I have been postponing, over and over again, my response to the request by a reader for pictorial spreads about beach fashions in early Malta because I believed it a difficult commitment to satisfy. 

Differently from today, not a single one of the hundreds of pre-war postcards shows swimmers on beaches. Paying humble homage to Victorian prudery, card publishers banned that subject as entirely taboo, and public photographers too.

From a 1933 family album

Postcard used in Malta in 1902 showing a lady in a contemporary bathing costume

Adults, especially women, in bathing costumes, may appear, but very exceptionally, in private family albums.

One 1930s photograph, showing women in the most chaste of swimming gear, has a note handwritten on its back: “I don’t think this should be in the album.”

The only pre-war bathing scene postcard, c.1905, showing policemen arresting a boy swimming starkers.

Curiously, the only postcard I know of which shows a bathing scene was most likely meant as a morality warning. Published round 1905, it shows policemen arresting a boy swimming in the nude. Apart from that, absolutely nothing.

An early 1930s beach scene

Three ladies enjoying the sea around Malta

Women in swimwear start appearing, timidly at first, aggressively later, with the explosion of the tourist boom that followed Independence. You can date post-war Maltese postcards rather accurately, by measuring how skimpy the bikinis are.

Xlendi Bay, Gozo, in the beginning of the Independence tourist boom

In an island surrounded by vast expanses of sea and espoused to tropical heatwaves, one would assume sea bathing to have been ingrained in popular culture. 

1960s promotion postcard of the Hotel Cavalieri, St Julian’s

The swimming pool area of the Hotel Capua Court, in Sliema, 1960s

If it was, it left very faint records in history. Apart from Toni Bajjada, whose marathon swims during the 1565 Great Siege became the stuff of legend, almost no mention of sea leisure, games or sports appears anywhere in our annals before the 20th century. 

St Julian’s Water Polo Club team in 1931

Winners of the British 1910 military water sports championships.

Maltese sportsmen participated for the first time in the Olympic Games of Amsterdam in 1928.

Malta had to wait till 1928 to send its first water polo team to the Amsterdam Olympic Games which, coincidentally, featured my mother’s brother, Edoardo Magri, later judge.

All images from the author's collections

A number of young children enjoying the sea in the 1910s.