Don’t get your hopes up – they were not love letters
Published:
August 2, 2014 at 9:45pm
Aside from the fact that the late Agatha Barbara (once Labour minister of education and then head of state) was a very butch lesbian – that is not a judgmental observation but a statement of relevance – a glimpse of one of the letters shown ‘tantalisingly’ in this video footage reveals that she used the Legislative Assembly as her sender’s address and signed off with the formal ‘Yours sincerely’.
So no August thrills there, I’m afraid.
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http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140802/local/discovered-former-president-agatha-barbaras-letters-to-royal-navy-officer.530284
Hope never dies. It could be a WREN. Frigging under the rigging, what?
Would Barbara be capable of rigging the frigging?
The Maltese public certainly is.
She was not as butch as her sister Rose though.
And I think I spotted a spelling mistake in Valletta (in the address) :)
Did she know how to swear in English as much as she knew how to in Maltese? In that case they would be nice letters.
It seems you may have written too soon. We may never know if there was really a romantic relationship or not. However they throw new light on received wisdom on Ms Barbara.
[Daphne – You are wrong, David. Those are the letters one would write to a friend, and there are only three of them. The letters are typed. One does not type a love letter – or even, for that matter, a letter to a friend. Agatha Barbara was a lesbian. Her own sister said in the newspaper today that she never knew her to go out with a boy or a man. She lived her out last years, in fact, with a lady friend. Miss Barbara was extremely masculine. I rather suspect that had she been born a couple of generations later, she would have had a sex change. The picture of her in The Sunday Times today showing her as a young woman playing in a band literally looks like a man in drag make-up. That’s what I thought it was: a drag performer, until I read the caption. I think today’s feature article was in spectacularly bad taste. You wouldn’t expect an elderly Englishwoman who had never heard of Agatha Barbara to know the facts, but journalists in Malta most certainly do.]
Funny how The TImes did not open up its comments board beneath the article. I am sure that many people would have had a lot to say about such a crude, sour person. Like Mintoff, she belongs in the trash can of history.
Ah! The good old Lyceum days when the Honourable Minister of Education swore at us and one year canceled our traditional Sports Day holiday resulting in several hundreds, if not thousands of Maltese Liri in damages, after students rioted and tore desks apart and pulled classroom doors off their hinges.
Now her successor is another star of the show, Evarist Bartolo. Enough said.
Some bad memories simply will not go away. They may fade, but then the present remnants of the old Labour Party, keep refreshing them!
You keep stating that Agatha Barbara being a lesbian is fact and I am curious as to how factual this statement is. The fact that she was butch, unattractive and never seemed to have a man in her life, in your eyes, appears to be the only basis for you making this statement.
[Daphne – No, my basis for making that statement is that she had a woman companion with whom she lived out the rest of her life after leaving office, in a house near Ta’ Pinu in Gozo, as I recall, though I might be wrong about the location.]
In fact, type in “Agatha Barbara lesbian” into Google and you just get your posts stating this as fact and a few other ones suggesting it.
[Daphne – Yes, because nobody actually wrote about it, Julo. In those days, sexuality was not an issue. We had a lesbian president and what do you know, nobody cared. Homosexuals were not invented yesterday. We bothered about the fact that she was loud, coarse, vulgar, ill-mannered and swore, and not about her sexuality. You would never have had a Cyrus Engerer scenario then, and it wasn’t because people were homophobic, but because we had far more serious issues to be getting on with. Your Google experiment is false. Try Googling ‘Anthony Zammit Labour MP gay’, for instance, and all you will probably get is my posts again. But he is most definitely gay, and his long-standing boyfriend was or possibly still is Natius Farrugia, the mayor of Zurrieq. Do you want proof that Natius Farrugia is gay, too, or are you going to work it out, amazingly, for yourself? In any case, you seem to forget that I am actually quite old and that Agatha Barbara was a real person to me and not just a name in the newspapers. I used to see her walking, talking, sitting, standing, in real life and on television: literally a man in a dress. And I don’t mean a transvestite or a man in a drag: I mean, imagine your father or your nannu put on a dress and went out in it. Do you need help working out that Natius Farrugia is gay? Well, then, now you understand how those of us old enough to remember Agatha Barbara didn’t need help working out she way gay either.]
If you are so adamant that this is fact, (and are getting frustrated by people debating this with you) then prove it! Sources would be nice and certainly better than “because I know this as fact” ie verifiability.
[Daphne – I am not getting frustrated debating it at all. I find the thought fascinating that, when Natius Farrugia is long dead, there will be somebody like you arguing with somebody like me and telling her to ‘prove’ that he was gay. Bless you, sweetheart.]
Very nice of you to bless me in a non patronising way. I will admit that I do not know much about Natius Farrugia and whether he is openly gay or whether, again, this is all hearsay based on your previous experiences with him and circumstantial evidence.
I agree that being referred to as gay, when you are not, is not necessarily insulting, but many straight men do take offence to this (recent case law in Mellieha would serve to illustrate this) so it could fit within an agenda that you may have.
Therefore yes, after he is long dead people may very well be debating whether he is gay or not (if it is ever relevant) if the evidence does not stack up.
PS I know women who live with other women, do not have relationships with men and are not gay!
[Daphne – I suppose you are the sort of man who unwittingly walks into a men’s gay club and wonders where all the women are tonight.]
Hmm that would possibly explain why all the guys at my local are so friendly and the barman wears hot pants and plays the Scissor Sisters and Kylie rather too often.