Sandy of Zejtun

Sandy just missed his 90th birthday on August 11th. He passed away on Wednesday.

I had last interviewed him, at Casa Antonia in Balzan, on February 28th, for a book about 50 years of Malta’s independence; and before that at the Victoria Hotel in Sliema; and earlier at his residences in Zejtun, and in St George’s Bay, Birzebbuga, where he was born in 1924.

It was impossible to do Maltese political history without at some point engaging Dr Alexander Cachia Zammit, an MP from 1962 to 1987 and twice a Minister in Borg Olivier’s administrations before and after independence.

Calm and soft-spoken, Sandy was a scion of Maltese politics, and more so of Zejtun, the village with which he was most intimately associated and where he resided for most of his life. He had made his debut as a medical doctor under the auspices of another Zejtun medic, Guzi Caruana, but then served as a DMO in various localities including Bormla.

His father, Alfredo, was a small land-owner and philanthropist, a minor figure in the PN’s moderate Panzavecchian wing with whom the young Sandy attended his first meetings; but his uncle, Salvatore, was a well-read Mizzian Nationalist pioneer, who led the Council of Government poll in 1870, and was the first councillor to propose that the death penalty be abolished.

Sandy’s distinguished ancestry went back further. A direct ancestor, Michele Cachia, who died in 1839, had led and represented the Zejtun forces during the anti-French insurrection and was a prominent member of the Congresso Nazionale. Like Salvatore later, he would proceed to London as a Maltese representative to talk to the British authorities. Sandy was proud of all this pedigree. It is one reason why he had asked me more than once if I could write his family’s history or recommend someone who would, as Sergio Grech finally did last year. It was Michele Cachia who, among other activities, had introduced night time signalling by lanterns from the top of Zejtun’s church during the insurrection; but his brother, Antonio, was a renowned architect of fortifications, churches and gardens.

Sandy was president of Zejtun’s Beland Band Club for more than half a century, since 1960, and he would try not to miss attending meetings until quite recently, as he told me. He was thus a village notable in every sense and many, particularly in Zejtun, will sense a void after his death.

As is usually the case with doctors, Sandy was socially conscious and had a bedside manner. The two ministries he occupied from 1962 to 1966 and then again from 1966 to 1971, bear some testimony to this. In labour and social welfare he was much concerned about old age pensions and national insurance, even the blind; he was also keen on introducing Wages Councils to regulate working conditions in different employment categories. At a time when Malta still depended largely on intermittent British military spending, he went on major intercontinental missions to raise quotas for would-be Maltese emigrants from Australia and New Zealand to Canada; it was in his time too that the first organised industrial emigration to Belgium took place. As  Minister of Health it was Sandy who, among other sectors including nursing, changed the mental hospital’s name to that of Mt Carmel, to lessen its stigma.

Shortly after Mintoff’s party was returned in 1971, he and his brother Lawrence were arrested in a flare of publicity by Police Commissioner Effie Bencini for allegedly misappropriating government documents. After a controversial trial – Sandy’s defence lawyers were Guido de Marco and Eddie Fenech Adami – both were acquitted. An iconic memory is that of the Cachia Zammits, of whom Sandy was by far the better known, leaving the court room in Valletta in 1972 wearing garlands of white carnations, which supporters had placed around their necks, followed by a grand welcome in Zejtun, a Labour stronghold where however Sandy consistently led the Nationalist vote until 1981. 

He was a Borg Olivier loyalist, admiring his leader’s foresight, and regarding independence in 1964 as the greatest landmark of all. He had been viscerally opposed to integration, although to oppose it publicly in 1956 was risky, in some areas more than in others. True to his principles and disposition, Sandy was one of only six MPs who voted with their leader against the bill to make Malta a republic, without a referendum, in December 1974. A true blue conservative, he even found the current Pope, as he put it to me, ‘too liberal and something of a Jesuit showman’.

The Zejtun connection held. Witness Foreign Minister George Vella’s edifying tribute to a fellow compatriot, whom he also visited when in hospital, ‘Sandy u Jien’, in the Grech biography.

As ambassador to the Holy See, Sandy helped organise the first ever papal visit to Malta, by John Paul II, in May 1990 - the crowning glory of his life.

In a blog the other day one reader described Sandy as a ‘true gentleman’ worthy of his times, the likes of ‘which’, he added, were in short supply today.

Sandy was married to Doris Martin since 1954. To her, his son John and his daughter Kathryn, the nation’s sincere condolences.

Prof. Henry Frendo is a historian and author