Sixties-style reporting of what today would be a major story

I like to read the Fifty Years Ago and Hundred Years Ago columns in Times of Malta. They are fascinating at times. Last month I clipped out this particular piece to reproduce here.

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June 28, 1964

13-year-old gagged

A 13-year-old boy from Qormi was found gagged with his hands and feet tied and bound by the neck to a tree in the grounds of the United Services Sports Club, Marsa. A lady member of the club who was watching a cricket match in the club grounds heard muffled moans coming from under a tree.

She told her husband, who together with other members and club stewards investigated the sounds. They found the boy lying huddled up with his face against the ground. The boy could not give any description of his assailants. He had been lying there less than an hour.

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Of course, if he had been raped, Times of Malta would never have said so in those days, lest public sensibilities be offended. That style of minimalist reporting really seems absurd now. It was probably absurd already then, for all I know. I hadn’t yet been born.

And ’13-year-old gagged‘? The gagging was the least of it there.