Telegraph Journalist of Maltese Ancestry Speaks about the Destruction of British Heritage
From Admiral Rooke’s seizure of Gibraltar in 1704 to the lowering of the Union Jack at Fort St Angelo in March 1979, a string of stations ran from the Pillars of Hercules to the Levant – Minorca, Malta, the Ionian Islands, briefly Sicily, finally Cyprus – which gave the inland sea the character of a British mare nostrum.
These were vital ports and harbours allowing the Royal Navy to protect the routes to India, southern Europe, and North Africa. And the commercial and maritime genius of the British people was no less manifested in their Mediterranean empire. As G.F. Leckie observed in 1808, the British should “form for ourselves an insular empire, complete in its parts, and sufficient to itself”.
How times have changed. For those acquainted with the depressing recent record of Maltese attitudes to the island’s British past, the news last week was hardly surprising. Malta’s planning commissars rejected the final appeal against the demolition of the Chambray Barracks: an imposing nineteenth-century sandstone range built within the Knights’ old fort to house British soldiers and their families. The arcaded façade will be lifted off, and its mangled remains will be “incorporated” – that euphemism for taxidermy again – into a five-star hotel.
The same logic operates a few hundred miles to the east. Since the March drone strike on RAF Akrotiri, Cypriot president Christodoulides has called for a renegotiation of the sovereign base areas. Tellingly, he described the bases as “a colonial consequence”. Quite how long the Ministry of Defence’s position that sovereignty is not on the table holds, in the age of post-Chagos imagination, is anyone’s guess.
British history in the Mediterranean is not often rhapsodised. And yet, beyond its strategic and naval importance, this was an area of remarkable literary fertility and outstanding characters.
Coleridge served, in an opium-shaded interlude, as Public Secretary in the British administration of Malta in 1805; the dissolute Lord Byron died at Missolonghi nineteen years later for a Greek state which the Royal Navy was already half-creating; Edward Lear filled his Corfiot years with watercolours that remain the loveliest record of any British colonial possession; Lawrence Durrell found in Kalami the ancient Corcyra of Prospero’s Cell, in Rhodes his Marine Venus, and in Bellapais the bitterest of his lemons; Patrick Leigh Fermor walked the Mani with a notebook and, on a darker night, drove past twenty-two German checkpoints in occupied Heraklion in a kidnapped general’s staff car.
The barren landscape produced a particular British type – sun-scorched, philhellene, often slightly disreputable, fluent in three languages and at home in none. A type that is now tragically extinct.
The long shadow of the world which produced that type is slowly vanishing too. Gozo is no longer the isle of Lear’s watercolours or of the young Prince Philip’s first married years. Today it is simply another stretch of coast given over to poured concrete and infinity pools.
The same is happening to Limassol, to Larnaca and to Valletta itself, where the city my Maltese ancestors knew – the King’s Own Band Club, the Anglo-Maltese Union Bar, the marble Queen Victoria – feels increasingly like a museum exhibit awaiting its boutique-hotel conversion.
The British Mediterranean is perhaps in its closing chapter. But as we turn the final pages, it is worth knowing what is being lost at Chambray, and watching what happens next at Akrotiri. For nearly three centuries the British were not only the people of the Atlantic archipelago. They were also a people of the middle sea; and what an extraordinary set of people they were.