Large Goyard Cabin Trunk

A fine Goyard cabin trunk with brass handles, Circa 1920. The interior of the trunk has been re-lined to match what was there originally.

Dimensions: 112 cm/44 inches x 57 cm/22½ inches x 35 cm/13¾ inches

This trunk has an interesting history:
Most likely first acquired by William Mowatt Flook on his travels just after the First World War. Around 1936 Billy Flook then gave it to his niece, American, Dorothy Manning Dailey. She then used it for a European trip in the summer of 1936, with fellow ex Wellesley college class of 1932 graduate Ruth Banner. Afterwards, the trunk came back from England with Dorothy on the August 1936 voyage of the Queen Mary from Southampton to New York, when the famous ocean liner first captured the Blue Riband (awarded to the fastest ship to cross the Atlantic; she lost the title to SS Normandie in 1937, but recaptured it in 1938!) Dorothy recounted the episode saying that the moment they hauled anchor in Southampton they knew the ship was going for the ‘Blue Riband’ as she never stopped blowing her fog horn and the ships boilers were fired with such intensity that coal and cinders rained down on the deck so much that one could not go outside for the whole voyage.
Later in it's life, the trunk was used by Dorothy's son, Warner, in the summer of 1959 where aged 14 it accompanied him to summer camp at Pok-o’-Moonshine in Willsboro, New York, run by Colonel H Tilden Swan. Here it was somewhat of a curiosity as no other boy had seen anything like it and a rumour went round that the trunk was actually a child coffin, because of the fancy interior lid. In 1968 when Warner moved to London to work for Christies auctioneers, the trunk followed him here several months after his arrival.
In the late 1970s it was hired as a film prop for the 1978 film ‘Agatha’ where it was used by Vanessa Redgrave in Harrogate. The film being based on Agatha Christie's mysterious disappearance which started in a nationwide hunt for her. It was then hired out again for the 1979 TV adaptation of ‘The Corn is Green’ directed by George Cukor, starring Katherine Hepburn as L.C. Moffat, the strong-willed schoolteacher under whose guidance the illiterate Welsh teenager Morgan Evans succeeds as a university honours student; filmed on location in Wales (this is when and how L.C Moffat MA was painted on the top).