The Arab Chest

According to the record of her possessions made by my mother late in her life, this Arab chest was bought by my father in Zanzibar on instruction from 'agents in Liverpool' who wanted one as a wedding present for a member of staff. The wedding was subsequently called off so my parents kept it. This must have been in the 1940s and my mother further records that my father paid £4 for it.

The story I have in my memory is that my father bought it off a dhow, one of the traditional sailing ships of the Persian Gulf which came down to the east coast to trade. It may have been the sea chest of a nahoda, as the dhow captains were called.

The three small drawers along the bottom each had a mortice lock - the keys long ago lost - while the lid had some sort of locking mechanism, perhaps an early form of padlock. Certainly, the chest is old - as far back as I can remember the lid's hinges had come away from the chest so we opened it by lifting the lid off.

The family has always used it for storing family papers, photograph albums, boxes of 35mm slides, and various items of memorabilia. At the front on the left in this picture can be seen the spines of three black books, two of which are my grandfather, Captain Haylett's copies of letters he wrote to his ship's owners in Liverpool from exotic ports in the West Indies. In one of the drawers are stored papers about my mother's family, the Wilsons of Bannockburn, along with old passports, and in another are almost all the letters my brother and I wrote to our parents over the years we were at school in England.

To the right in the picture can be seen a small compartment with a lid. In some of the better chests, there is a secret compartment below this, in others there is a secret drawer behind the three drawers. Sadly, our chest doesn't have any secret compartments, not that I have managed to find.

More can be read about these chests at Zanzibar Stories & History.