'Unfinished Business'

Author: George Sammut
Edited: Austin Sammut
Publisher: Midsea Books / 2024
Pages: 308

One day the Archbishop of Malta, Sir Michael Gonzi, sent for the editor of the secular Sunday Times of Malta to complain about a three-column picture of girls aged eight to 10 performing ballet at the Manoel Theatre, complaining they were indecently dressed.

Then all of a sudden the archbishop, who must have been in a rare day for confidences, switched subject and asked the editor, George Sammut, how ladies' evening dresses held up when they were strapless.

He confessed that some days previously he had experienced what for him was a terrible nightmare.

Prime Minister George Borg Olivier was giving a grand reception at the Auberge d'Aragon (where the prime ministers of that time had their office) in honour of the visiting Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip.

While waiting for the arrival of the royal couple, the three bishops (Gonzi, Bishop Galea the Vicar General and Gozo Bishop Pace) were chatting on the side when Lord Mountbatten, at that time C-in-C Mediterranean, came over and suggested they join the prime minister at the main entrance.

The bishops agreed but to do so they had to cross a large hall where the guests were assembled. Most of the women guests wore strapless gowns. The bishops had never seen so many bare backs.

They were made to stand by while all the guests were presented to the royal couple, the men bowed and the women curtsied.

The three bishops were quite short and so when a lady curtsied, her décolleté would roughly come to the level of the bishops' noses.

Gonzi's nightmare was: not having anything to hold their dresses up, what would happen if some top were to somehow slide down?

George sought to reassure Gonzi. He pulled out a whale bone from his shirt collar and explained to Gonzi that was how ladies' evening dresses held up. And anyway it was unlikely that ladies would go about in dresses which they could not trust.

Gonzi appeared reassured at that, though this did not mean that henceforth his relations with the paper and its editor did not swing from harsh criticism to downright condemnation.

This is vintage George 'Roamer' Sammut for you - in with the British Crown, in with the Nationalist government and also as an ex-novice in with the Church. Chatty, a raconteur and irreverent.  Always a good read.

The story of this book is simply told: after he was kicked out of his post on 19 March 1972, George decided to write about his experience at The Times. He got as far as 1965 before his untimely death in 1984. His wife, Lola, kept the manuscript under wraps till her death 12 years ago.

His children then felt enough time had passed and most of the people he wrote about had also passed away.

George's memoirs are reproduced as they were, mistakes and all. His wife added a postscript given the book's title was Unfinished Business.

To roundup the book his children added a copy of the special magazine to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Valletta, which George had curated and a copy of an interview he carried with the first ambassadors accredited to the new state of Malta.

Mainly though, the book tells us about the inner story at Progress Press, about Mabel Strickland's fickle character and about George's health problems. In May 1965, aged 45, George suffered a heart attack. He returned to work six months later, not as an editor but as an editorial assistant. In all, he spent 27 years working for Mabel.

The Times of Malta had come through the war as Malta's best known paper. Even when it was produced in a huge warren of a building and even with all the quirks of its main characters, it had a certain rigidity of procedure - two editorial conferences a day, and a rigid timetable that did not allow lateness in printing.  

Except naturally when Mabel wanted to include something late in the day or wanted to see the front page late at night and in her house in Lija. While the press waited.

George explains how he found The Sunday Times as the weakest of the papers printed at Strickland House and the battles he had to remove rubrics that nobody read.

Like that other Times (and later SPL) journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, he found he was better writing his column, Roamer's Column,  than managing the paper. And his column was immensely popular, as Daphne's Running Commentary would be years later.

There is a fascinating link between George and me, although as far as I can remember, we never met, except on one occasion when Mgr Victor Grech invited him to the Seminary to speak to us about journalism.

On 18 March 1972 I was ordained priest by Archbishop Gonzi together with 26 others at St John's.

The next day Mabel informed George he was being sacked as part of an austerity drive and also because of his age.

The two events were obviously unconnected except for one of those coincidences that life sometimes throws up: Herbert Ganado mentioned the two events in his next article on il-Hajja, the newspaper I was to join in July 1972 where I was to remain until April 1987.