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THIS WEEK BOOKS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 8 DECEMBER 2019 4 As the events of Sette Giugno continue to reverberate across Maltese society in fresh protest movements and even upcoming Hollywood movie treatments, author Paul Bartolo sits down with TEODOR RELJIC to chat about the new edition of his landmark study, 'X'Kien Gara Sew Fis-Sette Giugno' 'The present system cannot go on' For the sake of giving a full picture to our readers, could you kindly walk us through the history of the book itself, and tell us a little bit how its first edition came to be, and what has been added to this new one? This book combines my post-graduate training and experience in three disci- plines: history, education, and psychol- ogy. Though my main work at the Uni- versity is now coordinating the training of psychologists, my first degree and master were in history. While research- ing the national archives forty years ago at the Palace in Valletta, for my Master's dissertation on 'War and social change: Malta 1914-19', I discovered documents of the 'Commission of Inquiry into the events of June 7 and 8, 1919 and the cir- cumstances that led up to them' and the evidence given by 150 witnesses in Au- gust-September 1919. These witnesses were people who were in the streets of Valletta during the rising and who saw the firing on the crowd, and included people from all walks of life: the person who had gone to Valletta with Manuel Attard from Sliema who was shot in Old Bakery Street; the doctor who tried to tend to Wenzu Dyer who was fa- tally hit by a bullet in Palace Square; the soldiers who actually shot at the crowd; the politicians who were meeting in the National Assembly including Nerik Mizzi and others who tried to placate the crowd after the shooting; the police; the Acting Governor; the representatives of the dockyard Imperial Government Workers Union; the merchants; and newspaper editors. There was also the report of the Commission of Inquiry that collected the evidence; however, this re- port was criticised as being too biased in favour of the Colonial Government. In taking note of these documents, I had been influenced by my post-grad- uate training as a history teacher when there was the development of a new ap- proach to teaching: rather than having students just read the conclusions about events reached by historians, they were to be provided with copies of original materials so that they could have direct experience of historical investigation and reporting by trying to make sense of his- torical documents themselves. All this led to the production of the first edition of 'X'kien gara sew fis-Sette Giugno 1919' (What really happened on the Sette Giugno) that was published by Klabb Kotba Maltin in 1979. I had constructed a chronological collage of evidence given before the Commission of Inquiry that provided a very intrigu- ing narrative by the people who were direct witnesses of the events. This was accompanied by commentary based on an analysis of the archival material that included the Colonial Government's correspondence with London, as well as reports of the various departments of the Colonial administration and petitions by individuals and groups sent to the gov- ernment, together with an analysis of the newspapers of the time. That edition went quickly out of print, partly because there were still people alive who had themselves been present at the Sette Giugno 60 years earlier or whose description of the Sette Giugno events was still treasured by their chil- dren. The occurrence of the centenary of the Sette Giugno spurred me to delve once more into the archives, and particu- larly the National Archives of the UK at Kew, to produce a second edition with a completely new chapter that addresses questions raised since the first edition as well as providing over one hundred pages of new visual materials and docu- ments. On a similar note, how would you trace the evolution of the very discourse surrounding the event? How has the way we talk about Sette Giugno changed over the years, and how is this evident in this latest edition of your book? Over the past 40 years since the publi- cation of the first edition, the Sette Giug- no has become recognised more widely as an important national event. Suffice to say that the Labour Administration set up a Sette Giugno monument in Palace Square in 1986 while, three years later in 1989, the Nationalist Administration included the Sette Giugno as one of five national days. This recognition of the national sig- nificance of the Sette Giugno differed considerably from the approach taken by the British Governor of the time Lord Plumer. In the book I describe how this new Governor who took office on June 10, 1919, while endeavouring to sup- port Malta's prosperity, tried to erase the memory of the Sette Giugno, portray- ing it as a "deplorable incident among friends" that was best forgotten. Maltese governments since 1921 had also tended to avoid celebrating the memory of the events, fearing it will be used to encour- age protests against their administration. The first two booklets about the Sette Giugno were published by the parties in minority positions – the Labour Party in 1927 and the Nationalist Party in 1930. The Strickland party and richer classes also feared riots and portrayed the Sette Giugno events as a fete for thieves, sug- gesting that those who were killed were no martyrs but simply bystanders. In fact, it was only in the late 1960s, when Prof Henry Frendo described the Sette Giugno as a Maltese revolu- tion that the national importance of the events began to be more appropriately appreciated. My own publication in 1979 then set out the details about the events, showing that they were not simply the riots of a day or two but a national po- litical movement that arose out of the first world war, similar to other national movements of the time in other parts of the British Empire, particularly Ireland, Egypt and India of which the Maltese were aware. Thus by the 1980s there was the development of a better understand- ing of how the Sette Giugno held an im- portant place in the significant develop- ments of the Maltese inter-war political scene. Consequently, the Sette Giugno was declared as one of the national days in 1989. Since then, interest in the events continued to grow as official speeches and other commentaries on the Sette Gi- ugno are made on every 7th June. But it has been the celebration of the 100th an- niversary this year that has given rise to a number of more extensive publications and television programmes that are ena- bling people to understand better what the Sette Giugno was all about. The new edition includes additional archival material. What would you say this contributes to the overall experience of the book? And how about the visual material supplied by Judge Giovanni Bonello? The new edition has delivered the ac- count of what really happened on the Sette Giugno more complete because, firstly I delved deeper into documents at the National Archives of Malta (now in Rabat). For instance, an interesting doc- ument in the Malta archives that I had not used earlier, was a report in August 1919 by Joseph Howard, who became the first Prime Minister of Malta in 1921, who had interviewed dockyard people about how their opinions on how the British were treating Maltese dockyard workers, and about whether the dock- yard was "the hottest bed of the unusual agitation". Even more importantly for the new edi- tion, I made use of all the relevant mate- rial in the National Archives of the UK in Kew. In this way, for instance, I found a full account of the evidence given before the Military Inquiry that was held only two weeks after the events of June 7, in- cluding the evidence of the four soldiers who admitted firing on the crowd; a copy of the lists of people who were injured on June 7 and 8, and of the 40 people who were court-martialled. In addition, I re- viewed the comments written by the Secretary of State and officials at the Co- lonial Office in London about all that was reported from Malta, and about newspa- per articles in Italy and the UK about the events. There was also information about visits to the Colonial Office by Strickland and Cassar Torregiani. I found some files that had been kept secret for 70 years, such as one on correspondence by Nerik Mizzi with an Italian colleague that had been censored by the British in 1917 and Teodor Reljic