Located on Gulf Road across from the old ship harbor, Bait Dickson is named for H.R.P. Dickson and his wife Violet, who lived in the home from 1929 until the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. According to Dame Violet Dickson by Claudia Al Rashoud, the building was an old merchant house that was modified at the turn of the century to be used as the headquarters for the British Political Agent. Mohammed Abdul-Hadi Jamal writes in History of Postal Services in Kuwait that part of the building served as a post office from 1904 to 1929.

The first photograph above was found on abebooks, taken by Sergeant Thomas Fairclough in the 1930s. The next come from the work Arabian Adventurer, a work on William Richard Williamson who traveled the Gulf in the 1920s and 30s. The last images come from Voice of the Oud by Jehan Rajab and this website and one that I took

After marrying after WWI and living in Iraq and Bahrain for a time, the Dicksons came to Kuwait in 1929 and moved into the house. Freya Stark visited Kuwait in 1932 and mentioned the Dicksons in her work Beyond Euphrates. H.R.P. Dickson wrote several works, including Kuwait and Her Neighbours (1956) and The Arab of the Desert (1959).

Jehan Rajab met Dame Violet in the 1950s and developed a yearly ritual of visiting the Dicksons on Boxing Day. Harold Dickson died in 1959, but Violet continued to live in Kuwait. Al Rashoud writes that she, “went for regular horseback rides along the seafront, riding from her own home down towards where the Safir Hotel now stands.” Violet published Wildflowers of Kuwait and Bahrain (1955) and Forty Years in Kuwait (1971).

According to the work by Al Rushoud, Dickson remembered that, “when I came to Kuwait in 1929 the desert of Arabia and the hinterland of Kuwait were to me a great and rather frightening unknown. Outside the city walls, the narrow camel paths led away from the Shamiya wells to the south, disappearing into the dusty haze of early summer.” In Forty Years, Violet wrote that, “from 1959 onwards the town was gripped by a fever of re-building, and we were sometimes dismayed to see how eagerly the Kuwaitis were demolishing whole quarters of the old mud-brick town and replacing them with multi-storey concrete blocks… beyond the walls of my own house and yard, modern Kuwait has grown up, and all is fever and bustle, but beyond that again is the peace of the desert, and the desert still calls.” These models at the Bait al Othman Museum depict Bait Dickson and “Old Kuwait”:

Harold and Violet’s daughter daughter Zahra Freeth also wrote works on Kuwait, including Kuwait was my Home (1956), A New Look at Kuwait (1972), and Prospect and Reality (1972). When the Iraqi forces invaded in 1990, Violet was at the Kuwait Oil Company hospital in Ahmadi. After living in her home in Kuwait for 61 years, she was evacuated to Britain where she died in January of 1991.

Today, Bait Dickson is a museum. The floor plan map comes from the article Socio-Spatial Analysis of Traditional Kuwaiti Houses by Omar Khattab.

The first photo below is from History of the Postal Service, it dates to 1991 and so you can see the damage the building incurred during the invasion. The other images were found here, Kuwait: Arts and Architecture, A Collection of Essays, and Voice of the Oud.