Mabel Strickland (1899 – 1988) has been dubbed the uncrowned queen of Malta, not unjustifiably.
Her father was Lord Strickland, Prime Minister of Malta; her mother Lady Edeline Sackville, eldest daughter of Lord De La Warr. Wiki summarises her career thus.
Strickland founded a newspaper group in Malta with her father and her stepmother, Lady Strickland, DBE (Margaret, daughter of Edward Hulton). In 1935 she became editor of The Times of Malta and “Il Berqa” before taking over as Managing Director of the Group on the death of her father in 1940. The paper never missed an issue throughout the Siege of Malta in World War Two, despite taking direct hits on several occasions. She formed and led the Progressive Constitutionalist Party during the 1950s and was one of the principal political leaders of the 1950s, participating in the integration talks in 1956-57 as well as opposing independence in 1964. She was elected to the Maltese Parliament in 1962. She always fought passionately for a free and independent press and to maintain Malta’s ties with Britain and the Commonwealth. On her retirement she has established the Strickland Foundation in the name of her family.
That is part of the story. Mabel, I can be so bold nearly thirty years after her death (were I to have met her I would have been strictly on “Miss Strickland” terms) put the A in autocratic, the B in bossy, the C in character, D in domineering, E in eccentric … you get the picture. She was perplexed when Dom Mintoff was elected Prime Minister. On the one hand she admired his degree from Hertford College, Oxford, where he had been a Rhodes Scholar; on the other, feared he was a dangerous leftie, maybe even a communist. Her newspapers trenchantly conveyed this fear leading to an uneasy relationship between Prime Minister and uncrowned queen.
The rest of the story concerns her Will. She wanted her great-nephew, Robert Hornyold Strickland, to be her heir. You have to have immense self-confidence to saddle yourself with that name. At the same time she wished her home, the 16th century Villa Parisio to be home to the Strickland Foundation while Robert would have use of it too. There is also a lack of clarity as to whether Robert or the Foundation should receive substantial dividends from Allied Group (the entity her newspapers have morphed into). Her Maltese executors made mincemeat of her Will, run the Strickland Foundation as their fiefdom and Robert so far has got nothing.
After all this time Robert is still fighting for his rights. In my opinion he will not have them restored. The law is often unjust, especially when a foreign claimant is opposing entrenched members of the Establishment. If I may digress, my mother and her siblings were heirs to their uncle’s Estate. Ralph Cator died in Alexandria in 1945. They received nothing. However, his entry in the Radley College archives is worth reading for his job titles – it reminds me of the opening lines of Black Mischief, published in 1932.
“We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim…”
Anyone for tennis in the Mixed Court of Appeal?
I had to look up HBM as in His Britannic Majesty’s Consular Court for the Ottoman Dominions. Those were the days. They haven’t had justice like it since!
“Mr Mohammed, Mr Justice Cocklecarrot made it quite clear in R v The Twelve Dwarfs that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence in a case of stoning for adultery”
Surely, you would have addressed her as Miss Strickland rather than Mrs? I knew that poor Robert had had great frustrations in trying to settle his affairs but had no idea that Mabel had left them in such chaos.
You are right and I have made a correction.