In the first days of February 1942, Malta was being bombed, squeezed by shortages, and still haunted by the possibility of a successful invasion. In that siege mindset, the colonial administration decided to be more drastic. It stopped treating “pro-Italian” sentiment as just politics or culture and started treating it as a security problem. In this view, the most logical step would be to remove the ‘threat’ from the island altogether, an escalation from detention to exile. T

On 6 February 1952, King George VI died, and Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II. The succession was immediate: the moment the King died, the Crown passed to his eldest daughter. The public proclamation that followed didn’t create the new monarch, it formally announced what had already become legally true. For Britain, it was a national rupture: mourning, black borders in newspapers, a sudden change in tone after the austerity of the post-war years. For Malta, still