Malta's 100 ton gun is not visible from the ridge road south of Ricasoli and deliberately inconspicuous from the sea but from the little chapel above the film facilities it is silhouetted against the southern skyline.Its origin arises from the historic struggle between projectile and defensive armour and it represents the culmination of rifled muzzle loading guns of the nineteenth century. One of only two still in existence (the other is at Gibraltar) it was abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, France was resurgent under another Napoleon and Italy was at last uniting, becoming more than a mere geographical expression, so Britain was obliged to look to its protection of Malta.
Military thought was moving toward fewer guns of a larger size rather than a multiplicity of smaller weapons requiring different sizes of ammunition and Malta's coastal defences were standardised on the 38 ton rifled muzzle loader with a bore of 12.5 inches firing a shell that could penetrate 18 inches of armoured plate at a range of about one thousand yards.
In 1876 the British gunmakers of Sir W. G. Armstrong of Newcastle upon Tyne offered to the Admiralty a gun weighing 102 tons with a bore of 17.76 inches but the British navy rejected it so Armstrongs sold the manufacturing rights to Italy who constructed several of these weapons and fitted four of them in each of their new battleships Duilo and Dandolo that were protected by 22 inches of steel.
The British now realised that these warships could stand off the Grand Harbour of Malta, impervious to the defending weapons and sytematically destroy eveything in and around the harbour. Almost panic–stricken, the British hastily commissioned guns of even greater calibre of at first 160 and finally 220 tons only to find that this specification was beyond the limits of the then manufacturing technology so swallowing their pride they ordered the 102 ton guns for both Gibraltar and Malta and these were the weapons that still stand at both places. They were actually manufactured at Woolwich Arsenal on the outskirts of London.
There were two guns mounted in Malta in specially designed forts that each cost the sum of 18,890 pounds sterling ; one in Fort Rinella and the other to the north of the harbour at Fort Cambridge that was removed and the fort demolished some years back. The gun at Fort Rinella was declared obsolete in 1905 and the fort used for storage.
Nearly thirty years later we came to live at the married quarters provided for the garrison of Fort Rinella for the complex was by then surrounded by a large radio station at which my father was an operator, or telegraphist as they were then termed.
It was not easy for small boys to get into Fort Rinella but we managed by devious means and besides pretending to fire this enormous cannon we explored the machinery beneath - for the gun was too large to be operated by hand and was trained and traversed by steam. All of the steam mechanism was scrapped some years back.
The gun required up to forty men to operate it under a battery commander and a master gunner with nine gunners. Twelve men dealt with ammunition, three the position finder and four the range finder. There was also a trumpeter, storeman, lampman and a fatigue man whilst a telephonist maintained contact with its twin at Fort Cambridge and a control station at Fort St Elmo. Besides the telephone there was back-up semaphore and signal mirror and it was intended that one gun should fire whilst the other was being re-loaded. The rate of fire was once every four minutes but when they tried to increase the rate at Gibraltar they split the barrel.
It was never used in anger and was last fired for testing purposes on the 5th May 1905.
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