My love for the newsroom has never died. Sounds a bit nostalgic? Maybe, but the thrill of working in a newsroom was like oxygen to me, though in the first few years of my joining the Times of Malta, it wasn’t a fraction as interesting (and at times frustrating) as it had become in later years, especially in times under Labour administrations. 

When I joined the newspaper in 1964, six months before Malta became independent, the man in the hot seat was Tom Hedley, the much-revered editor whom Mabel Strickland had recruited from the Daily Malta Chronicle. Little did I imagine that one day I would step into his shoes.

Capt. Joe Agius, a no-nonsense man, ran Strickland House like an army unit. Ms Strickland, who called at the place practically every day, insisted we call him by his rank as this instilled a greater sense of discipline. It did. I eventually made that sense my own. 

The place was at the time populated, to use a word that has come to have a nasty connotation today, with people who had already made their mark, Ninu Zammit, George Sammut, Tony Montanaro, Carmelo Testa and so many others. 

With computers for typewriters, the newsroom looks different today from what we had in our time but its function as the newspaper’s ‘engine room’, as I used to call it, was the same. One big difference though is that, whereas we just had to write the story and that’s that, journalists today have to have the ability to work for multiple news platforms. 

The working tools journalists have today were science fiction to us. We didn’t even have a tape-recorder at first, let alone computers, and I had to rely on my Pitman shorthand to take down notes. That’s how I reported Dom Mintoff at his marathon public meetings.

Reporting Mintoff was relatively easy, not only because he would repeat his arguments, sometimes almost verbatim, meeting after meeting, but, for impact (and get a sip of coffee from his Thermos), he would often pause in between sentences, leaving you ample time to catch up with him. 

You would not have had that luxury reporting his opponent, Nationalist Party leader George Borg Olivier. The ultimate in frustration though was covering Ms Strickland’s political meetings. When you think you’ve done your job, you would invariably be called to her home in Lija for her to vet it, and, believe me, she wouldn’t leave a word in place. It was exactly the same with the then archbishop, Michael Gonzi. 

After the patching up of differences Strickland House had with him and which had directly involved Lord Strickland, she would not have wanted to irritate him through the publication of anything that may displease him. So I would have had to trudge to his palace for him to see my report. And, just like Mabel, he would take the liberty to do it his own way. 

All this was par for the course. What wasn’t was the intimidation we had to face under Labour administrations, leading to the burning down of the newspaper building in an orgy of violence on October 15, 1979. 

Destroyed pieces of furniture at the door of Strickland House after it was burnt by vandals in 1979.

As the saying goes, journalism is a rough draft of history. When I started out, the island still did not have the kind of institutional infrastructure we have today.

We saw the birth of the Central Bank (I remember interviewing the first governor, Philip Hogg), and the Malta Development Corporation. For tourism, we had a tourist board, operating, not from the kind of plush places authorities have today, but from crammed offices in a block of flats at the top of Merchants Street, Valletta. 

Times have changed. Starved of the kind of advertising revenue they used to have in the past, newspapers today face the stiffest challenge to their financial survival, at least in their present print form. 

The Times of Malta has changed too, but its mission has remained essentially the same. As it has done over the past 85 years, it keeps writing the first draft of history, undaunted by the obstacles thrown in its way.

Victor Aquilina is a former Times of Malta editor and the author of two books on the history of Strickland House’s newspapers: Strickland House: The standard-bearers and launching of the Times of Malta, Book One: 1921–1935, and Strickland House, Times of Malta at War and Labour Party’s sweeping victory, Book Two: 1935–1947.

He is also the author of Lord Strickland, plots and intrigue in colonial Malta, and Black Monday, A night of mob violence.

This article first appeared in a supplement commemorating 85 years of Times of Malta.