Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday, several local news websites have been reflecting on the Queen’s close relationship with and affection for Malta. But there are aspects of this relationship that only the most serious journalists know about, and here they are:
The Queen fought in Malta in World War II
While the Queen’s first visit was officially in 1949, she secretly served as a Spitfire pilot during the Axis siege of Malta during World War II.
However, the teenage princess was not a good pilot, as she kept shooting down fellow Royal Air Force planes by mistake. By the time the Luftwaffe was defeated in 1942, Elizabeth, or Wing Commander Elijah Berth, as she was known, had racked up 53 confirmed friendly-fire kills. Some historians speculate that the Allies could have won the battle one year earlier if the Queen had shot down enemy planes instead.
Others even speculate it was the Queen’s German ancestry that led her to deliberately shoot down Allied planes in an attempt to win the war for Hitler.
The Queen continued to enjoy her passion for flying even after the war had ended. She was only forced to give up in 1997, after she ‘accidentally’ strafed a car while flying over the Champs-Élysées in Paris, an incident that was successfully covered up by Buckingham Palace.
She enjoyed skinny dipping
Visits to Malta were an opportunity for the Queen to escape the stuffiness of palace life and let her hair down. One of the ways in which she enjoyed herself was by swimming in the nude.
Much like her stint as a fighter pilot, this was a closely guarded secret and locals were forbidden from seeing her while she was engaged in her hobby. In 1953, while the Queen was swimming in Gnejna, a young fisherman who happened to be passing by on his boat laid eyes on her and was promptly shot on site by Prince Philip, who was stationed with a sniper rifle in Lippija Tower.
The Queen kept up her tradition of skinny dipping right up to the last time she visited Malta in 2015. In a breach of royal protocol, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his wife Michelle insisted on joining the Queen on her swim. According to bodyguards who were present, Mrs Muscat is the only person to have ever made the Queen swear, when she called Michelle ‘an obnoxious halfwitted dumbfuck’.
She once won an arm-wrestling contest with Dom Mintoff
Former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff was known to figurately strong-arm his political opponents into submission. But the fiery former Labour leader met his match in the Queen.
In 1956, while on a visit to Buckingham Palace, the Queen surprised everyone present when she challenged Mintoff to an arm-wrestling contest. If Mintoff won, the Queen promised to relinquish all British claims to Malta and withdraw all military forces from the island immediately.
Confident of winning, Mintoff eagerly accepted. But as soon as the whistle was blown for the contest to start, the Queen slammed the Prime Minister’s arm against the table and triumphantly yelled, “HUZZAH!”
Consequently, Malta would not gain full autonomy from the United Kingdom for another 18 years, and Mintoff’s arm never fully recovered. Here he is trying to smile through the pain with Muammar Ghaddafi:
She loved pastizzi
Much like every foreigner who visits Malta, the Queen took an instant liking to pastizzi. In fact, she loved them so much that she employed her own personal pastizzar at Buckingham Palace.
She was known to eat up to 30 pastizzi a day, and while most doctors would strongly advise against doing so, she attributed her longevity to the fact. She once remarked:
“The copious amount of grease in these culinary marvels keeps my old bones lubricated.”
Not content with irkotta and piżelli, the Queen even got her pastizzar to make her a new type of pastizz, filled with swan meat and the tears of poor people.
She once tried to give Malta away as a gift
This infamous incident was in fact Bis-Serjetà’s first ever story. In April 2011, the Queen attempted to give Malta to Prince William and Kate Middleton as a wedding gift, thinking that the country was still a colonial possession of the British Empire.
Not wanting to upset Elizabeth, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi reluctantly agreed to the request, and Malta temporarily became part of the UK once again, until William and Kate gave the country its sovereignty back a few months later because they thought it was “a bit of a shit hole, full of loudmouthed morons who are more inbred than our family.” Rude.
*The article in question has sadly been lost due to the ravages of time and forgetting to pay web-hosting fees.
