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15 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 MARCH 2020 NEWS Top left: An ex-voto of 1813 showing Nicola Bartolo supplying water to the infected in their huts surrounded by a sanitary cordon manned by troops in the first ditch outside Porta Reale Valletta. (Sanctuary Our Lady of Mellieha); top: Votive offering showing plague victims being carted off to mass graves; left: An ex-voto of the Plague of 17 Aug 1813 of Anna Lungaro showing the pest Hospital Valletta. The light house on Fort st Elmo can be seen through the arch where an attendant with a mask around his face is fumigating the foul air. (Sanctuary Our Lady of Mellieha) Sir Thomas Maitland police force which remains a tool controlled by a 'sovereign prime minister' on the other. Reforming the civil service While Maitland fought the bubonic plague as a military campaign, with himself as the general-in-chief, his suc- cessor Sir Henry Bouverie is never mentioned in regard to the cholera epidemic of 1837 which occurred on his watch. Although cholera also killed some 4,000 mainly native Mal- tese people, the British medi- cal authorities were convinced that it was not contagious and consequently limited their in- terventions to the bare mini- mum. At the same time this out- break also took place in an im- portant period of transition. The cholera of 1837 was the prelude to the implementation of the reforms of the Austin/ Lewis Commission, which put an end to the segregation be- tween an all-British ruling elite of top civil servants and the native Maltese and paved the way for the development of an Anglophile middle/upper class. The cholera epidemic actu- ally broke out while the Com- missioners were visiting Malta, and Sarah Austin, the wife of the distinguished jurist John Austin, left a vivid account of the course of this epidemic. This clearly brings out the sense of distance and hostility between leading British offi- cials on the one hand, the na- tive Maltese physicians who insisted that the cholera was contagious, and the bulk of the population, who suspected that the British government might be trying to poison them through the free medicine it provided. On the other hand Sir John Stoddart, the English Chief Justice, provided a fascinating account of the cautious precau- tionary measures adopted by the inhabitants of Sliema, who appointed a mixed Anglo-Mal- tese commission to manage the impact of cholera on their lo- cality, and hired a physician to visit all the households, as well as provided free bread to all the poorer inhabitants. As a result, Stoddart noted, only two individuals died of the cholera in their locality. The Sliema case anticipated a significant change in Maltese politics and society. Shortly after the end of the cholera epidemic, the Austin/ Lewis Commission was to rec- ommend the removal of top English civil servants (among them ironically Sir John Stod- dart himself), their replace- ment by Maltese counterparts and the making of significant legal reforms. These included the granting of liberty of the press and the reform of Maltese substantive legislation. Thus the cholera epidem- ic marked the transition away from Maitland's model of top- down Anglicising rule towards a model which, by accepting some of the 'native Maltese demands' made possible the careers of individuals like Sir Adrian Dingli, who was simul- taneously a native Maltese ad- vocate and a top Colonial civil servant. It is highly appropriate in this context, that Dingli's name is indelibly linked to the locality of Sliema, which was to house the new anglophone Maltese middle class which emerged from the same reform process which made his career possi- ble. Something to think about the next time one walks down Dingli street or takes a stroll around Dingli Circus! Malta has already grappled with various epidemics in the past. But two epidemics which occurred in the first half of the 19th century are particularly instructive, because their political management heralded a change in the way Malta was governed and left a durable inf luence on Maltese society