Victor Ragonesi, who backed Borg Olivier’s quest for Independence, is 100

When his children were still very young, Victor Ragonesi took on what became his life’s most demanding occupation, at the side of Nationalist prime minister Gorg Borg Olivier, while Malta was engaged in negotiating its independence from the United Kingdom.

He never slept more than four hours, his eldest daughter Mariella Cassar recalls.

“After the 1962 election, he became Borg Olivier’s personal assistant. He’d leave home at 6am, come back for lunch and a siesta till 4pm, and then return at midnight.”

In these years of intense talks between London and Auberge d’Aragon (where the Office of the Prime Minister was situated), Ragonesi was frequently travelling for talks with the British, and Commonwealth nations like India and Kenya, sharing their best advice on dealing with the old colonial master.

Victor Ragonesi at the Malta Independence Conference

“He wanted to go to the UK totally prepared,” Cassar says of her father, who last week achieved a historical milestone of his own: a centenarian, a celebration that stands side by side Malta’s 60th year since gaining independence.

Malta celebrates six decades since acquiring independence from Great Britain, just weeks since Ragonesi, today in assisted living, celebrated his 100th birthday anniversary on 7 September.

And while Gorg Borg Olivier is undoubtedly crowned as the father of Maltese independence, few will doubt the key support Ragonesi contributed to the Nationalist premier’s mission at the time.

He was born in 1924 in a Valletta family of natural Nationalist stock, friends of PN leaders Enrico Mizzi and Ugo Mifsud, and firmly in the stream of Italophiles that defined pre-war Malta. He would later become a speechwriter for the PN’s leader after the return of Mizzi from internment in Uganda.

His son Rodolfo Ragonesi, an environmental activist, says his father was instilled with a strong sense for Malta’s freedom from a very young age. “At 16 he had tried to sign up to join the defence corp on the island in 1940 by trying to pass himself off as an 18-year-old. Having got caught out on his return home in military fatigues, he eventually joined the gunners in 1942.”

Victor Ragonesi meeting Prince Philip

The immediate aftermath of WWII posed existential questions for a fortress island in search of a secure constitutional future and an industrial base that could feed an impoverished nation. By 1955, Ragonesi would take PN party administration squarely in his hands when elected general secretary.

The Labour administration at this time was pursuing a referendum to bring about Maltese Integration with Great Britain, a process opposed vehemently by Borg Olivier’s PN, which sought dominion status instead – a form of self-government that would have still left foreign policy in the hands of the colonial master. Ragonesi then witnessed an episode in which a Conservative MP had offered Borg Oliver one of the three seats Malta would be allocated in the House of Commons after Integration. “They wanted to give him a house in England and the best education, in the best English colleges, for his children, which would be paid by the British themselves,” he wrote in the Sunday Times in 2001.

Victor Ragonesi (left) with Gorg Borg Olivier

Ragonesi believed Anthony Eden was determined to be the prime minister who could achieve the integration of colonies with MPs in the Commons. “Various members told us barefacedly before and during the Round Table Conference that they were in favour of Integration… and insulted us because we were against,” he said in 1960, in his penned reactions to Eden’s published memoirs.

“In personal communications, he had told me that the British Colonial Secretary had tried very hard to ‘persuade’ Borg Olivier to have the PN support integration with Britain in the run-up to the 1958 referendum, but that he would have none of it,” says Rodolfo.

Victor Ragonesi

Britain wanted to maintain a foothold in the central Mediterranean as they did in Gibraltar to the West and Cyprus to the East. “My father told me in 1964 Malta was given no choice but to retain the British Crown as its Head of State as well as to retain a foreign military base on its territory. This formed part of a quid pro quo to obtaining independence, on which Britain refused to budge at the time.”

After the failure of the integration referendum, boycotted by the PN and its electorate, and later the riots of 1958 in which the first Mintoff administration resigned en masse, the road towards full independence was set – both the PN and Labour had mapped out the singular route that was to be Malta’s destiny.

When Borg Olivier formed his Cabinet in 1962, unemployment was high at 5,500. The following year it had risen to 7,002. At least over 15,000 Maltese were directly employed by the British services in the drydocks and other military facilities, but spending was being cut drastically, with a rundown that would continue throughout the 1960s.

Ragonesi participated in all the negotiations on the road to independence, working with Professor J.J. Cremona on the drafting of the Constitution. “Through those years he was very mindful of Malta’s potential to steer and maintain an independent course, despite the realpolitik and influence of strong regional powers, NATO and an emerging globalised world,” Rodolfo says of his father.

Victor Ragonesi saw Malta being caught between the Cold War’s spheres of influence within the Mediterranean, where the Russian fleet was comparably as big as the American fleet.

“We wanted the British and NATO to retain Malta as a base,” Ragonesi said in a Campus FM interview in the 2000s. “It was a matter of security for us, to be able to attract foreign investment, with no danger that some other country could simply grab us, and investors losing all they had invested. We told the British: you have been exploiting us for the past 164 years, so you have to pay for the base. We concluded the financial agreement and for 10 years they offered us £51 million.”

Politics was now more than a full-time job for Ragonesi at a time when Malta was in constant talks with London over its future and the fate of its military economy. “We’d eagerly wait for his letters,” says Mariella Cassar.

“He’d write back a minimum of once a week, sometimes twice weekly. Mum would read the letters, sometimes just the portions involving us. But the main thing were the chocolates he’d send.”

By 1966, Ragonesi would leave his position – a family of four children required a different kind of attention. “His bark was worse than his bite. Most people who knew him had some trepidation around him, but I didn’t,” says Mariella.

He’d work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, taking his family on picnics on Sunday, or swimming at Exiles beach in the summer. No work or politics discussed at home, Mariella says. “He was very conscientious, always discrete… the conversation was always around family, the children, keen to see our school reports.”