Two Wars, a Few Hundred Metres Offshore

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

Gzira’s building stock has a gap in it, and the reason is visible from the seafront.

In short: Manoel Island became HMS Talbot in 1941, shore base of the submarine flotilla that was strangling Rommel’s supply line. That made the water opposite this town one of the most bombed places in the Mediterranean. More than fifty people from Gzira were killed. The town dug itself shelters by hand, and the first man down the hole was the parish priest.

The first war

The town’s war history does not start in 1940. In the First World War, when Malta became known as the nurse of the Mediterranean, the open ground that is now Pjazza Meme Scicluna — where the polyclinic stands — and the length of what is now Triq Carlo Manché were covered in tents. A local man born in 1904 remembered nothing there but hospital camps full of the wounded. Gzira was, briefly, a field hospital.

HMS Talbot

From early 1941 the Royal Navy ran its 10th Submarine Flotilla out of the Lazzaretto buildings on Manoel Island, under the name HMS Talbot. From there a force that never exceeded about a dozen boats sank well over 400,000 tons of Axis shipping, cutting the supply line to the army in North Africa.

That made it a priority target, and the Axis treated it accordingly. The bombing through 1941 and 1942 was relentless — on one night in February 1942, twelve one-ton bombs fell on the submarine base alone. Fort Manoel’s chapel took a direct hit in March 1942 and was destroyed. Much of the Lazzaretto was flattened. The flotilla was eventually withdrawn to Alexandria because the base had become untenable. It reopened as a hospital in 1949 and served until the Royal Navy left.

Bombs aimed at a submarine base a few hundred metres away do not land only on the submarine base. The parish records are blunt: from the very first day of the war, bombs fell on Gzira and left casualties, and they kept falling. More than fifty people from this town were killed. There is a marble plaque that remembers them.

It is also why a Gzira street can swing from 1920s stonework to 1960s concrete and back within fifty metres.

What they were digging for

The shelter story deserves more than a sentence, because the scale of it is hard to credit.

Malta sits on limestone up to a hundred metres thick, and limestone has an unusual property under bombardment: it absorbs the shockwave rather than transmitting it. That made rock the best protection available — and because blasting was inefficient in it, almost all of it had to be cut by hand, with picks.

So that is what the island did. By June 1941 the underground workforce had grown to around 5,500 people. Nearly five hundred public rock shelters were finished and another four hundred were being dug. Between them they could hold 138,000 people, with another ninety thousand having access to alternative cover. Roughly nine hundred shelters were cut across the islands in total. Some complexes that held five hundred people were dug in three weeks.

And Gzira appears to have been first. On 20 January 1941, the Gzira–Msida District Committee put together a volunteer gang of men who had never used a pick in their lives and set them to work in relays. The first two to go down were a doctor and the parish priest.

The doctor was Turu Colombo, a Sliema physician who lived on Rue d’Argens — and his life after the war is one of the stranger arcs in this series. In 1947 he became Minister of Finance in Paul Boffa’s Labour government. In 1951 he walked away from politics, entered the Franciscans as a novice, and was ordained two years later as Patri Ferdinandu. Then he sailed for Australia with a group of emigrants and spent years in Sydney looking after around sixteen thousand Maltese, spiritually and practically. He came home in 1974 and died in 1978. From a shelter shaft in Gzira to the finance ministry to a parish of emigrants on the far side of the world, in a single lifetime.

No doors allowed

The system that developed had a particular logic. Government cut the main corridors; families paid to dig their own private cubicles off them, at their own expense and under strict conditions — a fixed maximum size, usually around six feet by eight, completion within a month, and the spoil carried out before dark every evening. No cubicle was allowed a door. Only a curtain or an open screen, because a sealed room would have stopped the air moving for everybody else.

Space in the public dormitories was rationed at two square feet per person, later doubled to four when it became clear how long people would be living down there. Light came from bowls cut into the rock, filled with water and topped with oil or fat, with a wick floating on top.

In 1942 the government decreed that every major public shelter had to include a birth room. Children were being born underground often enough to need a policy.

Shelter wardens kept order below ground, and were paid in the only currency that mattered: free use of a cubicle for themselves and their family.

Dun Carlo Manché

If Gzira has a figure it should be known for, it is a parish priest who died at forty-five and left behind a bed, some books, one pair of torn shoes and a watch.

Carlo Manché was born in Valletta on 22 September 1905, one of seven children of a surgeon who was a lieutenant colonel in the British army. He was ordained on his twenty-third birthday and said his first mass at the Gzira parish church the next day. He finished top of his theology and canon law course at the University of Malta, which won him a scholarship abroad; he spent two years at the Gregorian in Rome and came back with a doctorate. He spoke English, Italian, French and German, and read Latin, Hebrew and Biblical Greek.

He could have gone anywhere. On 12 March 1935 he became the second parish priest of Gzira, succeeding Dun Anton Manché, and he stayed until he died.

The historian Henry Frendo records that during the war Manché helped his people “not only with prayer, but with courageous action” — that he worked night and day and did not leave the parish, found food, housed the homeless and the injured, and served in the Victory Kitchens alongside everyone else. He was one of the two men who went first into the rock in January 1941.

What he did the rest of the time is less comfortable and more revealing. This was a fleet town with a fleet town’s trade, and Manché set himself against it — one biographical account states flatly that he changed his parish “from a habitat of prostitution to a reputable place”, and that he lived like the poorest of his parishioners.

He made enemies doing it. He was badly beaten on one occasion by men whose business he was interfering with. On another, a man came to his office with a gun, and left only because a parishioner called Twanny Farrugia happened to walk in. Manché declined to report either incident to the police.

He died in Gzira on 18 November 1950, aged forty-five. Thousands came to the funeral, from every kind of background. One monsignor later wrote that had the Church ever examined his heroic virtues, he would long since have been declared a Servant of God.

In the 1950s the town renamed Oratory Street after him. There is a plaque from 1975, a bust raised in 2000, and in May 2017 the community restored and re-inaugurated both, beside the parish church. A book of first-hand recollections — Dun Carlo Manché: Fi Kliem Niesu — was launched at that church in December 2022.

Two last details. He was a fine musician, and with Meme Scicluna he founded the town’s band, Mount Carmel — the only band in Malta founded within Catholic Action, which is why its standard carries the Marian AM rather than the usual lyre. And at one point he wrote to the archbishop asking to resign, become a Carmelite friar himself, and hand the parish to the Carmelite order. The Curia refused.

His friend St George Preca, Malta’s first canonised saint, said of him near the end: every evening, I see him in his room, embracing God. The plaque beside his bust says it more briefly: he preached and lived the Gospel.

You can walk past his bust in about four minutes from our front door. Almost nobody who does knows who he was.

Frequently asked questions

Why was Gzira bombed in the Second World War?

Because Manoel Island, directly across the water, was HMS Talbot — shore base of the Royal Navy's 10th Submarine Flotilla from early 1941. That made it one of the most valuable targets in the Mediterranean, and the Axis bombed it relentlessly. More than fifty people from Gzira were killed during the war.

How were Malta's wartime shelters built?

By hand, with picks, because Maltese limestone absorbs blast but is inefficient to blast through. Government cut the main corridors and families paid to dig their own private cubicles off them, under strict rules: a fixed maximum size, completion within a month, spoil removed before dark, and no doors allowed, so air could circulate. By June 1941 around 5,500 people were digging.

Who was Dun Carlo Manche?

Parish priest of Gzira from 1935 to 1950. He held a doctorate from the Gregorian University in Rome and spoke four languages, led one of the first organised shelter-digging efforts in Malta in January 1941, served in the Victory Kitchens, and campaigned against the prostitution trade in the town. He died aged 45 leaving a bed, some books, one pair of torn shoes and a watch.

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.

10th Submarine Flotilla — Wikipedia.

Manoel Island — Wikipedia.

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).

L-ismijiet tat-toroq tal-Gżira [The street names of Gzira] — Bernard Scicluna. Festa programme, 2008, p. 21ff.

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

Ritratt storiku fis-sala ewlenija [A historic photograph of the first bandsmen] — Joseph Ian Attard. Festa programme, 2010.

L-istorja tal-Gżira — Joe Ian Attard. Festa programme, Għaqda Mużikali Mount Carmel, 2001.

L-istorja tal-Gżira [The history of Gzira] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira. 75th anniversary publication, 1996, pp. 10–13.

Previously: How Gzira Became a Town

Next: The Fleet Years

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