MALTA CALLS

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 51, Issue 3151, 3 August 1942, Page 7

MALTA CALLS

MAN WHOM ROME ABUSES BROADCASTS FROM BBC. THE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER That the English winter is worse than Hitler’s blitz is the considered opinion of Joseph Sultana, who does the weekly Maltese Newsletter for the British Broadcasting Corporation. A farmer’s son who was born in 1911 in Zagra Gozo, Sultana was a teacher in Malta until 1938 —Munich ■time—when he came to London as a Government student. He took his Teacher’s Certificate at St. Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, in June, 1940, and was just on the -point of returning to Malta when Italy entered the war. So he is now teaching in London, instead, at a Southall broadcasting for the BBC. The last is the high spot for him. He enjoys being at the very heart of things. Preparing the Newsletter gives him a personal interest in the war, and delivering it is his great excitement of the week. Like so many broadcasters, 'Sultana talks to a particular audience—his parents—but also visualises the crowds gathering round the open-air loud-speakers in his own island .fortress.

He is immensely pleased by the reports’ from that remarkable organisation, the BBC Monitoring Service, that Rome Radio singles him out for

abuse every time he broadcasts “renegade” is one of the milder terms used. Conscious of the link between Malta and Carthage, he remembers that ancient Rome made good its threat “Delenda est Carthago” (Carthage must be destroyed). “Now,” says Sultana, “we are playing the return match.”