Was this in the film, Joan Mintoff? No, it wasn’t. So be thankful.
A comment posted on this website, by Rita Camilleri:
My late father was a policeman and he was often stationed at Dom Mintoff’s house in Tarxien. Mrs Mintoff would wait until her husband had left the house before giving my father, the policeman at the door, a glass of tap water.
Not a soft drink or even tea or coffee – no, TAP water – that is how stingy Dom was. Mrs Mintoff wasn’t at all stingy herself, but had nothing to offer and was too afraid to give the policeman in the sun even a glass of tap water while her husband was there.
My father also used to mention how Mrs Mintoff would sometimes ask him to kill one of their chickens so that she could cook it, and how they would have to pretend to him that it had been found dead of natural causes and so she was cooking it not to waste it, rather than wasting it by killing it to eat it. She was scared stiff of him.
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This really shows his love and respect for the ‘haddiem’.
Kollox mieghu se jiehu! Miskin!
During the glorious Mintoff years, nobody was allowed to build around his Tarxien villa. This abuse was rectified after 1987, when permits were issued. But by then he had already ordered and completed the creation of a ‘public garden’ at the rear of his home. The name? JOANNE GARDENS, for his daughters Joan and Anne.
Imagine the Super One hysterics, and rightly so, if Lawrence Gonzi were to do something similar today.
@Rita.
What did your father expect,a full English breakfast?
[Daphne – Don’t you allow your wife to make coffee and a sandwich for people working in your home, Silvio? Even if they rarely accept, because these days police officers stationed outside homes generally take a Thermos flask and lunchbox with them because they generally come in their own car, it’s only civilised to offer.]
No Silvio – he never expected anything, but you do not treat people like that. When I had workers at home they ate with us at our table.
Oh my God ! What’s a glass of water? What’s a glass of diluted orange juice, lemonade, tea, milk, coffee? Nothing!
Thank you for these stories which continue to remind me (not that I wasn’t so sure) that I must be very good-natured person. The last time I had workmen I gave them a bottle of good wine each to show them my appreciation for their good work. And I did this after I paid them and not in exchange of free services.
@mattie – it’s not really about the fact that she only gave my dad water – but about the fact that she was scared of her husband and having to lie about the chicken and saying it died of natural causes..
What workers expect is a fair payment for their work and that’s all. Why should they be patronised and humilated by being given handouts? They have their pride as well, that’s why, as Daphne said, most of the time they refuse.
[Daphne – Errr, Silvio, since when is the offer of tea, coffee and a sandwich patronising behaviour? I find it far more offensive if I am working someplace and am NOT offered anything.]
Silvio,
Whenever my wife notices any perspiring workman outside our home she offers refreshments that are usually most gratefully accepted and she does not feel the need to do it behind my back.
Do you think that she is doing wrong and that I should put the fear of God in her not to do it again because that is how Mintoff treated his wife?
Silvio, when we had workers, and no kitchen, we used to offer coffee, water etc and go out and buy them from the bar around the corner. The workers used to do the same and offer us when they went to the bar. It’s called good manners and respect and not handouts.
Silvio, when we have workmen around the house, we always offer them hot or cold drinks, depending on the weather, and sandwiches/biscuits /cake, and (in summer) ice cream.
It is basic good manners and courtesy.
@ Silvio
Partit tal-haddiema wkoll. X’rispett, Alla jbierek.
It’s basic respect. Also, the policeman stationed outside his house has to deliver the newspaper(s) at 9am sharp.
Dear Dr. I am sure that your good wife is not burdening your household budget too much, for when and where can one see a perspiring workman nowadays?
[Daphne – You lead a very sheltered life, Silvio.]
Most mornings an African immigrant, rain or shine, trundles a garbage wheelbarrow collecting street refuse in our area, and yes, he is a perspiring human-being grateful to be supplied with a cooling drink or a bar of chocolate.
You are right, Silvio. My good wife is not burdening the household budget too much because nowadays a bar of good chocolate is cheaply available openly on our grocer’s shelves and it does not have to be smuggled through customs as in Mintoff’s “not so golden” days.
Why does that surprise you?
The man inspired fear and deceit. It was so in his family, it was so in the country he mismanaged for the longest 16 years in living memory.
How can you be proud of having such a father unless you’re in total denial, or have inherited his deceitful trait?
Your father was a scumbag, Yana, you will never convince us otherwise.
Dear Daphne, I assure you that I am always willing to take out my silver tea set for my guest and friends,b ut why should I pamper those who make me pay through the nose for something that should cost a few Euro?
Just see that they get what was agreed and end of story.
I remember the days when my employees gave us presents at Xmas – how times change. They now receive bonuses and employers are left with just a bigger overdraft.
[Daphne – You do it because it’s civil and polite, Silvio, and not because you owe them anything. That’s why it was Mrs Mintoff, the half of the couple raised with proper manners, who insisted on offering the policeman something to drink, while her spouse, who reasoned in terms of ‘owing’ and ‘why should I’, reasoned as you do here.]
I must admit I am no match for you. I try but you always come out the winner.
Keep it up, you make my day.
Mintoff and his love for chicks…
What a miserable excuse for a man, and even human being.
The story mentioned above is typical of what I know of that wretched, obnoxious, old has-been,.
If Joan Mintoff Bland has any sense she would shut up and go back to private life.
During Christmas drinks at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 1987 (I haD returned as a free citizen after almost six years of exile in Sicily), I was faced by Maurice Pace, a Director of Information during the Mintoff years.
I said to him in front of many other guests present: “Issa qed niltaqa’ mieghek l-ewwel darba. Int kont li cempiltli wara li gie imhabbar ir-risultat tal-elezzjoni 1981 u ghamiltli hafna theddid biex ma nirritornax lura Malta. Qatt ma rajtek jew kellimtek. U inti ghidtli li kont qed titkellem f’isem Mintoff.”
He replied: “Twahhalx fija. Jien kont ordnat minn Mintoff biex naghmel kollox halli inwaqqaf dak ix-xandir. Kien jghajjat u jwerzaq, anki waqt li jqaxxar il-lehja ghax ghamel zmien kien jorqod Kastilja. Kien jhedded anki lili li jekk ma inwaqqafx ix-xandir tieghek, kien itajjar anki lili. Ghalhekk kont ordnat b’hafna theddid.”
I said that this does not justify his actions because I was deprived of my basic human rights for almost six years.
I have not seen the film Dear Dom yet, but I am sure this episode of a groos injustice by Mintoff and his henchmen was not included. This is just for the record.
The experience of Cable & Wireless employees typifies the respect Mintoff and the GWU had for ‘il-haddiem’. It occurred about the same time as the doctors’ dispute but did not elicit as much emotion for obvious reasons.
My father, along with his colleagues, suffered a significant diminution of work conditions and pay when Cable & Wireless was taken over. They suffered in silence whilst the CMTU, their union, fought their battles unsuccessfully with the government.
Finally, the ‘gvern hanin has-Salvatur ta’ Malta’ installed a punch-clock at their landmark premises in St Julian’s. My father and his colleagues protested that this should have been the subject of consultation. In protest they reported to work but refused to punch in – an industrial action sanctioned by their union. Instead, they signed the register as they usually did. They were not the type of people to skive off.
They were summarily suspended from work WITHOUT PAY for seven months. They were mainly men of a certain age with families, and the sole breadwinners. There were no jobs for women in those days so it wasn’t a matter of saying that their wives should have worked instead. There were no alternative jobs for them, either, though a few found positions through the kindness of friends.
My parents and we three children lost our livelihood because my father refused to use a punch-clock and signed a register instead.
We survived on the small income that my father managed to earn from part-time work here and there, and on the money which the CMTU gave to its Cable & Wireless members to buy bread and milk.
THIS is the Party of the Worker. This is the REAL Mintoff.
I have watched the documentary and my only complaint is that it was much too kind to him.
My grandfather worked at Cable & Wireless and recently was telling me what hardships he suffered through during that time. I completely agree with you- I have also watched Dear Dom and I too feel that it was too subtle with certain details and far too kind.
How is it we always read “my father worked at Cable & Wireless” at “Barclays Bank” at here and there and lost his job, thanks to Mintoff. but we never read my father “lost his job with the services” and he was given unemployment benefit.
My grandfather retired from work and received a pension. My uncle died and his widow received a widow’s pension,. All this thanks to Mintoff and his social services.
If history is to be written, let’s make sure it is unbiased; we owe it to our future generations.
[Daphne – Silvio, listen carefully. Introducing pensions was NORMAL. It was EXPECTED. It was RUN OF THE MILL AND PAR FOR THE COURSE. Going to war on businesses and their employees was not. Did Eddie Fenech Adami’s government bring about the massive and positive changes it did after 1987, including the EXTREME CHANGES needed to join the European Union, by fighting with everyone and creating misery and fear? No. There you have your answer. And in any case, it wasn’t Mintoff or his government which introduced social services or the concept of social services. What Mintoff did was use Gaddafi’s money to start a national bribing system called the children’s allowance, which became ‘ic-cisk minghand Mintoff’, a gift rather than a social security cheque.]
You must know me, Qahbu. My father, both grandfathers and several uncles all worked at C & W.
I can vouch for every word you said. Only, you left out the bit about Mintoff compensating C & W for the equipment with the workers’ pension fund – proof, if ever it was needed, that Mintoff never gave a stuff about workers’ rights or workers’ welfare.
It was never about social welfare, it was all about power. And today’s (M)LP is absolutely no different.
What else wasn’t on that film, I wonder?
Yesterday somebody told me about the way the nationalised banks were being used by Mintoff (directly, not through his delegates or acolytes so no excuses that he was not in the know) to bully people into submission otherwise their home loans and/or business loans would be called in.
[Daphne – Yes, Lomax, that’s a fact. It’s one of the main reasons Mintoff wanted the banks. When you control the banks and the government and have no scruples about corruption and abusive behaviour, you control businesses and people. You can refuse loans, call in overdrafts. You know exactly what they own and what they don’t. I was always astonished at how people just didn’t get this. Seizing the banks was not about seizing a going concern. It was about increasing control on people’s lives. Businesses were made and others broken. If you brought in a favoured person as a silent partner, then you were sorted, but it was like having the Mafia on board. Others were constrained to working out of cash flow.]
This person personally witnessed it because he used to receive orders. He resigned shortly after and was unemployed for a number of months. I didn’t know about this and I’m sure there are thousands of publicly-untold stories out there, either lingering in people’s hearts or else being told over coffee and tea in the intimacy and secrecy of the kitchens of so many Maltese who look back at those times with incredulity and fear.
Perhaps the time has come for people to speak up. We cannot continue living in fear of oppression. Fear is a powerful tool, which Labour wants to instil in us because fear keeps the people in their place. Fear stifles initiative and hope. Fear, ultimately, is the dictator’s only tool, more than his weapons and armies.
We need to speak up. All of us. We owe it to our children, lest we be condemned to repeat the horror of those years – and, let’s make no mistake, this is not an exaggeration. There is a sense of foreboding in the air – if we listen well, without the blinkers of the opulence and the comfort we’re enjoying and we’ve been enjoying in the past years, if we step back a moment and not take things for granted, we notice, instantly, that the patterns are all there and so many people are just licking their lips in anticipation at the thought of their regaining power to stifle any opposing voices.
Let’s listen to the calls for retribution against Pierre Ellul – not to of course inflict on Mr. Ellul any ” “punishment” but to understand that the mentality is still there. The mentality that any contradiction and opposition should be stamped out is still there and is just waiting to resurface.
That is why they hate Daphne so much and that is why Toni Abela is “forbidding” the film to his constituents (or rather, dissuading them from watching it). That is why calls have been made for Pierre Ellul to be stripped of the funds and that is why whilst I was watching the film, people were calling out whenever Psaila Savona or the gentleman who was blinded from one eye were speaking about their trials and tribulations.
Yana’s words, and the words of so many others, even the words of Mark Montebello (his blog) and others on TVAM yesterday show that these people are the same if not worse, embittered and hardened by the festering which went on in these people in these last twenty-five years.
So let’s speak up. People need to know. If people have suffered they have a right – and a duty – to speak up.They owe it to their children.
One of his old bodygaurds once told me that Mintoff is the biggest coward he had ever seen.
He must have been. Bullies always are. I would also add insecurity. What a life of ‘inner’ fear he must have lead.
It seems as a young boy he was given a scholarship to a church school on the basis of his family’s income. When however, his parents were called in to justify how it is they could pay for a lavish wedding reception but not their son’s education, he was made to bear the consequences.
There was no logical reason, half a century later, to discriminate against church school students with the ghoxrin punt system if the intention was to extend university education to all strata.
What he did, was a calculated move to get back at his demons.
He WAS a coward, no doubt about it. Part and parcel of his paranoia.
He always walked around surrounded by bodyguards, and when he had to board a plane you could see him dashing up the stairs at breakneck speed, as if all the denizens of hell were right after him.
Well, he cannot run far nowadays, can he?
Not on a wheelchair, for sure.
He can down a hill.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpxCfI1a9Hs
[Daphne – Well, all that virile swimming and riding and prunes for breakfast really served him well, I must say, if he ended up in a wheelchair at 94. My grandmother who sat about and ate what she pleased was pulling her shopping-cart up the hill to the supermarket at 96.]
Issa li kieku kellhom johorguh nhar Hadd il-Ghid? Jitilghu b’girja bih it-telgha tal-Addolorata….Mhux Salvatur?