The Sette Giugno Riots of June 1919: The Day Maltese Blood Was Spilled for Bread

Every year on the 7th of June, Malta marks Sette Giugno, Italian for 'Seventh of June', one of the island's national days. It commemorates the 1919 riots in Valletta, during which three Maltese men were fatally shot by British troops and a fourth, Karmenu Abela, was bayoneted the following day and later died of his wounds. The dead; Manwel Attard, Ġużè Bajada, Wenzu Dyer and Karmenu Abela, are remembered as the first martyrs of modern Maltese nationalism, and their names are inscribed on the monument that stands today in St George's Square, outside the Grandmaster's Palace.

But Sette Giugno did not begin as a struggle for independence. It began with bread.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the cost of living in Malta had risen catastrophically, and the price of bread, the single most important staple in the Maltese diet, had soared with it. Wages, especially for dockyard and government workers, had not kept pace. And there was a widespread and bitter conviction among ordinary Maltese that the merchants who imported the grain and milled the flour were making fortunes out of their hunger. The riots of the 7th and 8th of June 1919 were, at their root, a revolt against the price of bread, which is why the events have sometimes been described as a 'bread riot', even as they became something much larger.

This is the story of what happened, drawn from the standard historical accounts, principally Herbert Ganado's Rajt Malta Tinbidel, Brian Blouet's The Story of Malta, and the findings of the official Commission of Inquiry, of who died and how, and of why a riot over the price of bread became the founding moment of modern Maltese political life.

The Background: War, Hunger, and the Price of Bread

Malta in 1919 was a Crown Colony and, above all, an imperial fortress. Its economy revolved around the British military and naval presence: when military spending was high, a portion of the island prospered; the rest of the population depended on imported food, and on wages that the colonial economy kept low.

The First World War distorted this further. Across Europe, the war had disrupted agriculture and trade; imports were limited, food became scarce, and prices rose. In Malta, farmers and merchants with surpluses to sell did well; so did importers and millers. But for the ordinary Maltese family, the war years and their aftermath meant a relentless rise in the cost of living, and above all in the price of bread. Maltese merchants importing grain faced soaring costs, partly because of the expense of insuring cargo against the wartime threat to Mediterranean shipping. When they asked the British colonial government for a subsidy to keep bread affordable, they were refused.

The flashpoint was flour. Against the recommendation of its own Council of Government, the colonial administration kept a tax on imported flour, and bread prices climbed. There was a widespread popular belief, whether or not it was entirely fair, that the island's principal grain importers and flour millers were profiteering at the expense of the poor. The three names most associated with milling at the time were Antonio Cassar Torreggiani (known as Is-Sur Tonin), Colonel John Lewis Francia (then President of the Chamber of Commerce), and the firm of Louis Farrugia and Sons (the same family business that would, years later, become the brewers Farsons). Their homes and premises would become targets when the violence came.

It is worth recording, in fairness, that the picture was more complicated than the crowds believed. An unpublished letter by Cassar Torreggiani, released by his family decades later and reported by MaltaToday in 2013, revealed that he had personally lobbied the British Governor, Lord Methuen, for a bread subsidy, and had been, in his own words, virtually 'derided' and laughed out of the Governor's office for suggesting it. The millers may have been less the villains of the story than the popular anger of 1919 assumed. But in a hungry city, the man whose mills made the flour was an obvious target.

The Political Dimension: The National Assembly and the Dream of Self-Government

Bread was the spark, but politics was the tinder.

Malta's political class had, for years, been pressing the British for greater control over the island's own affairs. The 1903 constitution had given the Maltese only a weak voice, just eight elected members out of twenty in the Council of Government. In the closing months of the war, the campaign for reform gathered pace. On the 23rd of November 1918, the lawyer and politician Dr Filippo Sceberras used the newspaper Malta to call on associations across Malta and Gozo to form a national movement for greater constitutional liberties. The result was the convening of a National Assembly (the Assemblea Nazionale) to formulate the island's demands.

The Assembly first met on the 25th of February 1919. It approved a resolution, tabled by the nationalist faction led by Dr Enrico Mizzi, reserving for Malta all the rights being granted to other nations by the Versailles peace conference, which would, in effect, have meant independence from the British Empire. This more radical resolution displaced a moderate one, put forward by Sceberras, that asked only for responsible self-government. The two currents, the radicals who distrusted Britain entirely, and the moderates who wanted to negotiate, ran through the Assembly, and through the crowds who gathered outside its meetings.

There was already a pattern of unrest. At the Assembly's first meeting on the 25th of February, crowds had attacked shopkeepers who had defied the occasion by remaining open, including a shop tellingly named 'A la Ville de Londres'. The police had not intervened, which only emboldened the more extreme elements. University students, mostly aligned with the radical camp, had staged their own protest on the 16th of May 1919. The police and the postal workers were themselves threatening to strike. By the time the National Assembly was due to meet for the second time, on Saturday the 7th of June 1919, Valletta was a tinderbox, and the authorities, as the subsequent Commission of Inquiry concluded, 'did not appreciate the gravity of the situation'.

7th June 1919: The Day the Shooting Started

On Saturday the 7th of June 1919, the National Assembly was due to meet for its second sitting, in the Giovine Malta building. The police had anticipated possible trouble and, on the 5th of June, had asked for soldiers to be placed on standby at the Auberge de Castille. But the scale of what was coming caught them entirely unprepared.

The first spark, fittingly, involved a flag. A Maltese flag defaced with the Union Jack was flying above the shop 'A la Ville de Londres'. The crowd forced its way in and tore down the flag and its pole. From there, the disturbance spread rapidly through the heart of Valletta. The crowd moved to the Officers' Club, smashing windows and insulting the officers inside. At the Bibliothèque in Pjazza Regina, they demanded the removal of a Union Flag, which had been flying at half-mast, with other government flags, to mark the recent death of the President of the Court, and the men on duty took it down. At the meteorological office, housed in a Royal Air Force turret, the crowd broke in, ransacked the offices, tore down the Union Jack, and burned it in the street along with the furniture.

The mob then moved to Palace Square, jeering at the soldiers stationed in front of the Main Guard. In Strada Teatro, they broke into the offices of the Daily Malta Chronicle, a pro-British newspaper and jammed pieces of metal into its printing presses to wreck them. Meanwhile, other crowds were attacking the houses of men they associated with the imperial government and with profiteering: above all, the home of the miller Antonio Cassar Torreggiani, at 191 Strada Forni, from whose windows furniture was being hurled into the street.

At 5:30 in the afternoon, the acting police commissioner called for military support. Just 64 soldiers of the Composite Battalions arrived to confront a crowd of thousands spread across several streets, a force that later historians judged hopelessly inadequate to the task. Small detachments were sent to the flashpoints. Six soldiers under Major Ritchie and Captain Ferguson were sent to defend the Cassar Torreggiani house in Strada Forni. Ten soldiers under Lieutenant Shields were sent to the Chronicle offices.

It was here that the day turned lethal.

The Four Who Died

At the Cassar Torreggiani house in Strada Forni, six soldiers faced a crowd of thousands. Captain Ferguson, his revolver stolen, his uniform torn, fought his way out to fetch reinforcements, returning with a further 24 soldiers, who were posted along the street facing in both directions, under orders not to shoot unless commanded. The troops took aim; the crowd fell back.

According to the Commission of Inquiry, a shot was then heard from the direction of a window of the Cassar Torreggiani house, which, the report implied, meant the first shot came from the Maltese side. Whatever the truth of that, what happened next is clear: one of the soldiers fired into the crowd, and the rest of the troop followed.

Manwel Attard fell first, in front of the Cassar Torreggiani house. He was the first to die. Others were wounded.

Ġużè Bajada was hit near Strada Teatro. He fell on top of the Maltese flag he had been carrying, an image that would become one of the enduring symbols of the day.

At the Chronicle offices, Lieutenant Shields faced a different problem: there was a smell of gas in the building, and he needed to get his men out through a hostile crowd without a massacre. He ordered a soldier to fire low, away from the crowd, to clear a path. That shot struck Wenzu Dyer (Lorenzo Dyer), who was trying to run away. His wound was serious; the crowd lifted him and carried him to Palace Square. He did not survive.

Three men, then, were fatally wounded on the 7th of June. The officer in charge at Strada Forni was already shouting for the firing to cease. In all, on that first day, three died and around 50 were injured.

The fourth death came the next day. On the 8th of June 1919, the disturbances continued, with the crowd now attacking the palace of Colonel Francia, another miller, in Valletta. Royal Malta Artillery soldiers had been posted to protect the house but were reluctant to use force against their own countrymen, and the crowd forced its way in. That evening, 140 Royal Marines arrived to clear the building and the street. Karmenu Abela (Carmelo Abela) was standing in one of the side doorways of Francia's house, calling out for his son. Two marines moved to arrest him; when he resisted, one of them ran him through the stomach with a bayonet. Abela died of his wounds on the 16th of June 1919.

Those are the four: Manwel Attard, Ġużè Bajada, Wenzu Dyer, and Karmenu Abela. They are the four names inscribed on the Sette Giugno monument, and the four officially commemorated as the dead of the uprising. (Some popular accounts mention additional names of men said to have died later of their injuries; the four above are the officially recognised victims, and the ones the historical record reliably documents.) On the British side, several soldiers were also injured during the disturbances.

The Aftermath: From Bloodshed to a Constitution

The killing did not immediately end the unrest. Even as the dead were mourned; flowers and tributes were laid in the streets where they had fallen, the disturbances spread beyond Valletta over the following days, with crowds attacking Cassar Torreggiani's flour mills in Marsa and trading houses in outlying villages including Żejtun, Luqa, Qormi and Rabat. Censorship of political articles in the Maltese press, lifted earlier, was swiftly reimposed.

The colonial authorities responded on two tracks. On the 16th of June, a Military Court was convened, and a court-martial was instituted to investigate thirty-two people who had taken part in the uprising. But the British government in London also understood that something fundamental had to change. The riots had demonstrated, in the bluntest possible way, that the political and economic frustrations of the Maltese could no longer be ignored.

The new Governor, Lord Plumer, who had arrived in the immediate aftermath, recommended liberal concessions. The British House of Commons accepted that Malta should have 'control of purely local affairs'. After negotiation with the National Assembly, a new constitution was drawn up. On the 30th of April 1921, the Amery-Milner Constitution was proclaimed, granting Malta responsible self-government for local affairs for the first time, with its own elected Legislative Assembly. Political censorship was repealed on the 15th of June 1921. The first election under the new constitution was held in October 1921, and the new parliament was inaugurated on the 1st of November 1921 by the Prince of Wales (the future, and briefly, King Edward VIII).

This is the heart of why Sette Giugno matters in Maltese history. Four men died over the price of bread, and within two years, that bloodshed had helped force the British Empire to grant Malta the first real measure of self-government in its modern history. The road from 1919 to full independence in 1964 would be long and would double back on itself more than once, but Sette Giugno is widely regarded as its true starting point: the first time, as one Maltese historian put it, that the Maltese 'bit the hand that fed them'.

A Contested Memory: Bread Riot, Nationalist Uprising, or Both?

It would be misleading to present Sette Giugno as a single, simple story, because Maltese historians themselves do not agree on what it fundamentally was. The events have been claimed by very different traditions, and that contest over their meaning is itself part of the history.

Was it, first and foremost, a bread riot; a spontaneous explosion of hunger and economic desperation, in which the political slogans were secondary to the price of flour? Or was it a nationalist uprising, the first conscious mass assertion of Maltese identity against colonial rule, with the bread question merely the occasion? Or was it, as some have argued, a class struggle, pitting the Maltese poor not only against the British but against the Maltese bourgeoisie and the mill-owners who profited from their hunger?

Each reading has evidence behind it, and each has been pressed into service by different political traditions. In the 1920s, strikingly, Fascist Italy tried to claim the four dead as 'martyrs' of the Italian Risorgimento and heroes of Italian irredentism in Malta,  when the bodies of the four victims were placed in their tomb at the Addolorata Cemetery on the 9th of November 1924, the Italian Fascist government publicly celebrated them in those terms. Maltese nationalists, by contrast, claimed them as martyrs of Maltese, not Italian, nationhood. Later, the Maltese labour movement emphasised the economic and class dimensions of the revolt. The British colonial authorities, for their part, initially preferred to frame the events as mere criminal disorder by 'hooligans', to minimise their political significance.

The most balanced modern view holds that all of these elements were genuinely present, that economic injustice, political powerlessness, and social instability formed, in the words of the historian George Cassar, 'a volatile backdrop', and that it is precisely the combination that made the explosion so powerful. The people in the streets of Valletta on the 7th of June 1919 were not all there for the same reason. Some were hungry; some were angry at the millers; some wanted a constitution; some wanted Malta for the Maltese. What they had in common was that they had had enough.

Remembrance: The Monument and The National Day

For decades after 1919, Sette Giugno occupied an ambiguous place in official Maltese memory, claimed and contested by competing political currents. It was only in the later twentieth century that it was given a settled and central place in the national story.

On the 7th of June 1986, the Sette Giugno monument, sculpted by the distinguished Maltese sculptor Anton Agius, the same artist responsible for many of Malta's major national monuments, including the Freedom Monument in Birgu and the Manwel Dimech statue in Valletta, was inaugurated in St George's Square (Palace Square) in Valletta, directly in front of the Grandmaster's Palace. The bronze depicts a group of male figures, two of them raising the Maltese flag, commemorating the dead and injured of the uprising.

On the 21st of March 1989, the Maltese Parliament formally declared the 7th of June to be one of Malta's national days, and the first official commemoration was held on the 7th of June 1989. 

The monument itself has had a slightly turbulent recent history that, in its own small way, reflects the contested memory of the event. During the renovation of St George's Square it was removed and placed in storage, then relocated to Hastings Gardens. After considerable public objection to such a nationally important monument being moved out of its proper place, and following a public consultation, the government returned it to St George's Square on the 3rd of December 2016, where it stands today, the focus of the annual wreath-laying ceremony each the 7th of June.

Today, Sette Giugno is woven into the fabric of Maltese civic life. Schoolchildren learn the four names. The President and Prime Minister lay wreaths at the monument. And the date carries a meaning that has, over a century, settled into something close to consensus, whatever the historians' debates: that on a June day in 1919, ordinary Maltese people, pushed past endurance by hunger and injustice, stood in the streets of their capital and would not be moved, and that four of them paid for it with their lives.

Manwel Attard. Ġużè Bajada. Wenzu Dyer. Karmenu Abela. They died over the price of bread. They are remembered as the men whose deaths began Malta's long walk to nationhood.

About Matthew Gollcher

Hi, I'm Matthew, an SEO Specialist and Content Writer at Yellow Pages Malta. I'm passionate about creating meaningful content and exploring AI's creative possibilities. When I'm not working, I enjoy the gym, time with friends, watching series and reading, and playing guitar. I'm always eager to learn and grow both personally and professionally.