Tiger for Old Dob Dob

In bomb-blasted Malta last week, beefy, pink-faced Lieut. Gen. Sir William George Shedden ("Old Dob Dob") Dobbie, gave his farewell message to the people. The 63-year-old Governor and Commander in Chief of Malta, who had survived nearly 2,300 Axis air attacks, was going home to England for a rest.

To Malta's people--the first to be decorated en masse by a British king (TIME, April 27)--Old Dob Dob had shown two qualities that made him a blood brother: imperturbability in the face of danger, and simple piety. During the hottest raids on Malta, air-raid wardens would find Sir William beside them, unruffled, pitching in to help move wounded out of bomb-wrecked houses. Nightly he held Bible classes for officers and men, sprinkled his War Office reports with Scriptural quotations.

Malta's stubborn defenders like to joke about the time when Old Dob Dob, sent to restore order during the Arab-Jewish riots in Palestine in 1928, said: "This will be the easiest war. . . . We will have to fight only four days a week. The Arabs won't fight on Friday, the Jews on Saturday and Dobbie certainly won't on Sunday." No Sabbatarians, the Luftwaffe forced Sir William to fight on many a Sunday, deepened his conviction that Naziism means nihilism.

Replacing Old Dob Dob as Governor, General the Viscount ("Tiger") Gort, 55, onetime Chief of the Imperial General Staff, arrived at Malta in the teeth of a heavier-than-usual air attack.* Sworn in while bombs were dropping, by a chief justice whose hand was bleeding, Tiger Gort fell on his face when a bomb crashed close by.

* Temporary command of Gibraltar, Lord Gort's previous post, fell to Major General Sir Colin Jardine, 49, who served under the Tiger with the B.E.F. in France.

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