Come on, everyone: TOWER TEA, SANGA SHOES, RED DEVIL JACKETS, BULK-BOUGHT RICE, BULGARIAN JAM,ABANDERADO UNDERPANTS, DESSERTA, TANA TOILET PAPER. CAN ANYONE REMEMBER WHAT THE TOOTHPASTE WAS CALLED?
Karmenu Vella tells us why Tana Toilet Paper and Tower Tea will be the salvation of the workers, while Leo Brincat sports something he picked up in a jumble sale due to the restriction on import quotas for 'male knitted clothing'.
BBC News, Warsaw
8 February 2011
POLISH GAME RECREATES COMMUNIST SHOPPING HELL
-Adam Easton
Poles have been queuing to buy a new board game called “Kolejka” (The Queue), which recreates the tedious shopping experience of communist-era Poland.
Crowds of people, including those who remember standing for days in queues and teenagers who were not even born in the 1980s, lined up at the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) to buy the game.
“I’m too young to remember, I’m just trying to find a way to explore this period of time. I’m interested in the history of the country and my parent’s history,” said Anna Moronczyk, as she queued with her 17-month-old son to get a copy.
The IPN is the home of Poland’s communist-era archives and investigates crimes from that period. It also promotes awareness of that time and devised the game as an educational tool, to teach young Poles about history in an entertaining way. Half of the first batch is being reserved for schools.
“We hope it will show young Poles how difficult it was to buy everyday supplies like sugar, bread or furniture,” said Karol Madaj, the game’s designer. He was only nine years old when communism ended in Poland in 1989, so he had to seek tips about those days from his older boss.
“Some young Poles don’t believe there were queues in those days. You can see it written on the internet forums. They think queues only started when department stores began the sales,” he added.
To prove queues did exist, minutes earlier Karol screened black-and-white documentary footage of people lining up in butchers’ shops in the hope of getting a cut of meat.
Grim shopping lottery
Players can queue-jump with cards giving them special advantages A Polish education ministry spokesman, Grzegorz Zurawski, acknowledges that currently there is too little focus on recent history in schools. Only the last few weeks of a student’s final year is devoted to it.
“We are changing our way of teaching modern history because we know now that many young Poles know nothing about this period,” he said. The ministry plans to introduce a new curriculum in 2012 which reflects greater emphasis on 20th-Century history.
The game comes in a box designed to look like it was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. On top is a coupon, which the communist authorities issued so they could ration items like meat.
Between two and five players compete to be the first to buy the 10 items on their shopping list. Players send out family members, represented by coloured wooden figures, to line up outside different shops for the authentic 1980s products, such as a tape recorder with two spools of tape, tinned ham or “Popularna” tea, which promised “heaven in your mouth”.
The problem is that the shelves in the neighbourhood shops are empty and players must queue without knowing which store will soon get a delivery.
Once a delivery arrives, there is only enough stock for people at the front of the queue to make a purchase. Special cards help players to queue-jump, such as one showing a mother carrying a baby or another which gives insider delivery information from a friend in the local Party apparatus.
There is also a black market, where everything is twice the normal price.
‘Exactly like this’
The game’s functional box also mimics no-frills communist shopping Some of those who had queued to buy the game and could not wait to get home to play it sat down at specially-prepared tables in the IPN building to test it out.
“It was exactly like this,” Piotr Zochowski, 44, told me as he played the game with his wife and three children.
“Then you had to queue for everything. I remember when I bought shoes with coupons. The only ones I could buy were about half a size too small – but there were no others, so I had to buy them,” he said.
At the next table, students Ania, Lukasz and Maria, who were happy to describe themselves as “board game geeks”, said it surpassed their expectations.
“It’s well-designed, it looks nice, it could be a commercially-produced game,” Lukasz said. Of the three, only Lukasz had been born when communism ended in Poland in 1989, but they all remembered the products from those days.
“I had this cassette player,” Ania said. “And I had that lamp,” Maria said, pointing to an orange metal table lamp with a flexible stand. “Everybody had that lamp,” she added.
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It came in a tacky white box with pink lettering (one colour printing because it was cheaper) and had some kind of name that ripped off Sensodyne.
I think it was called Sparkle.
Pepsodent
PEPSODENT
[Daphne – As if.]
We did have” Pepsodent”, but it was made in Malta.
It was Pepsodent. I recall my grandmother referring to pepsodent. The 60+ will tell you. It is one of those things when people refer to the original brand name of a product, like Hoover for a vacuum cleaner.
The Nationalists would do well to introduce something along these lines to make sure Labour doesn’t muck up again.
Can’t you see the point, Matt B? Former Communist bloc countries have these board games as a sort of “psychological cleansing” ritual.
Enough time passes for you to start mocking something you hated.
And no one, but no one, wants to go back to that system.
So much so that whenever you have a small fringe of silver-haired nostalgics holding their annual pro-Communist march, they make the headlines, and the condescending BBC reporter interviews them as if they were some exotic specimen.
Not us. Malta’s lunatic fringe is a full 50% of the population. And no one would produce such a board game, because the Mintoff-KMB era is vested with a sacrality which forbids any mockery.
Ramek cheese triangles
Pasta Angelus complete with black insects which needed to be “floated up” before one could cook the pasta. Does anyone remember that?
Anyone for caviar?
I remember Ramek but was sure it wasn’t a local product. I looked it up and it is in fact produced by Kraft.
Here’s an advert google brought up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/toymaster/2261438351/
Was it perhaps some privileged importer who brought it to Malta, or did we have counterfeit Ramek?
Spider Jeans. Or was it Spyder?
Typical 1982 going-out outfit for a 19-year-old:
Spider jeans
Sanga shoes
Princesa underwear
Homemade shirt off Burda pattern with material bought from tal-bicciet
Jumper from L-Amerikan
And that’s unisex.
Abanderado and Princesa were the last adverts to be aired before the 8pm news. I remember them because they broadcasted very few video ads and before these video ads, Xandir Malta used to broadcast a never-ending list of ‘still photo’ ads, where the announcer on duty would read the script against a still photo of the advertised product.
Was Persil made in Malta too at the time? I recently caught myself singing the jingle:
Persil automatic makes things whiter
Persil automatic makes things brighter ..
The advert used to be run constantly before Dallas, along with one for sanitary towels (made in Malta, naturally) called Rosella.
They’re called caption cards not still photo ads
And going to Wimpy at Valletta, because there was nowhere else to go.
You could have lived dangerously and gone to the Gzira branch. There were some rather colourful characters there.
You could have gone to Fortizza, Golden Seven or Wimpy in Sliema. The Caves, Tigulio and In Crowd in St.Julian’s. Pescatore in St.Paul’s bay. Nigret Nightclub, Tobby Jug, Point De Vue in Rabat. God you really did not know how to enjoy yourselves then you were to obssessed with politics poor souls.
[Daphne – Apart from the fact that half the places you mention were thronged by johnnies, Grace, and completely infra dig, you seem to be one of those poor souls who don’t mind if they’re dancing in chains, as long as they’re dancing. Miskina.]
Well Daphne let’s face it Maria only went to Wimpy in Valletta, and La Redoute seemed to have a kick in visiting the one in Gzira. Now you are younger than me, so most probably you wouldn’t know what type of bars existed in that area – one was called Snake Pit. I’m sure no parent ever allowed their daughters in that area.
I don’t see why I should be called miskina, I have very good memories of my youth, I am one of the lucky few who no matter how hard life is can look at the bright side. How else would I survive in Malta with so many fanatics running around from both sides of the political spectrum.
Oh God, what horrible memories.
My dear ms Fairy liquid you might have worn all that garbage in 1982, I was in my 20s and wore Wrangler/Levis jeans, St.Michael’s underwear. Shoes bought from Darmanin footwear. I actually loved making clothes from Burda patterns tal-bicciet could range from JB stores or Camilleri textiles, depending on what type of outfit I needed and for what occassion. You might not be proud of your dressmaking abilities, but then it depends on how able you were, and how much money you could afford, but then if you bought your clothes from l-Amerikan I can imagine what type of income you had and from which part of Malta you came.
Grace is right. There was Bowling in Gzira, Capitol theatre in Valletta, The Coach and Horses in Qui si sana, Raffles, Union and Upper Secondary in Valletta for discos, Buskett Roadhouse, Styx disco, Surfside, not to mention places which are still the same like Rita t’Ghar Lapsi, il-Barri l-Imgarr, Charlie Il-Mahmug, il-Bobbyland where our Prime Minister Sant used to go.
Other restaurants I used to frequent were La Famiglia, Hagar Qim restaurant, Barracuda, Cafe Roma, Hunters Tower, King Fisher Wied iz-Zurrieq, Tunny Net Ghadira, Il-Kampanjol at Qajjenza (hdejn tal-gass) and that disco near Zebbiegh which I forgot its name.
Wrangler and Levi’s jeans and Mothercare babywear were manufactured in Malta by Blue Bell, Clothing Industries and another company. If we wanted to buy a Facis suit we went to Costa near the Embassy Cinema Valletta.
Stop grumbling about those years because we were in heaven without knowing it.
Tunny Net – dak kien zmien. Dawk il-jotts u kaxxi ta’ min jaf x’hiex.
U l-Bobbyland ma’ Sant. X’buzz, man, kif jghidu.
The fly in your ointment is that the places you mention were full of people like you and ‘Grace’.
And don’t I just remember Wrangler jeans – when word went round that that a consignment had found its way onto the monti stalls, people would swarm to Valletta, even though a pair of jeans meant legs in different sizes with a waistline big enough for a hippo.
Bulk bought ‘Cheddar’ cheese that looked and tasted like laundry soap.
I used to have a blue ‘Red Devil’ jacket and people used to ask if I had joined “tal-Gakketta Blu”.
I hadn’t, but wearing that jacket made me feel as if I was standing up to the regime.
In those dark days, wearing blue was an act of defiance. All this talk of the 70s and 80s is so depressing, as we cannot be sure that it is all behind us. Il-vera dwejjaq.
Same here! Wearing my blue Red Devil jacket always came with a warning from my parents to be careful.
Also I’ll never forget the time I got jumped on and roughed up by a gang of girls who used to loiter on a corner where I used to alight from the school bus – this for having the audacity to walk past them sporting my church-school uniform in 1983 or 84. Ah such happy days…
I used to be verbally abused every day on my way to school by a crowd of Juniour Lyceum boys waiting for their bus.
I had one too and still have … it was dark blue with white and blue stripes – very warm to ride on the motor bike cause we couldn t afford a car….
The sleeveless Red Devil jackets came in three colours: blue with red-and-white shoulder stripes, white with red-and-navy shoulder stripes and yellow, with shoulder stripes in two shades of blue. I’d know; I wore mine to death.
When Square Deal managed to get a licence and a quota to import something, the shop was mobbed.
I think that at one stage it was ‘Pepsodent’. The manufacturers must have got some kind of permission to manufacture it under licence. I wonder who owned the factory?
Incidentally, in those days the tubes were made of metal and crimped closed at the end. I used to smuggle cash out of the country by uncrimping the end, removing some toothpaste and hiding my cash in the tube. I did this many times, and I never got caught.
The toothpaste was made by Patrick Holland’s brother.
“I wonder who owned the factory?”
Clue: His sister lives in the same block as your childhood home.
I meant his cousin, not his sister. T. Street, close to Pepita.
Yo Bro – and everyone else – the toothpaste was definitely called ‘Coral’, possibly because of its texture. I distinctly remember how good it was . . . for cleaning table-tennis bats’ playing surfaces. We were keen players in them days.
MENTADENT was the only brand available up to 1981. In 1981 a local company, Industria Chimica and Cosmetics Ltd. of Birkirkara “launched” four new brands of Malta made toothpaste called DENTAFRESH, PERLADENT, BIANCODENT and FLASH. The advertising campaign stressed they were offering a “refreshing choice”! (cf. Times of Malta 19 Aug 1981)
[Daphne – Mentadent! That’s it.]
Oh yes I remember Mentadent. I only used it once and I was sick to my stomach. So then I asked my British friend to bring me toothpaste and chocolates whenever they visited.
Mentadent, Deserta. I remember this too well. I have just turned 50, so I was 20 when in 1981 I voted for the first time.
I remember going with my parents, and brothers because to be a Nazzjonalist at Bormla at that time, was out of this world.
Not being able to go and buy In Nazzjon because of the bullying. I used to smoke at that time……..yet couldn’t get Rothmans Blue.
The elections of 1981 were a disgrace. We had coffins and rabbit skins placed against our balconies. Rabbit skins: witty Labour word play with the name Fenek Adami.
My father was the treasurer of the PN club of Bormla, and it used to be hell to go out. We use to be scrutinised, in what we are wearing, what we are buying………….everything………..in 1981 my eldest brother, two months prior to elections, was in the UK doing his viva voce exam for his PhD.
When he came back, he found that our ever so nice neighbours had reported him to be stripped of his right to vote because he had spent a month in the UK. He had to go to court to defend himself. Thank God for Dr. Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and Prof Guido Demarco (may he rest in peace), who helped.
This is what we need to reaalise: a vote for Labour is now clearly a vote for the past.
I’m wouldn’t be so sure of that. Mentadent is a well known Unilever product. I clearly remember the ‘Mentadent P.’ adverts on Italian TV.
The toothpaste available locally back then might possibly have had that name printed on it but it sure wasn’t the same product.
Yes, Mentadent! I spent ages not washing my teeth because of that sickening Mentadent, and am paying for it dearly now…
We used to have HANSA milk in battered tins with a yellow label. My daughter, then five years old, became very sick twice after drinking that milk, once with salmonella.
Mentadent is actually a well-known brand. They didn’t just rip off their customers. They ripped off established brands. I doubt they had licence to do so. Were that the case, they’d have had to copy the (expensive) packaging too.
‘They’ being the local producers, and not the actual brand owners.
No it wasn’t. It was Coral as stated further above. Mentadent is a foreign brand of toothpaste still in existence today.
Matt B
I entirely agree with you cause these Labour old corrupt people are trying so hard to drum into our young generations’ brain that during the 70s and 80s life in Malta was like heaven.
Thank God we have Daphne who set up this blog so that our teens can read and learn from our bad experiences and how Labour governments deprived our generation to live a decent life in our own island.
In 1985, together with other students from Italy, France and Norway, I was in Poland on a student exchange programme.
I remember seeing queues everywhere and almost nothing to buy; my Polish friends looked at us (western Europeans) with a certain degree of envy because according to them we had all the commodities and could afford to buy anything.
This might have been true of my other friends but not of me. Little did they know how close our reality was to theirs: the lack of decent goods in our shops, the telecommunications, the freedom of expression, etc, etc.
I also remember that they had shops called Pewex where you could find all the “western” branded goods i.e. appliances, food, clothes, etc., and you could only purchase these goods with US$.
I remember thinking at the time that that was particularly cruel: goods were there for everyone to see but only few could afford them; then I would think: well at least they have a choice if they could afford it, we in Malta don’t.
Catch – that longish bar of fake chocolate with a sort of rice-krispy interior, and a red wrapper with yellow lettering. CATCH IT IF YOU CAN! We were really spoiled for choice, weren’t we.
You can still buy that today…
Also see this at http://www.catchbar.com/catch_history.htm
“Catch Bar was first produced in 1976 at the HB Chocolate factory in Tallaght, County Dublin, Ireland. Soon after its launch CATCH became ‘the’ best selling chocolate confectionery item in Ireland out performing all its competitors including major imported brands. The Catch Bar became synonymous with the ever popular television advertisement from 1976 featuring the jingle…..’Catch it if you can’
Thirty four years on, it remains one of the most recognisable candy bars in Ireland and The Catch Bar is now sold in more than twenty countries throughout the world.”
So we must have had the fake version of it.
Who goes mad for a Huskie bar? Everyone wants it, near or far … Huskie!
I remember a consignment of canned tuna fish that had “pet food” printed on the tin.
Catch
Mini mint
Huskie
Tango
Chokita
“Catch it if you can, on the outside it’s chocolate…..”
Anybody remember Larry ix-Xadin?
“Huskie” was a coconut bar, It was meant to be like Bounty, but with a taste of soap.
And let’s not forget the Snickers-wannabe “Nuggle”… Nibble a nuggle anyone?
Who remembers Chalait “chocolate”? It often came with added (squirming) extras.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/il_vojt_imhallat_max_xejn/3708132886/
HUSKIE
And Fid-Dinja ta’ Gilin ma’ Eileen Montesin?
[Daphne – and her puppet Ritchie.]
Montesin was conducting a programme at carnival time with a costume competition.
She asked one little boy: “Ta’ x’hiex int liebes hi?”. The kid replied: “Ta’ King’s Page”.
“King Spage? Qatt ma smajt bih dar-re!” she exclaimed.
Well, Montesin herself had dressed up as ‘Alison Wonderland’
What is it with these Labourites and their rubber puppets?
Toni Abela seems to be quite fond of them too.
Thanks a lot.. now I can’t seem to get the “Catch” song out of my head.. and the scariest thing is I seem to remember all the words:
“Catch it if you can, on the outside it’s chocolate and underneath the chocolate are crispies
Catch it if you can, beneath those crispies you’ll come across lots more chocolate
Catch it if you can, there’s more to tell, in the centre it’s creamy caramel
First it’s crispy, then it’s creamy – Catch!”
.. well it’s not like we had much to watch in those days.
You could always watch the parliamentary sittings.
Had they not been so awful they would really have been entertaining, especially when the likes of Karmenu Vella, Joe Grima, etc got up and crossed the floor for a fight.
Pity there’s not footage of Lorry Sant breaking George Bonello Du Puis’s front teeth, because then we would really have proof of the “zminijiet tad-deheb”. O zmien helu, indeed!
Larry Ix-Xadin was meant to take the piss out of the late Larry Calleja, PN’s main camera man during MLP’s ‘golden years’.
He used to work for the Broadcasting Authority along with Maurice Tanti Burlo until they were nicely brushed aside to make way for people who liked Mintoff. In Larry’s case, the man who used to carry his equipment became his boss…
During the infamous Rabat mass meeting, Larry’s bulky battery pouch prevented a police bullet from injuring him. I guess a Labour supporter would argue that the bullet was from a Nationalist supporter’s gun. Isn’t that what happened to Raymond Caruana after all?
Tes…how can I possibly NOT remember Larry ix-Xadin.
We also had something called “Snow Boy” I think, or was it “Water Boy”. It was sprayed down the toilet when there was no water, which was nearly every day, and it would ‘seal’ off the urine so that you didn’t have to flush the loo every time you used it.
[Daphne – Yes, it was blue. But every cent counted in those years, so instead of buying a special product to damp down the smell of an unflushed lavatory, I would cross the road with a pail and bring back some sea-water.]
Eh imma Deffni mhux tifla tas-sinjuri?
Ah, those buckets of water! I remember one elderly woman trudging all the way up to the top of a hill in our neighbourhood with her bucket of seawater. Imbaghaq jigi xi Laburist ahrax jghid li dawn il-memorji kollha “manufatturati”!
Water boy.
Seen this rich guy’s comments
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=178157065561625&id=1127800098
Who is the vestal virgin in the photo?
[Daphne – Miriam Spiteri Debono]
Dik li qalet li taht il-PN in-nisa ghandhom hafna tikmix f’wicchom – remember?
Was it Mentadent or Signal?
Meanwhile, ministers and a small circle of Labour bigwigs were busy building villas, buying yachts and generally getting rich and richer.
It is fair to say that the Mintoff regime widened the gap between rich (a small percentage of the population) and poor (all the rest) in spite of wool-over-eyes measures like minimum wages and children’s allowance.
Does anyone remember the clips aired before the 8pm news about truckloads of ‘happy’ Albanian ‘students’ going to work in the fields?
I always missed anything aired before or after the news. My father used to have his eye on the clock to make sure we switched over to the Italian channels (all two of them) at a quarter to eight so as to miss all the propaganda that was dished out every night.
Ironically, it was also through RAI that I had found out that we were finally rid of the Labour government in May 1987. Xandir Malta were probably still in denial.
I was six years old in 1987. One morning, a few days after the election, I was quietly having a dump, and there was a knock on the door. My father opened the door a crack and just said “In-Nazzjonalisti rebhu”.
What is seared in my memory is the expression of suppressed jubilance on my father’s face. Mine was never a political family (big fucking mistake which will haunt us for evermore, but there you go) but I could see that he was relieved.
So I finished my dump. A few hours later, when the carcades started, we had lemons thrown at our house by PN supporters on the back of a truck. Little did they know, but such is life.
Sixteen years later, I was desperately trying to persuade my grandmother to vote PN, and vote yes in the EU referendum.
I pulled out all the stops, including the old “you’ve lived through the war, now is the time to make one final effort”. MLP MP Michael Farrugia was her doctor and she felt bound by some sort of perverse peasant’s code to give him her Number One.
She said she’d vote Nationalist for my sake, which was awfully nice of her. She lived just long enough to see us join the EU.
[Daphne – Lucky her. My grandmother determinedly went to the polling booth on referendum day to vote Yes.(she was 97). She then spent the next couple of weeks reassuring me that it was impossible for the Nationalists to lose the general election and if I thought they might then I hadn’t worked out the arithmetic, so she proceeded to work it out for me. Then she died before we went to the polls.]
Why does this blessed country always have to live on a knife edge?
I was out with an EU flag after both referendum and election in 2003, and I saw a fair cross-section of the Maltese population also carrying EU flags. The feeling wasn’t one of PN gloating, or of having vanquished the MLP, but of RELIEF. The same feeling of relief that I saw around me in 1987.
Well we had a choice of shoes, you could buy Soldini too!
@ A. Attard & DCG
Wrong, Miriam Spiteri Debono is the one on Leo Brincat’s left.
Carmen Spiteri?
I remember my father getting all worked up whenever someone rang our doorbell. He used to swiftly cover the VCR with a tea towel before letting anyone in. I could not figure out what the fuss was about at the time, and when I asked, I was told that that was a family secret.
My uncle had smuggled in two Intellivision game consoles on board a foreign friend’s yacht in the mid 80s and we had one of them. I remember being warned not to talk about it to my friends or classmates.
I seem to remember that we always used Pepsodent at home so there was at least one popular brand of toothpaste available in Malta.
I can’t understand all the comments about people going to Sicily for toothpaste. When I was really very young, before Mintoff messed up bad, I also seem to remember strawberry flavoured children’s toothpaste.
Of course I remember the problem with chocolate – anybody who went abroad smuggled in chocolate for me. I can still taste how good Mars and Twix tasted when there was nothing comparable in Malta.
You must also not forget the ban on anything Japanese. I think I read somewhere that Mintoff had given Japan an ultimatum. When they ignored him he banned all imports from Japan. Of course the only people negatively affected were the Maltese. People with Japanese cars for example could find no spare parts. My father had a Mazda.
OK we did have Pepsodent toothpaste. It was manufactured locally. HOWEVER it was not the Pepsodent marketed in Europe and the rest of the civilised world.
Unilever provided the local manufacturers with cheap ingredients and the relevant formula for the “Pepsodent” which was then marketed in sub-saharan Africa and in Bangladesh.
The dental profession is still reaping the benefits.
The same happened with tea. The local agent of one particular brand of tea bags gave me a large bag of tea bags as a Christmas present. When I thanked him and said we were not encountering any problems buying it in the shops he said “What your are buying is NOT tea but I cannot elaborate. I wanted to give you tea as a special gift”.
No wonder so many boxes were offloaded to the Tunny Net.
Daphne, what about cars? Did you forget about Lada and Skoda?
And everybody and his dog had a Seleco TV set.
ciccio2011 u xi trid tajd kontrijhom dawk il-karozzi jixtiqu il-kumpaniji tallum adhom jamlu karozzi tajbin daqs dawk jifilhu ghax-xoghol
JAQAW INTI GHANDEK LADA? vera ma tafx ahjar jahasra!
Does any one remember the large glass jars of pickled everything imported from Bulgaria or Poland? Ideal when drinking vodka.
There was a time when even travel to Italy was severely restricted with the banks letting you have minimal amounts of Italian lire; must have been when the Italian Military Mission left Malta for some 18 months.
Oh joyous times !
Imports from Italy were abruptly banned too.
Toni Abela is in the photo too, minus the rubber puppets.
SUNNY BOY tinned milk from the bulk buying days.
Anyone remembers the coupons for a kilo of sugar, a litre of bulk sunflower oil, a tin of Exeter corned beef, and so on, exclusively imported by an ex Labour candidate who obtained most of quotas available.
Rather than trading Panini football photos, we traded coupons at the grocer.
Advert on PBS – still photo/cardboard cut-out of the Exeter logo placed in front of a camera, accompanied by the sexy and mouth-watering voiceover:
“Exeter Corned Beef. Corned Beef Exeter. Prodott Genwin”
Mmmmmm! Even more appetizing that Toni’s Mum’s Minestra!
What an education! And all this the ‘manufactured’ rantings of a few PN leaning individuals? Indeed!
If only the unthinkable would happen – as in a few MLP/PL/Moviment ‘GDID’ people, preferably some who were actually involved in the government departments of the day & companies involved, would come forward and verify all of this from their own standpoint.
Maybe even a waiter from the Tunny Net maybe?
I remember clearly after my first day in Form 1 nagging my parents for a pair of football boots. A day later I was the proud owner of a black pair with weird black rubber crescent studs on the bottom.
I cannot remember the make – Sanga or some North Korean crap imitation intended to break your ankle?
I remember my first computer in 1982 – had to wait 2 months for clearance and had to fill forms against forms. The funny thing is we were used to such rubbish and accepted it as the norm.
I had to smuggle one – a good friend of ours (rest her soul) brought it over in her luggage.
I also remember (somewhat ashamed), smuggling chocolate, toothpaste and good underwear from Sicily, in false bottomed suitcases – with a couple of decoy bars on top – 50% of which would be “confiscated”.
But what was worse were the constant attacks on us students at the university by the “aristocrats” of the workers, with not even a policeman in sight. And these persons are still running around and now swarming around Joseph Muscat.
Funny how Lino Spiteri is nowhere to be seen. He too was part of this cabal.
Tou-bloody-ché! And now he masquerades as the wise old moderate who, wouldn’t you know, was against Mintoff, and against import substitution, and in favour of VAT and the EU all along.
As a cabinet minister in the government which promoted everything he says he was against. Oh yes. It’s called having your cake and eating it.
There’s a light in Lino Spiteri’s eyes when he speaks about Mintoff and how “mar jinnegozja mac-Cinizi!” which speaks louder than words.
He is an armchair critic now, holier than thou…
Lino Spiteri says that he resigned from Sant’s government because VAT was out and CET was in.
The real reason might be because Sant did not tell him anything and Lino Spiteri got to know about it over a meal at a restaurant.
Husky chocolate
“Husky is a special treat
So good for you so good to eat”
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=100001733436282&sk=wall
Labour Pride Facebook Group
from the Labour Pride ‘wall’
Ryan Fiorentino:
K Vella brillanti kien….fil konferenza…new kid on d block…
I remember people phoning up ‘Tal-bulk buying’ when they needed to dispose of an old sofa or refrigerator, when they were of course referring to the bulky refuse service.
I still wonder whether it was just the result of poor education or an intentional ‘mistake’ reflecting what people thought of the bulk buying schemes of the day.
One of the last goodies to be taken away by the socialists was Penguin. Then some Mintoffian official must have thought these biscuits had too much ‘ foreign’ chocolate and banned them.
We also had one brand of butter – can’t remember the name. [Daphne – Anchor, tal-Ankra]
At one point even table salt had disappeared from the grocers’ shelves, although this was probably still available at the Tunny Net.
And sugar was only available against pre allocated coupons.
I do not recall any brand names but since this is a walk down memory lane, I remember a funny incident (not common in those days) a few days before the election in 1987.
We were a well known Nationalist family, mum was a ‘street leader’ and all that but Debono Grech decided to grace us with a house visit.
Mum let him in and dad was out (offering evening mass for our soon to be liberation).
I still recall my dad’s eyes popping out of his head when on his return he saw Debono Grech sitting in his (dad’s) favourite chair. Dad regained his composure as soon as he saw that mum was taking the mickey out of Debono Grech and decided to play along and waste some of his time and slow him down in his last minute home visits.
Everything was going fine until Sandy, my cat, walked in. She proceeded to sniff Debono Grech and then carried out the ultimate insult ( to us). She leapt into his lap and proceeded to pursue her sniffing with great vigour (it must have been the racing pigeon smell).
A few more minutes of precious campaigning went to waste. Finally JDG managed to extract himself and flee (I felt like saying flea actually) never to return.
Sandy was banished into the yard, along with his favourite chair, which it seems was in desperate need of a good airing, with my dad muttering something about crazy cats, traitors, unhealthy fetishes and threats of feline castrations. A few days later all was forgiven and Sandy could return back into the house, a free cat like its owners.
Oddly, they thought advertising was necessary even though those products were the only available ones in their category.
Yes, I know much of it was a not so elaborate con – simply a way of transferring money between state agencies – but what, in heaven’s name, were they thinking?
Producers and importers were forced to advertise, to provide revenue for Dardir Malta, as it was affectionately known.
All advertising by statal and para-statal bodies was handled by Rose Advertising run by Charles Mizzi, a GWU stalwart.
@ Antoine Vella
Yes, you are right in saying that producers and importers were forced to advertise, to provide revenue for Xandir Malta.
When there was the boycott some companies cut down on the number of adverts that they put on. I worked for a big company which substantially limited the adverts during that period.
Does anyone know what the counter measure of the regime was?
They included the difference in advertising tariffs spent the year before in the water and electricity bill which ran in tens of thousands of Liri. Unbelievable maybe, but very true.
The company refused to pay and we only paid the water tariffs less the advertising surcharge.
Unfortunately for me, I was the go-between the company and Xandir Malta regarding the adverts and their payments.
One fine morning, I was in my office when a Xandir Malta employee, a water services employee and two plain clothes policeman paid me a visit.
They demanded the payment and when I refused to comply the other two men showed me their CID card and informed me that I am under arrest. WHAT!
I was also told that if the payment is not made they will shut down the water service resulting in the obvious cessation of production.
I can still remember the smile on the two police officers’ faces since they knew me to be a Nationalist front-liner who never gave in to their bullying.
Now this story might seem science fiction to the younger generation. But every word of it is true and it was everyday life in the golden 80s. Hah. Golden indeed.
I remember once being at Dr. Fenech Adami’s summer residence and on the telly the Xandir Malta logo was covered by a sticker. I got up and went close to read the words. It said, XANDIR PERSISTENTI – MOHHI RESISTENTI.
I think this slogan has to be revived so as not to let ‘Lejber’ rewrite history.
I remember that boycott list all too well. That was the time when my mother stopped buying my beloved chocolate Ovaltine.
Please don’t keep updating your blog! I want an early night, and checking the updates can be too hard to resist at times!
Country by country, European nations are abandoning communism and totalitarian regimes and in Malta the people want to bring them back. We never learn.
Daphne, please send Maria’s resonating slogan to Paul Borg Olivier –
” A Vote for Labour is a vote for the past”.
[Daphne – I don’t have his email address.]
A few days ago I was chatting with my Mintoffjan neighbour, and he got nostalgic in a certain way about the old days.
I told him, well, in those days we paid high prices for a bar of imported chocolate and nowadays we have full displays at our supermarkets untouched as people are more concerned with eating healthy foods rather than chocolates.
His reaction was:”Tghid mhux ha nhallat ic-cikkulata Topsy jew Huskie ma tallum. Dik kienet veru tajba, hasra m’ ghadekx issibha.”
Nothing will convince such people that life now is much better than life then.
Who’s that guy behind il-Guy?
Looks like:
http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsH/8073-27838.gif
Victor Sultana, Gozitan doctor.
I think it’s someone called Victor Sultana. Not sure.
[Daphne – It is. After being out of politics for around 25 years, he has resurrected and is now writing articles for the Labour press and going to Labour Party events.]
It’s Labour candidate Victor Sultana.
He is Victor Sultana the surgeon.
I’ve heard of Desserta but never of Red Devil jackets. What were those? I tried Google…nothing came up. Something to do with Manchester United?
[Daphne – Red Devil was a brand of puffy weatherproof jacket, made in Malta. I had a red one, to be difficult. Well, actually it was because I went to St Dorothy’s Convent and had to wear a blue uniform every day for years, so I hated the colour and have only just begun to get round to wearing a bit of it.]
Most things have been mentioned so far, but does anyone, particularly the Sliema folk, remember the hassles everyone used to go through to get water?
We lived in Lija, and our taps were thankfully never dry (probably because we were on the same pipeline as San Anton), but as a kid I remember being terribly amused at the lengths my nanna in Sliema would go to to collect tap water.
Typically the taps would be bone dry during the day.
At night a trickle would maybe appear; then again, only if you were lucky.
She’d somehow be on standby to fill up as many buckets as possible to be able to flush the loos, wash the plates, the floors and so on during the day.
The water was revered like liquid gold, especially in summer, because you never knew when the supply would return, and there was no graver sin than wasting it on anything that wasn’t strictly essential. When the taps went dry for more than a day or two (and the loos got *really* whiffy) people would have no choice but to walk down to Exiles with a bucket and collect sea-water instead.
Fortunately nanna’s house also had a large well, and I remember most of the family regularly going over to fill jerry-cans and glass bottles to at least be able to have drinking water.
The situation had become so bad that I remember the ‘Protesta ta’ l-Ilma’ in Valletta in the mid-80’s when loads of people showed up to protest in Republic Street and were savagely beaten up. Apparently the sight of a crowd of Sliema housewives banging on empty saucepans was deemed to be too provocative.
Pretty impressive stuff when you’re a 10-year old kid, and photos of your nanna’s friends with bruised and bloodied faces are splashed all over the Nazzjon.
Zmien helu indeed …
[Daphne – I lived in Sliema and we rarely had running water in the summer during the day in the 1980s. My parents had four teenage daughters, so you can imagine what hell it was for them. They would set an alarm for 2am, or just stay up, which is when the mains water came on. The Water Department used to turn the supply off during the day and turn it on in the early hours, for kicks.
The pressure was too weak to reach the rooftop tank, so my father installed a tank at ground level, with a pump system to take it to the roof. If it was a good night, both tanks would fill up. After my parents stayed up waiting for the tanks to fill, they would stay up some more filling jerry-cans and buckets. But still the water would run out. You’d be standing there under the shower, cover in soap and with your hair in a lather of shampoo, and then suddenly you’d be scalded as the cold water ran out and the steaming water began pouring straight out of the boiler onto your head.
Then you would get out of the shower covered in soap and try your best to remove it with a towel (which then couldn’t be washed because there was no water). Hair with shampoo still in it presented a greater difficulty. You wrapped it up in the same towel you’d used to rub the soap off your body, go down to the kitchen for a jerry-can, then ‘persuade’ a stray sister to come back with you to the bathroom to pour the contents over your head. Have you ever tried raising a full 15 litre jerry-can over your head and tipping it while leaning over a bath? It’s impossible.
Then I got married, had a baby and lived elsewhere but also in Sliema. Every day in the mad summer heat I had to ring around friends and relatives to find somewhere to wash my few-months-old baby. I couldn’t wash him at home (or myself, for that matter) because we lived in a first floor flat and the water pressure never reached beyond the ground floor in Sliema. To flush the loos, I crossed Tower Road with a bucket and filled it with sea water. Hekk kienu jghixu tal-pepe.
I remember that housewives’ protest well. My husband was set upon by several policemen who knocked him to the ground and kicked and beat him. They smashed his spectacles, stole a silver cigarette lighter which had been a present from his father, ripped his clothes, damaged his face and gave him a black eye, and injured his arm so badly that it was in a sling for weeks. His crime? His mother was at that protest, and when the police turned up to assault a bunch of middle-aged Sliema women dangerously armed with saucepans, he ran round the corner from his office to get her out of the way. That was not allowed.]
We lived in Birkirkara at the time and water cuts were very frequent; well, almost every day (probably we were on the same pipeline as Fenech Adami).
During the summer months my mother used to take my two brothers and me every day to the beach by bus to St. Paul’s Bay or St.Julian’s, mostly not for the fun of it but to serve the purpose of having a bath with sea water as at home there was no water.
The little water we had at home was kept to wash our faces.
My dear father used to say ‘ninhaslu bhall-qtates’; we wash like cats.
Nobody mentioned the long waiting time to get a telephone line. We waited for seven, yes, seven long years to get a telephone line installed.
Our next door neighbour who were Labour supporters got theirs installed within a week of applying.
The trick was to go “speak” to Carmen Sant, wife of the late Lorry Sant, who was a candidate on the Birkirkara district. My father who was a man of principle would not and did not.
While still waiting for the telephone line, we moved house and luckily there was a line there so we thought our problem had been solved.
Unfortunately our euphoria was short lived because the moment our sweet new neighbours found out, they reported us and it was removed. O zmien helu
And most probably these policemen got promotion after promotion in the years after the 87′ PN victory.
Reconciliation!
Now, lest the Labour Party accuse Daphne of making up the above story, maybe Evarist Bartolo would care to confirm that it is, in fact, the truth. After all, his wife’s sister, Mary (heavily pregnant, I believe) was present too, and was b
Reading this makes me livid with anger. Anyone voting Labour is twisted or naive.
What makes me even more angry is the fact that the PN went to bed with these nasty evil creatures, and let th
This has been an incredible trip down memory lane.
The product names brought back visions of embarrassment when we used to wait for the annual visit by a brother who lived abroad at the time. He very kindly used to fill half his luggage with goods that were prohibited on the island and he was our hero.
I had blanked out those horrible years.
The one thing we must remind our younger readers is that most of this ridiculous situation was not only the retaining of foreign currency at home because the raw material was imported anyway.
The local production of toothpaste, chocolate, toilet paper, pasta and whatever you care to mention, was in the hands of ministers’ friends and lackeys like for example Patrick Holland’s brother.
Corruption was endemic. They would set up a cheap production line employing a handful of people aided and abetted by the minister who would then refuse all importation permits for anything resembling that product.
It was easy money in a monopoly situation and they artificially created such situations enriching themselves in the process. Someone said earlier that the divide between rich and poor in those socialist years was huge. How right he is.
Things were bad in the 80s in Malta, that much is true, but comparing the local situation then to what it was in Poland, Czechoslovakia, or any other former Warsaw Pact member does a gross injustice to the people of those counties.
I have spoken at length with older Czechs about their past (which they remember so well), and nothing, but nothing, can equate our experiences with what they went through.
Naturally, that does not exonerate those individuals who put Malta through hell back then, but it is exceedingly foolish for instance to claim, as many have, that there was no democracy in Malta in the 80s.
No doubt it was not a smoothly working one (it still isn’t if truth be told) and the government of the day did reduce itself to a kind of “Rule by thuggery”, but EFA, de Marco and the rest of the PN leadership were still free to be an opposition. If Malta was even remotely like Czechoslovakia they’d have been in exile, in prison, under house arrest, or disappeared. But no, they were not.
Also, It is obviously true that freedom of speech was severely hampered on the national TV station (we all remember that), but the PN had their own newspapers, openly distributed nationally, while in a truly Communist country they would have been banned (not just use of the word “Nazzjon”).
But no, there was nothing clandestine about the PN’s media machine. It was well oiled even then, and allowed to go about its business, generally speaking (barring the clandestine transmissions from overseas).
I’m not saying things were not in a mess in Malta and that there was desperate need for a change. They were and there was, as your excellent summary of events surrounding the Raymond Caruana murder illustrates so well.
But still, apart from a few incidents (Tal-Barrani, Rabat, and a couple of others), the weekly Sunday mass meetings went off rather smoothly. Somehow I can’t imagine a political gathering of literally close to a quarter of the nation’s population being acceptable in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc. back then. It’s laughable even to compare the two.
For all your cosmopolitan pretensions, in this case yours is a typical Maltese point of view.
So according to your selective memory, everything was fine and dandy in the 80s except for a slight hiccup or two along the way; were you abroad during those times or perhaps not even born?
My selective memory, your selective reading. Did I say everything was fine and dandy? I think I used the word “hell” somewhere, which in itself is hyperbole, but there you go. Even I fall victim once in a while.
Is that Toni Abela peering over Leo Brincat’s shoulders?
More zmien helu anecdotes
I was 9 years old when KMB and his merry lot closed the church school I attended. The teachers, with great risk to themselves and us, used to give us lessons in their homes.
As luck would have it, my teacher’s home was in Fgura, a stone’s throw away from the Labour Kazin and I distinctly remember the malevolent stares of the partitarji.
More overt expressions of hostility came from the 8th-Army-Suldati tal-Azzar at the Drydocks. When my school (De La Salle College) re-opened, we were regaled with colourful vernacular as well as internationally-recognised single-digit greetings on our way to school.
Although I couldn’t exactly comprehend what was wrong but there was a sense of tension in the air. I distinctly remember a big row between my parents when my mother accidentally left a copy In – Taghna visible inside the car. My father had positively freaked out.
Daphne,
Nahseb li fdik il-protesta tal-ilma, hallejt il xi hadd barra – Patri Modest.
Ahh, the golden years indeed:
Daily trudging to and from the sea with buckets of water
No shoe laces (NEVER understood that one)
No razor blades (neighbours sharing one razor)
No cat-food
My mum sending me to queue for sugar with (green?) ration card in hand
I’d never heard of or seen insect-free flour or pasta
Toothpaste that tasted like crayon (strawberry ‘flavour’, was it?)
Hiding the VCR behind a stack of Readers’ Digest when it wasn’t in use
The round-robin coded phone calls when suspected house raids were afoot, so all those who had an illegal smuggled colour TV could hide it in the wardrobe
We referred to the colour TV as ‘the boyfriend’, as in – hide ‘the boyfriend’, your ‘husband’ is coming home!
My parents always keeping a lead pipe under the car seat in case of unwarranted attacks on us (yes they happened. and the threats were frequent)
My father trying to explain to me how the colour red can have both negative and positive connotations
Lessons in people’s basements because the church schools were closed
Holding peaceful protests and being thrown down a flight of stairs by Lorry Sant’s thugs
The Times being too scared to report it
Having to be ‘hidden away’ in Gozo because my family were receiving daily death threats
Ahhhh. happy times. the golden years indeed.
Remember the foam …….WaterBoy I think it was. We used to buy it in aerosol cans to spray into the loo to create a thick layer on the surface of the water. It would more or less contain smells till we were able to get water into the cistern.
Bingo! That must be what they mean by golden days – the colour of the toilet water!
Golden days? Innocent people, mostly women, peacefully, protesting because of lack of water were being beaten heavily by police in Valletta, and Minister Karmenu Vella, and MP John Dalli (PL) relaxing on their luxury boats and importing illegally who knows what into Malta.
Even more anecdotes:
. wondering whether you’d see your friends ever again when you or they were arrested
. wondering where your son or daughter was when he or she was arrested (To whom were you meant to go to for help? The police?)
. staying awake through the night wondering what would happen to your son or daughter, once you had found out that he or she was being held in a police cell
. being told that all the rubbish exceptionally laid out on market stalls in Catania on Thursdays was there “perche’ giovedi’ vengono i Maltesi”
. hearing an explosion and thinking “oh, another one. I wonder who was the target this time?”
. asking questions that teachers wouldn’t answer for fear of political retribution
. seeing labour party clubs protected by the police while their helmeted colleagues beat up peaceful and unarmed protestors with truncheons
“At the moment we’re being bombarded with pictures and stories from the past, which is clearly a tactic from the party in government that has no valid political arguments left to say. I form part of the younger generation and I’m not interested in the past but in the present, and my future.”
“The PL has learnt from its past.”
“Harping on the past is desperate spin and does neither party any good, especially with today’s young. Character assassination on account of being old or whatever convinces only the converted and as such is only a sign of how desperate is the accuser.”
“I’m not interested in the past but in the present, and my future”
Whoever said that is going to lead a very difficult life. Not only is this person admitting that they are blinkering themselves to avoid the truth, but also not using the past to inform yourself about the present is really bad advice.
“The PL has learnt from its past.”
Did it need to? We’ re not talking about making mistakes here. People in general know that killing is wrong. People also know that governments oppressing people is wrong. People knew that in the 70s and 80s, too.
People also knew that communism was wrong, and that all communist countries were suffering. People also knew that breaking the law was wrong. We knew it then, and so did they, and they still did it.
So what have they learnt exactly? That people don’t forget these things? That they can’t get away with it? What rubbish. Learnt from its past indeed. That is as stupid an excuse as their “hindsight” regarding the referendum.
They aren’t fooling anyone. In fact, the way they go on about telling us to forget the past, even the recent past, just shows that they know, like they did then, that what they did was wrong, but are just trying to find a way around it.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110209/opinion/editorial
Joseph E Briffa
It’s amazing to read this editorial from none other than the Times whose building was gutted by Labour thugs led by everybody knows who while the Police fire engine turned up without any water and the officers just looked at what was happening because nobody dared to intervene.
Mintoff then wrote to Mabel Strickland telling her that he defended the Times building as if it were his own..
A minister who is now back in the fold after being in limbo for several years thanks to Alfred Sant went on record saying that he regretted the paper was not completely eradicated; probably he couldn’t stomach page 13.
Even today after 30 years of full democracy, few are the ones who dare mention names because of the fear of reprisals should Labour again manage to return to power.
Just have a look at the line-up in Labour’s fold. Not less than six prominent members formed part of the Labour cabinet in the days of socialist bliss. This editorial is rendering a disservice to its readers and to those workers who were petrified when the building went up in flames and would have perished had not Mons Philip Calleja come to their rescue.
No one has mentioned one of the greatest feats in education during the golden years – the closing down of the Polytechnic. So much for the need of technologgy education about which the MLP used to talk a lot.
I recall when a friend who attended a Church school was not treated at the dental clinic for free because in those GOLDEN years these pupils were children of a lesser God.
After he grew up he had to pay hundreds of pounds to correct his teeth in a private clinic.
He did not enter university because he had fewer points for the simple fact of havng attended a Church school.
Yes, there is nothing better than the golden years of Karmenu Vella, so let’s bring them back by voting for Joseph.
There was a joke making the rounds at that time; dentists were to be proctologists before attempting any dentistry because Mintoff & Co had managed to close people’s mouths.
Ara x’kien hawn ta’!
Misshom jisthu! Pajjiz immexxi mid-dittaturi, biex ma nsemmux nies inkompetenti bhal Lorry Sant u shabu. Fejn hu Lino Spiteri llum?
Jiftakar kemm nies talbuh linja tat-telefon u ghax kienu mnizzlin PN ma tawhomx?
Philip Muscat insejtuh? Fejn kien Alfred Sant dak iz-zmien?
Il-Pupa, it-Toto, il-Qahbu u hafna hafna iktar. Jafhom Joseph Muscat dawn l-episodji?
Isma minni Joe u iddissasoccja minn dan dawn l-episodji ghaliex dawn x’ihammrulek wiccek biss ghandhom. Isthu! Isthu!
Weren’t there men’s shirts called Smart too? I heard a relative mentioning them once… so I’m not sure if they were exactly from this era.
Weren’t there men’s shirts called Smart too? I heard a relative mentioning them once… so I’m not sure if they were exactly from this era. Please confirm
I do not remember the name of the toothpaste but I do remember the Chinese corned beef called Ma-Ling.
Probably the residue of dead Chinese prisoners in the communes of the seventies, pulped in to make corned beef subsitiute.
Remember La vache qui rit and its daily tacky adverts on Xandir Malta? We did have Dallas and Dynasty though, which jarred terribly compared to the lives we led.
Anyone remember Boy London?
This was published on 8th May 1987
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/in-malta-vote-a-main-issue-is-orientation.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm
Most controversial of all is the reorganization of Malta’s 300-year-old Jesuit university. The effort is intended, one minister said, to ”put the intelligentsia in the refrigerator.”
Maybe we should put *them* in the refridgerator. Il-politika tal-invidja. Now watch them all scramble all over each other to display their magna cum laude, master, and dottorat.
MALTA TAKES ON THE WORLD IN DIPLOMATIC WAR
February 20, 1983, Sunday
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/20/world/malta-takes-on-the-world-in-diplomatic-war.html?scp=105&sq=malta&st=nyt
For more than a month the Government of Malta has been waging diplomatic warfare with the rest of the world. A truce has been reached, but members of the United States Embassy, along with all of the other diplomatic missions in this island republic of 320,000 people, remain under threat of being expelled as persona non grata. All foreign diplomats here are affected, but the United States has been singled out by the Government of Prime Minister Dom Mintoff. The dispute began on Jan. 10, when the Foreign Ministry sent identical notes to all diplomatic missions ordering ambassadors to make certain that diplomats refrain from ”contacts of any kind with members of the Nationalist Party.”
Bitterness grows after Malta vote
By JAMES M. MARKHAM, Speci al to the New York Times (The New York Times); Foreign Desk
January 4, 1982, Monday
Late City Final Edition, Section A, Page 9, Column 1, 981 words
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/04/world/bitterness-grows-after-malta-vote.html?scp=109&sq=malta&st=cse
The businessman was visibly agitated. He said he had received death threats and had been legally harassed for his support o f th e opposition Nationalist Party, which finished a close second in the parliamentary elections Dec. 12. Because Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, the leader of the governing Labor Party, won a third five-year term, the businessman and some other Maltese resolved to emigrate. Interviewed three days after the election, he said he and his wife could not allow their children to ”grow up in this atmosphere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/13/world/malta-s-new-leader-tough-and-a-planner.html?scp=62&sq=malta&st=cse
quote from article:
The task has not been easy in Malta’s highly charged political environment. In 1979, Mr. Fenech Adami’s home was attacked and his wife and mother forced to escape over the roof. In 1986, he and a crowd of supporters were attacked and more than 70 were wounded. Last March, five shots were fired in his direction outside a local Labor Party club.
In Malta vote a main issue is orientation
New York Times, 8 May 1987
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/in-malta-vote-a-main-issue-is-orientation.html?scp=15&sq=malta&st=cse
So far, the campaign has had a toll of two murders and more than 80 injured, and numerous cars have been shot up, damaged or destroyed.
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/21/world/malta-curbing-imports.html?scp=68&sq=malta&st=cse
Malta Curbing Imports
Reuters – Published: November 21, 1982
VALLETTA, Malta, Nov. 20— The Government of Malta, where 7.8 percent of the work force is unemployed, has banned the importation of 49 items and announced plans to promote local industry. The list includes products already made locally and ranges from soap and shampoo to shoes, clothing and leather goods. The Government attributes the high unemployment to the international recession, which has resulted in a drop in exports and a slump in tourism.
Does anyone remember “Comino” vehicles? I seem to recall seeing a few around. I believe they were built locally.
The “karozza ta’ Malta”? Only two were ever built, and they’re now worth a fortune.
Oh. I was under the impression they were a bit more numerous.
The Comino was a Ford Escort Mk1 or Mk2 Chassis with a horrendous looking fiber-glass body, not exactly a BMW Z4
Well , all you people (including Daphne) forgot that in those ‘golden years’ (1984) one could not find oranges, apples and bananas from June up to September.
The ‘quality’ of the fruit, when available, was sometimes “not fit for animals”. This was done to protect farmers, we were told.
Still, there were certain people who at the end of these ‘golden years’ could import watermelons from Sicily and which in Malta our farmers could not grow or were unable to grow.
When people mention Sicily, it means that around 1986 we had the opportunity to embark on the Gozo Channel’s Ghawdex for a trip to Catania to go and buy luxuries like toothpaste, chocolates, pushchairs, telephone sets and water melons.
Up to some years ago, people still brought chocolates to relatives and the office when they came from a trip abroad. That was thanks to Mintoff’s protection of the Deserta chocolates, which banned the importation of all the other chocolates.
Kolinos
Tuffieħ togħma ta’ sptar, żejt tal-karawett jinten pesta.
Id-Deżerta semmejtuha imma tiftakru kemm kien hemm flavours – sa banana u pineapple kien hemm.
Imbagħad tfaċċat it-Topsy li kienet qisha xaħam b’togħma fjakka ta’ ċikkulata. U l-Menqa Hits ħadd ma jsemmihom?
L-Għanja tal-Kampanjol, l-Emigrant, u biżibilju ta’ diski li jpittru lil Malta ġenna fl-art u l-emigranti vittmi msejkna għax jinsabu eżiljati barra minn pajjiżhom, filwaqt li dawn kienu qegħdin jagħmlu l-liri (dollars, insomma) and jgħixu fis-seba’ sema.
U l-Gwida u s-Sunday Chronicle, Marbelt Department Stores. Il-ħniena x’memorji ġejjin…bitter-sweet għax vera li batejna imma n-nostalġija għandha ħabta titfa’ z-zokkor biex ittaffi l-morr.
Imbagħad tfaċċaw ir-Regal – the biscuit with a heart. Kien għamel launching tagħhom Norman Hamilton f’Sibtijiet Flimkien permezz ta’ kompetizzjoni li kaxkret il-ġimgħat.
U kien hemm ċikkulata oħra b’togħma farka iktar raffinata mid-Deserta. Fakkruni x’jisimha please. Fir-riklam kienet tiġi tfajla qisha f’estasi u l-jingle What a feeling ripetuta kemm-il darba.
U l-bagits kienu kapulavur! Tisma’ lil Wistin l-ewwel eloġju għall-progress li sar stil 1984 ta’ George Orwell imbagħad lista ta’ prodotti li se jorħsu minħabba l-bulk buying: tonn taż-żejt. Minn 10 ċenteżmi bott ta’ mitt gramma se jsir 9c5. Roħs ta’ 5 milleżmi (taħbit fuq il-bankijiet tan-naħa tal-Gvern).
Kemm nixtieq għandi l-ħin nikteb rumanz fuq is-snin tmenin.
Nhar ta’ Sibt konna nixgħelu t-tubi u t-TV sagħtejn qabel jidlam, għax tant kellna power baxx li jekk tħalli sa ma jidlam, żiggi tixgħelhom. Jibdew iteptpu u addio l-hit parade fuq Xandir Malta.
U kif kollox staġnat kien! Anke l-kantanti, Madonna – dejjem l-istess nies fil-festivals. Kellna lil Renato, Joe Cutajar, Joe Grech, X-Tend, Tramps, Bajzo, Catherie Vigar (kont niffansjaha li din u kelli crush fuqha) u Mary Spiteri.
Qisu ż-żmien kien waqaf u ma kienx se jiċċaqlaq b’xebgħa stanga.
Wasal Jum il-Ħelsien. Il-festival intrabat ma’ dan il-jum qaddis, u anke konkors ta’ novelli kienu jaqraw fuq it-TV. Temmnuha din… siegħa sħiħa tisma’ lil Charles Arrigo u Charles Abela Mizzi jaqraw novelli fuq kemm batejna taħt l-Ingliżi u kemm qegħdin tajbin issa.
U x-xewqat bejn novella u oħra: il-management tat-Tarzna jawgura lill-poplu Malti kollu l-isbaħ xewqat għal ġid u prosperita’ fl-okkażjoni ta’ Jum il-Ħelsien.
Ħa nieqef għax għandi tofija tistennieni biex noqgħod insoffha.
Desserta, Chinese chocolate. Has Chinese chocolate improved these days? Maybe if those so-called golden days are back we’ll get better chocolates this time from China.
RED DEVIL was mentioned ….. I would like to have an explanation.
In 1987, I was a 12-year old and I remember during the election campaign preceding the 1987 election, one of our neighbours used to hang a stuffed toy rabbit on her clothesline and leave her broom in full view to annoy my mum. When the Nationalists won, my mum left the PN flag pinned to the balcony for weeks until it discoloured! Not to mention the brigata laburista marching and practising near their headquarters in Floriana. Mum used to scare us with enrolling us with the brigata if we misbehaved. What childhood memories…
My mum just saw my last comment and she actually said that the rabbit was not a toy at all but a dead one at that!
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I know this post is very old, and probably only you will see my reply, but I think the toothpaste was called “Pastazata del Capitano”!