Well-known cartoonist Maurice Tanti Burlò died 10 years ago, but his incisive political caricatures, published in Times of Malta, still strike a chord and are remembered as sharply by those who worked with him. Fiona Galea Debono reports.

He lampooned without fear or favour. And in the words of his son Sebastian – who has continued an uninterrupted line of Tanti Burlò cartoons that “document Malta’s decline since 1977” – he was “Malta’s satirical conscience of hope”.

Also known by the pseudonym Nalizpelra, Tanti Burlò died on December 10, 2014, aged 78, after 35 years of cartooning every week for the Sunday and daily paper – even when his strong hands trembled as he fought to hold his pen.

Tanti Burlò’s legacy is a fine collection of newspaper cartoons – “witty, direct, colourful and, most of all, fun”, according to former Times of Malta editor Victor Aquilina, who had asked him to do a pocket cartoon for the front page of the daily paper, sparking off a long-lasting association.

'Freedom and Fair Play - Hardly a question of Mouldiness!'. First published cartoon: “Dom Mintoff shares with the GWU responsibility for government. Disagreement equated with ‘Mouldiness’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, October 2, 1977)

“Readers just loved his work, which packed a punch in humour and satire,” he said about the man who became as much of a kingpin at Strickland House as Alfred Gerada had been in the 1930s; a leading chronicler of the social and political life in the country – not in words but in cartoons.

Tanti Burlò poked fun at whoever tickled his fancy, but particularly politicians, ruffling feathers in the process. Yet, former colleagues at Times of Malta say they barely ever had to refuse his work – “which is quite something, considering how risky cartoons could be in the life of an editor”.

Maurice Tanti Burlò as a young man. Photo: Prof Higgens

Aquilina recounts the only incident he ever had over the cartoonist’s work.

“One fine day, (former prime minister) Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici stormed into my office, fuming over a cartoon that had greatly offended him. He took exception to the shape of the necktie Maurice had drawn in a cartoon about him, saying it looked phallic.

“I tried to calm him down, saying it was no big deal in this day and age, but at this comment, he exploded into a rage.

'A bemused spectator watches "in reserve'!' Such juggling by Dom Mintoff wouldn't have been possible without Libya's oil as bait. (The Sunday Times of Malta, November 27, 1977)

“Did I think it had a phallic shape? Well, in all honesty, yes. I must have overlooked the details of the drawing in the urge to get along with my other work. But, even so, I do think Karmenu overreacted and showed he was ultra-prudish. Or maybe he thought he could intimidate me…”

So many years later, former Sunday Times of Malta editor Laurence Grech does not hesitate to pinpoint a cartoon that brought out Tanti Burlò’s “brilliance in his own way”.

It was around September 1984 at the height of the Church schools dispute and Tanti Burlò came up with a cartoon of a British coin with former Labour prime ministers Dom Mintoff and Mifsud Bonnici on its head. The inscription around the edge was a play on the title of the sovereigns of England, Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith), and read Fidei ‘Deafensor’ instead, highlighting their hard-headedness and failure to listen.

Tanti Burlò and his wife Elena at their home.

Describing Tanti Burlò as a free spirit” and a “gentle” person, Grech said he gave him a free hand and rarely ever needed to censor him, despite having legal responsibility for his open criticism.

Receiving his cartoons every week of his 17 years as editor, he only disagreed with him on a couple of occasions.

‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul!’ – Battle over untitled Church property (Robbing Peter to pay DOM was the original caption). (The Sunday Times Malta, August 7, 1983)

Grech remembers these well, and they involved a swastika on former General Workers’ Union general secretary Tony Zarb’s arm, which earned the paper a Lm400 fine.

“I had my doubts about it, but published it anyway,” Grech said. Zarb, at his most vehement, promptly sued.

'How's that for melodrama?' – Commemorating 'Black Monday', using the MLP's elec­tioneering logo for “Peace and Progress!” (The Sunday Times, October 12, 1986)

Such were the reactions to his work, and Aquilina points out the power of cartoons, saying that if a picture was worth a thousand words, a cartoon was worth far more, bringing out what the camera lens can never see.

Sadly, however, with the decline in print journalism, political cartoons were becoming an easy target for the chop, Aquilina noted.

Sharing fond details of his collaboration with the cartoonist, he recalled how he would usually bring over his work on a Saturday, accompanied by his son Sebastian, who stepped into his shoes when he passed on the pen of political cartoonist to him on his death.

Maurice and Elena in their garden.

‘A love for Malta and a distaste for bullies’

Speaking to Times of Malta from London, Sebastian Tanti Burlò said he sometimes thinks to himself: “Thank God he is not here to see the cesspit Malta has become.”

And yet, he constantly wonders what his wit and pen would have made of “this cabal of deplorables, who have reduced the islands he so loved to a pariah state on the outskirts of the EU”.

A prophetic cartoon, as the1998 elections proved, with a lion portraying Mintoff having the better of Alfred Sant. (The Sunday Times, November 16, 1997)

It was his father’s “love for Malta and his distaste for bullies” that drove him in 1977 to pick up his pen and draw his first cartoon for the then Roamer’s Column.

“I clearly remember as a child in the early 1990s being told I could never say he drew cartoons… I could just say he paints butterflies and works for Telemalta.”

The Tanti Burlò family in Helsinki.

Recounting the ritual of delivering the cartoons with his father to the editor on Saturdays and walking down Republic Street after, Sebastian Tanti Burlò noted how politicians would stop him to ask to buy a cartoon that was clearly deprecating them.

“It was only later that I understood my father’s genius and, moreover, politicians’ inflated egos. Although his cartoons openly mocked them, he drew them in such a way that they felt it a badge of honour to be portrayed by him.”

‘An Oliver for a Dom’- Mintoff abstains from two budget votes for more time to speak in parliament…. time from the opposition – which was granted – and time from his own government benches – which was denied him! (The Times, November 19, 1997)

More than just a cartoonist, Tanti Burlò was an artist, actor, educator, soldier, broadcaster, a fantastic father, and loving husband, his son said.

He would have “hated and held to account this Labour government and flaccid Nationalist party”, he believed. “In the 10 years that he has been missing, he would not recognise the island he once loved.”

Maurice Tanti Burlò performing in Francis Ebejer's Boulevard.

It all began to “get back at Mintoff” for the way Telemalta employees, including himself, were suspended without pay for supporting strikers.

He had described it as the start of “the 10 years of my political blacklisting by the Mintoff regime for having obeyed a legitimate two-day strike directive”.

This 'Smiley' cartoon was suggested by the originator of the concept of Lateral Thinking Prof. Edward de Bono with reference to the YES and NO votes in the EU referendum. (The Times of Malta, February 24, 2003)

In his cartooning career, Tanti Burlò published three books: A Worm’s Eye View in 1982, Blame it on Dom! in 2002 and Blame It on Ed! in 2004, and his cartoons have also been featured as stamp designs.

His established logo of the sun and three birds flying towards it, representing his immediate family, reflected his own “recognition of hope despite the personal, 10-year nightmare between 1977 and 1987”.

In an interview just before his death, he had said: “After all, I firmly believe that hope – in the profane sense – is one’s ability to caricature despair.”

‘Euroforecast’- The Times, September 26, 2003

Elimination of the 1920’s architecture on the Sliema ‘Front’ with the loss of their beautiful gardens in preference to ugly high-rise flats. (The Sunday Times of Malta, January 5, 1997)

‘Perestroika a la Maltaise!’ – Historic Bush/Gorbachev meeting in signalling the end of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall. (The Sunday Times of Malta, November 5, 1989)

Former Times of Malta journalist, George Cini, had written that going round an exhibition of the artist’s work in 2002 was “like resurrecting Malta’s eventful history over the last 25 years”.

The cartoons often turned out to contain much more than meets the eye, and a case in point, according to Cini, was one showing former Labour leader Alfred Sant hacking with a sword the tail of a dinosaur whose head is Mintoff’s – Nalizpelra’s prime target.

As Sant violently slashes the behemoth’s tail, newborn dinosaurs rush out of its chopped hind quarters – and the innuendos flowed on.