Lost Treasures
While reading an old Magnum from December 2010 I came across an article by Gregor Woods in Gallery entitled “Forgotten Treasures”. It concerned an article taken from the Cape Argus newspaper dated 18 July 1963, reporting the imminent sale of 32 000 privately-owned firearms in Nairobi, Kenya. These firearms had been handed over to the police for storage in the years leading up to the independence of Kenya in December 1963. The owners, many of whom had left the country, were given three months to claim their guns after which all the guns would be sold.
Those days were unsettling and nervous times, as nobody really knew what to expect post independence. Legal compliance was the order of the day and gun owners had to re-apply for their gun licences having handed them in to the police. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it?) After independence most farmers were allowed to re-licence their firearms although in reduced numbers. My father was a farmer and professional hunter, and was allowed to keep a fair number of firearms as tools of his trade. However, we handed in many guns that we never saw again and for which we were not compensated.
I do not recall that a sale, as mentioned in the Cape Argus article, ever took place. An agent by the name of Graham Boswell was supposed to have overseen the sale but it is possible that many quality guns left the country legitimately through him.
The firearms that were handed in were stored in a military underground armoury in a town called Gilgil, in the Rift Valley between Nairobi and Nakuru. In early 1964 I attended boarding school in Nairobi and at the end of the first term, my mother arrived to collect my sister and me for the trip back to our farm near Kitale in north west Kenya. My father was hunting in Tanzania, using company firearms as his own had not yet been released to him. However, their release had been granted so he sent a list of the guns to be collected to my mother and we went to pick them up from the armoury on our way home.
We arrived at the armoury and, having cleared formalities, were led down a passageway to an armoured door, beyond which were row upon row of stacked guns. Each was neatly labelled with a tag attached to its trigger guard which reflected maker, calibre, serial number and the initials and surname of the owner. At the end of each row were racks holding automatic weapons and handguns. In another area were neatly spaced machine guns, Vickers and Bren guns mostly, with other supporting equipment. Whether these had been surrendered by residents or belonged to the army, I do not know. To say that I was gobsmacked would be an understatement!
With typical English efficiency, the guns were batched according to the owner’s surname in alphabetical order so it was easy to find ours and identify the ones for collection. We collected four shotguns and six rifles in calibres from .22LR to .470, which I carefully rolled in blankets. My mother was keen to get back on the road so I did not really have time to appreciate what I was seeing.
However, military rifles were predominant with many Lee Enfields and Mausers present, (trophies from various East African campaigns), but there were also flintlocks, percussion and other weapons going back to the days of slave trade. Apart from various sporting rifles, what really caught my eye was the number of quality shotguns and double rifles bearing the best names such as Purdey, Boss, Lancaster, Evans, Rigby, and Holland & Holland. I left feeling a little despondent, wondering what would happen to these guns if not claimed. I heard later that whatever was left, was dumped in the sea off Mombasa.