Among the items currently on display at the Maritime Museum in Vittoriosa is a ditty box and its contents, which used to belong to a Maltese sailor who served in the Royal Navy - a ditty box was used by sailors to hold small personal items, such as a brush and comb, shaving gear, needles and thread, or letters from home.
Ditty boxes date back to 1620 and were made by whalemen and sailors. The word 'ditty' is a corruption of the tail end of the word 'commodity'.
According to Rick Jolly's book Jackspeak: a Guide to British Naval Slang and Usage, a ditty box was a lockable container in which a sailor kept his most prized or unusual possessions.
The wooden box was replaced around WW II by a small brown suitcase which is no longer issued.
Manuel Magro-Conti, assistant curator of the Maritime Museum, said the ditty box was donated to the museum.
"Every sailor used to keep those items in the ditty box that were important to him. If a sailor could read and write fluently, he probably kept writing instruments.
"Other sailors kept their special tools in it. In this particular ditty box, its owner had a wooden as well as Bakelite fuse extractors to exchange spent fuses," Mr Magro-Conti said.
Because the Royal Navy was regularly advertising for new recruits, Maltese recruits were granted a special concession, namely that they could wear a moustache, a concession that was not given to other members of the RN, he added.
Maltese recruits who sported a moustache were reluctant to shave them because they considered them part of their macho image.
The museum has a whole series of items in its reserve collection and every month, the museum displays particular items to enable visitors to enjoy the rich maritime history of the Maltese islands .
The ditty box which forms part of the reserve collection will be on display till tomorrow. It includes among other things, an ink jar and ink powder, a rubber stamp that prints the word 'secret', a cigarette roller, a silver cigarette case, photographs of HMS Cambrian, a picture of the Madonna, a scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and a book of black and white artistic photographic studies of nude women aptly called Eves Without Leaves.