28 September 1984. His account in this book is equally confrontational: it is sufficient to remark that he begins the chapter by mentioning Mother Teresa of Calcutta – as if there is any comparison between the saintly nun and the devastation of the Curia and the sacrilegious attack on the altar in the chapel.

He then quotes a very partisan report that was carried on the next day’s Orizzont which praised the workers as the Labour Movement’s Eighth Army.

There is more. Things between the KMB government and the church under Archbishop Mercieca regarding free schooling at church schools. So the dockyard held a meeting for workers early in the morning and PM KMB was present and made a rousing speech.

What KMB did not know was that from the previous night, plans had been made to take the workers to Valletta. Sammy himself says KMB was not in favour of this idea, and when the workers issued from the dockyard, and were joined by other workers from the Marsa Shipbuilding, and the flow carried him to Valletta, he told the workers to go back to the dockyard.

Sammy says he was leading the march but when a small group split off and made for the Curia, he did not lead, but followed them. Some entered the building from a side door and damaged some parts of the Curia. Obviously, he does not mention the disfigurement of the Blessed Virgin statue nor the breaking of the tabernacle door and desecration of the Hosts.

He then says: “The effect of the anger of the demonstration was immediately felt” but this does not refer to the tidal wave of revulsion at what happened but rather that the church bowed down and obeyed the law instead of breaking it and the church never again asked for money for schooling. If he still believes this, he has a skewed vision of history.

Another revelatory chapter is that which deals with his part in the blockade of the Grand Harbour to impede the UK aircraft carrier ‘Ark Royal’ from entering the harbour.

Once again, it was a Friday and once again it was the 28th, this time of June in 1988. Labour had lost the election and PN was in government but the dockyard people still believed they could run the show especially when the visiting ships did not give any clear commitment they were free from nuclear weapons.

The same template was used by Mr Meilaq: on the eve of the arrival of the ‘Ark Royal’, a small group met and Mr Meilaq came up with the idea of blocking the entrance to the Grand Harbour with a ship, the ‘Copper Mountain’ which had been abandoned at the dockyard.

Everything was kept secret until a break (lunch)time meeting in Cospicua, addressed, once again by KMB, who, again, had no idea what was being planned. Instead of returning to their place of work, the workers followed their leaders to Parlatorio Wharf and “freed” the ship.

It is not an easy task to manoeuvre a ship without power in the harbour, and there was a troublesome East wind blowing and the ship almost hit the Valletta side. Meanwhile, Michael Parnis led the Marsa Shipyard workers out on the streets so that any attack by the armed forces on the dockyard workers would be delayed or blocked.

The ship was successfully manoeuvred to block the harbour’s entrance and that was it. The ‘Ark Royal’ was kept out.

The next day, the government, helped by AFM, removed the ship from the harbour’s entrance.

There were actually two ship hijacks.

Sammy Meilaq writes: “Michael Parnis and Marie Louise Coleiro, secretary general of the Labour Party, and Labour MPs John Dalli and Alfred Portelli blocked the Marsaxlokk harbour by anchoring tugboats and barges in the middle of the port thus blocking ‘Ark Royal’ from entering.”

Meanwhile, Labour organised a mass meeting on both sides of the harbour. While this was going on, and AFM patrol boats and helicopters circled around, some workers unhitched another ship, the “Olympic Rainbow” which was berthed at Boilerwharf allowing it to swing outward towards Valletta.

Meanwhile, Lorry Sant and other dockyard workers commandeered three tugboats and battled it out with the AFM patrol boats, replying to the AFM’s tear gas canisters with the tug boats’ water jets. The patrol boats had to withdraw.

Mr Meilaq does not say how it all ended except that ‘Ark Royal’ had to berth at St Paul’s Bay and that the aircraft carrier suffered the same indignity later on that same year in Melbourne. He describes this second hijack as a ‘complete success’.

These two chapters make the most riveting reading. The first chapters allow a glimpse of Sammy Meilaq the person. Born, like his mentor Dom Mintoff, in Cospicua in the post-war years, he tells of the Muzew catechism classes, and also of his passion for barefoot boxing in some empty house, to rudimentary rules.

Childhood brought him in close contact with the politico-religious realities of his time. Once, in a church, he saw people reacting angrily at a bishop’s pastoral letter. On 28 April 1958 he watched while a crowd beat up some English sailors on a truck.

He was a bright boy and even skipped a year when he was at a nuns’ school and again skipped another when he passed the Lyceum exam. He was urged to continue with his studies and enter university but he chose otherwise, also because university tuition cost money at that time.

The attractions of the Bormla streets exerted their predominating attraction on him: he grew to like bikes even before he was licensed to drive one, and, completely honest, he caught the illegal betting bug at dens like the ‘Egyptian Queen’ in Strait Street, Valletta and an unnamed one further down making the acquaintance of people like Mutumallu at the Duwi Balli, and the man who killed the ‘Zuz’.

A large part of the book, spread in many chapters, describes Sammy’s complicated relationship with the Labour Party which ended when he supported Dom Mintoff in the controversial years when he brought the Labour government down and set himself against party leader Alfred Sant.

From an early age, especially when he started work at the dockyard, he was attracted by Leftist and Marxist ideas and he formed part of a small very Leftist group, which broke new ground by taking a huge red flag to a Mintoff meeting outside the dockyard (Was this the one at which the Dom asked if the dockyard workers were without b...ls?). Later on the group decked Queen Victoria’s statue in red and Sammy and Lino Briguglio, who were handing out pamphlets outside St John’s were shouted at by a very angry monsignor.

While an early effort to unite the various Leftist groups together failed, Sammy was persuaded to contest the first dockyard council in 1975. Little did he realise this would be the beginning of 36 years at the helm of the dockyard.

The worker management experiment at the dockyard may be, in future, the subject of extended studies. It all ended, as we all know, in tears but that does not mean it was a worthless attempt.

First of all, it must be said that the experiment passed through various forms, sometimes contradicting each other. One might say the experiment failed and the dockyard was closed because of the many mistakes committed at the very end in the Fairmount debacle, but Meilaq himself tends to blame the unnamed ‘management’ for all that went wrong. Possibly, others can blame Meilaq himself for tending to use the dockyard workers as shock troopers of the Labour government first and the Labour Party later. There were also personality issues to be tackled, such as the effervescent Gorg Zahra and the PN’s Furto Selvatico.

Despite the worker management innovation, the dockyard continued to lose money. So in June 1980, PM Dom Mintoff called yet another mammoth meeting at Castille and ordered what one may call a Chinese Cultural Revolution in  which everyone had to be elected and no one was to have a permanent post.

Sammy Meilaq’s account of his years at the helm are somewhat chaotic, he veers between the years and reverses back to years as much as he sometimes fast-forwards.

One big issue regards the post-1980 years: the Mintoff reforms outlined just two paragraphs back, were rejected outright by the dockyard workers and, separately by the union. Meanwhile, however, the 1981 election had come and gone and Labour lost its majority and the situation became very complicated. Essentially, Mintoff had moved even more to the Left but was not followed by his supporters.

In 1983, the dockyard won a contract to refit the ‘Cunard Countess’ which had been used as a troopship during the Falkland War. This contract was won against fierce competition and caused much anger in Britain. At that time, there were no less than 20 other ships undergoing repairs at the dockyard. This was , to be fair, the result of the work of the Kumitati tax-Xoghol as worker management was called then.

With his bare-hand boxing behind him, Sammy got involved in many street fights on behalf of the Labour Party. He admits to being present at the PN meeting in Kalkara which was broken up when Toto’ drove his car onto the PN supporters. He was arrested when the Nerik Mizzi bust in St John’s Square was pulled down in retaliation at the disfigurement of the Republic monument in Marsa. He admits to taking part in the fighting in Republic Street during a PN demonstration in Independence Day 1975 (but says he was defending two comrades).

On a less physical side he became a member of the party’s executive council for many years and he was also a member of the party’s Vigilance Board and had a key role in the controversy surrounding the leadership election in 1992 with Alfred Sant and Lino Spiteri as the main contenders.

He tells some riveting stories. For instance, among those who were killed in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel terrorist attack in Mumbai in December 2008, there was a shipping tycoon, Andreas Liveras, who almost 20 years before was involved in a costly court case against the dockyard regarding the repairs on his ‘Princess Tanya’ yacht which the dockyard lost and which also cost the job of the then general manager Lorry Farrugia after he was accused of being in cahoots with the tycoon.

A dockyard can be a dangerous place. Sammy Meilaq spends a whole paragraph listing the number of times he was injured while working but then only a short sentence to record the ‘Um el Faroud’ tragedy on 3 February 1995 when many workers died. (Wasn’t he the chairman at that time?) He then describes in detail how he was almost killed when he was taking part in a delegation in Libya led by Minister John Dalli and the car he was in was involved in a head-on collision.

In previous years he and other dockyard workers were also engaged in trade union activity in support and solidarity with other trade union members at other places of work. He tells how he led the occupation of the Hotel Phoenicia. His version of the events and outcome differ from the impression I had. Another case was the GWU issue with BOV, with outbreaks of violence and police using tear gas in Luqa in July 1988. A third case regarded the Kalaxlokk lockout of its employees in 1996, where according to this paper in 1996, there were plans for yet another blockade of the Grand Harbour.

Yet, the tide was turning. Perhaps the first signal came in 1999 when after years of pressure, the US ship ‘La Salle’ was accepted for repairs at the dockyard, splitting the dockyard workers into two groups, instead of the previous worker solidarity. It also deepened the split between dockyard workers and the Labour Party which had already appeared ironically when Labour was in power.

For it was the Labour government under Alfred Sant which brought to an end worker management at the dockyard. Sammy Meilaq is at his most scathing when he attacks John Cassar White, today BOV chairman, and Godfrey Baldacchino. He claims Mr Cassar White took just one week to analyse the dockyard’s financial situation and claimed industrial democracy was undermining management. But he is far more scathing in his treatment of Godfrey Baldacchino who he charges with being the Torquemada of the dockyard, believing what was told him in private meetings by the members of management and refusing to let Mr Meilaq and his council confront the accusers. The working party led by Dr George Abela came up with a prepared report that changed worker management to one of government and workers’ representatives sharing power and a government-appointed chairman on top. Mr Baldacchino had earlier claimed the management was “besieged, unarmed and dishonoured”. After 22 years of self-management, with impressive results to show, and with a gradual reduction of workers with no one getting sacked, a new situation came into being. The end was very near.

The day after 9/11, there was trouble at the dockyard because work was being assigned to a sub-contracting company instead of to the dockyard workers. People resigned from union posts and the two dockyards were amalgamated with 1,700 workers being retained and 900 others assigned to Industrial Projects Services Ltd. The union became weaker and weaker and the workers became frightened at all the talk about closing down the dockyard. Incidents became the order of the day and with each incident, the union lost more and more power.

Then came the ‘Fairmount’ debacle which cost the dockyard some €80 million and the yard had to be closed. GWU had long been asking to see the dockyard accounts but were only given snippets of information. The dockyard began to increase outsourcing and this caused many suspicions of corruption.

With the 2008 election approaching, GWU tried to reach an agreement with the Labour Party and commit it to keep the dockyard open. But Dr Sant kept insisting he needed to evaluate the situation after the election. After the election, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi revealed documentation in Parliament which showed that between July and August 2007 there had been meetings between the dockyard management and the Labour Party led respectively by Mr Cassar White and Helena Dalli. The union was not invited to these discussions.

Following the March 2008 election, before which Dr Gonzi had promised each dockyard worker their job was secure, GWU wrote to the PM submitting a report on the dockyard future. Dr Gonzi referred them to Minister Austin Gatt who never acknowledged the union’s report. Then Dr Gonzi suddenly announced the privatisation of the dockyard which process was to start with more hiving off of workers to early retirement. When the government further stonewalled, it took a mass meeting at Paola and a threat by Tony Zarb to break down the doors of Castille to bring a sort of rapprochement and improve, somewhat weakly, the end conditions for workers.

I remember very well the Public Accounts Meetings on the Fairmount scandal which did not lead to any definite conclusion. Previous to that, the government had commissioned a PricewaterhouseCoopers study (not investigation) despite the many allegations made by the union, mainly about Graham Couser who drew up the tender, and contract with Fairmount, was removed from his post and allowed to leave Malta (even though the union found out he was working in the Gibraltar dockyard).

The contract to convert the two Fairmount ships was loaded with many adverse conditions that made the dockyard lose money not just on the contract itself but also on other work which had to make way to this work. The PWC report speaks of a negative contribution of €37 million but the union speaks (more convincingly) of a €80 million loss on the job. And yet the ships were blessed by the archbishop when work was finished.

On 30 March 2010, the Malta Drydocks closed its doors for ever. Thus ended a history going back centuries to the times of the Order, then the British Empire and lastly the auto-managed dockyard run by its workers. Sammy Meilaq was one of the last to leave.

So ends the book and so too ends his commitment to what he saw as the principles of socialism as interpreted by his friend and mentor Dom Mintoff. Out of this longish account of the book I have left out those dealing with his friendship, comradeship and joint political militancy with the Dom.

Today one is dead and Sammy Meilaq is a pensioner. The Malta Drydocks and the Marsa Shipbuilding did close but instead of them there is now a functional dockyard with a very small workforce but any time I look across the harbour, it is filled with ships. The other site is waiting for expressions of interest.

The principles Sammy Meilaq so worked for – trade union rights, worker participation and management – have gone the way of the ghonnella. Malta has moved on and not even the new Labour government which is erecting a monument for Dom Mintoff dares go back to those old times.

Nevertheless, while disagreeing with some of the actions Sammy describes, the reader cannot but help admire the steadfastness, the courage and also the honesty of Sammy Meilaq, who, till the very last day of his employment, worked as a shipwright along with his fellow workers. No ring-fenced lush salary package for him, no government car, no driver, nor did he get to keep the government car after his retirement.

He may well be the Bastjunar on the Mintoff example as he says he is, and sometimes his boxing past came back and was useful in scraps, but they just don’t do men like that anymore. Or rather, he would argue with this and point out a host of fellow workers who were exactly like him.