The Fleet Years: Bars, Jazz and the Day the Ships Left

Part of Gzira Histories, a continuing series on the town’s past.

For the post-war decades, Gzira had an economy with a very specific shape: the fleet.

You could see it on the seafront itself. The road along the Strand carried civilians, but it also carried the servicemen stationed at the Tigné barracks and on Manoel Island, back and forth every day. Old photographs show a row of small rooms along the shore with identical doors, used by men who kept boats in the water off the island or rented as summer lets. And in the 1960s the harbour off Gzira held a ship locals called simply tac-ċiniżi — the Chinese one — part of the cast of a waterfront that was never quiet.

In short: the harbour towns lived on shore leave. Gzira had its bars, Valletta had more than forty in a single street, and the whole thing ran on sailors’ pay. It brought money, it brought a red-light trade, and it brought something nobody planned — jazz, swing and dance-band records, carried ashore by British and American crews decades before that music reached much of mainland Europe. Then the Mediterranean Fleet was disbanded in 1967, the last forces left on 31 March 1979, and the bars closed within the year.

The system

To understand Gzira’s bars you have to understand the system they belonged to. A kilometre away in Valletta ran Strait Street — Strada Stretta, christened the Gut by British servicemen — which at its peak in the 1940s and 1950s packed more than forty bars, music halls and clubs into less than a kilometre. It was the Mediterranean Fleet’s shore leave made into an industry, and the money ran outward through the whole island: through the Valletta market, through the families of the barmaids, through Gozo. Where work elsewhere was scarce and badly paid, this was the one reliable seam.

The mechanics were frank. Barmaids earned on tokens, one for each drink a sailor bought them — and the drink was usually food colouring in water, or Coca-Cola watered down to pass for whisky. The men mostly knew. They bought them anyway.

It had a cost that nostalgia tends to skip. These were red-light districts, with everything that implies about the women working in them. Two were murdered next to the Gut within three years — Marie Grech in 1970, Irene Johnson in 1972. It is also exactly the trade that Dun Carlo Manché spent fifteen years fighting in Gzira, and was beaten for.

Gzira’s own

The Gzira bars are badly recorded, and that absence is worth stating plainly. Three names survive in print — the Snake Pit, the Britannia and the Granada, along the Strand and the streets behind it — and almost nothing else. No photographs in circulation, no list of the rest, no accounts of who played in them or who ran them.

Compare that with Strait Street, which has books, a television drama, an academic project and a microbrewery named after it. Gzira’s version of the same decades went undocumented, for the same reason the buildings survived: nobody was paying attention.

What can be said is what the names suggest. The Snake Pit is sailors’ slang, and not affectionate. The Britannia is what you call a bar when your customers are the Royal Navy. The Granada is a cinema name — a hint that at least one of them was selling something other than drink.

The town also kept a street called Triq il-Flotta. Fleet Street. Not a fleet in the abstract — the one in the harbour, the one the bars were for.

What the ships brought

The more interesting legacy is the music, and it is genuinely consequential.

Malta sat on the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean route, and from the 1930s onward British and American crews came ashore carrying the newest records with them. Jazz, swing and dance-band music arrived here decades before they reached much of mainland Europe — not through radio or record shops, but in kitbags.

The harbour bars became the venues, and the district drew performers the way a gold rush draws prospectors: cabaret dancers, comedians, singers, jazz players and drag artists, from Malta, Britain and Eastern Europe. Bands could live on tips, playing waltzes and ballroom and whatever the room shouted for.

For a young Maltese musician this was an education that existed nowhere else in the country. You could hear American players, borrow American records, and get paid to work out how it was done.

From the shelters to Abbey Road

George Caruana was born in Valletta on 24 October 1927. He spent his adolescence in the worst years of the siege, and the detail that tells you everything is this: he sheltered from the bombing by day, and in the evenings he went to Strait Street to listen to jazz.

With Frank ‘Bibi’ Camilleri and Joe Curmi, known as il-Pusè, he formed what is generally called Malta’s first jazz trio. He played with Juice Wilson, Freddie Mizzi and Sammy Galea, and later joined Jimmy Dowling’s band. Somewhere in there he was noticed by the British bandleader and manager Tito Burns.

In 1952 he moved to London and changed his name to Tony Carr. The first audition led nowhere. Then in 1954 he was taken on by the American singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine for a European tour, and Eckstine is reported to have called him the best drum accompanist he had heard in Britain. He became a fixture at the Bull’s Head in Barnes behind the best British and American players passing through.

From the 1960s to the early 1980s he was one of the most in-demand session drummers in London. The arranger John Cameron made him his first call. He recorded and played with Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Donovan, Alan Price, Sixto Rodriguez and Paul McCartney — he played on Wings’ Back to the Egg in 1979, and he is the drummer on Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing”, one of the most played records in British history.

He worked at Abbey Road. He died on 2 January 2026, aged ninety-eight. A documentary about him — Strait Street to Abbey Road, made by the percussionist and researcher Ġużè Camilleri — premiered in Valletta in October 2024, and its title is the whole story.

The day it ended

It ended twice. The Mediterranean Fleet was formally disbanded in June 1967, and the flow began drying up immediately. Then, on 31 March 1979, the last British forces left Malta altogether.

The bars did not decline gradually after that. Their entire customer base sailed away on a single day. In Valletta the Gut’s owners pulled their shutters down and went home; sailors who returned years later described finding the bar names still fading over the doorways above locked doors. Gzira’s version went the same way, and the town spent the next two decades being overlooked — which is painful at the time and is the reason so much of its 1920s fabric is still standing today. Nobody demolished it, because nobody wanted it.

The ships emptied out and the bars closed within the year. The music did not leave with them.

Frequently asked questions

What were the bars in Gzira?

Until the 1970s Gzira had many bars serving the British fleet, the best remembered being the Snake Pit, the Britannia and the Granada, along and near the Strand. That economy ended when the last British forces left Malta on 31 March 1979.

How did jazz come to Malta?

In kitbags. Malta sat on the Royal Navy's Mediterranean route, and British and American crews brought jazz, swing and dance-band records ashore from the 1930s onward — decades before the music reached much of mainland Europe. The harbour bars became the venues where Maltese musicians first heard and learned it.

Who was Tony Carr?

A Maltese drummer, born George Caruana in Valletta in 1927. As a teenager during the siege he sheltered from bombing by day and went to Strait Street in the evenings to listen to jazz. He formed Malta's first jazz trio, moved to London in 1952, and became one of the city's most in-demand session drummers — recording with Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Donovan and Paul McCartney, and playing on Hot Chocolate's 'You Sexy Thing'. He died on 2 January 2026, aged 98.

Sources and further reading

This post draws on the following. Most are articles from the annual festa programmes of the Gzira parish and the Mount Carmel band club, digitised and freely available in the University of Malta’s OAR@UM repository; Maltese titles are glossed in English.

Gżira — Wikipedia, including the Snake Pit, Britannia and Granada bars and 2024 population figures.

Tony Carr (drummer) — Wikipedia, with obituaries in the Times of Malta and Malta Independent, January 2026, and Ġużè Camilleri’s documentary Strait Street to Abbey Road (2024).

Il-Gżira fl-imgħoddi [Gzira in the past] — Mario Fenech. Festa programme, 2009.

Il-Gżira fl-imgħoddi [Gzira in the past] — Tony Micallef. Festa programme, 2016.

Carlo Manché — Wikipedia, drawing on H. Frendo, Europe and Empire; J. Micallef, When Malta Stood Alone (1981), p. 85; and A. Bonnici, Il-Kappillan Karlu Manché (1975).

Previously: Two Wars, a Few Hundred Metres Offshore

Next: What Gzira Built

If you remember the Strand before 1979, we would like to hear from you — almost none of it has been written down.

Morrison Court is five self-contained apartments in a reimagined 1920s townhouse in Gzira. morrisoncourt.com.