Leviathan or The Whale

where they lay deflated like old inner tubes, incapable of bespeaking their true beauty. Like the dinosaurs of Crystal Palace–where we went on another family pilgrimage, to see concrete iguanodons and plesiosaurs stranded in a suburban park–London’s magnificent whale is an object of error and mystification. As a boy, I assumed that inside the model was the animal’s skeleton, like a cathedral tomb containing the bones of a saint. In fact, the whale is hollow, and was made using plaster and chicken wire over a wooden frame constructed on site–as if the great hall had been built around it.
    The idea of a new Whale Hall for the museum had been posited as far back as 1914, but war put a stop to it. The project was revived in 1923, when the museum’s pioneering director, Sidney Harmer, called the Trustees’ attention to ‘the inadequacy of the exhibited series of the larger whales. The subject of whaling is very much in the air at the present time,’ he noted, and he reminded the Trustees that they had ‘frequently expressed their sympathy with efforts to protect whales from extinction’.
    Warming to his theme–on three sheets of pale blue foolscap paper–Harmer declared that ‘under such circumstances it would be natural to expect that such species as the Greenland Whale, the Blue Whale and the Humpback Whale would be illustrated in the Whale Room…to give the visitor a satisfactory idea of what these three important species are like’. It was even suggested that government grants for the relief of unemployment and men disabled by the war might be used. However, the primary reason for the new hall was to promote the work being done by the
Discovery
expeditions in South Georgia, where scientists were conducting their investigations alongside the British whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean.
    It took almost a decade for Harmer’s spectacular vision to be realized. In June 1929 the new hall was announced–complete with a glass roof framed with steel girders, in the Modernist style–but was not completed until 1931. To fill this grand new space, a life-size whale was proposed, and so in 1933 the museum decided to commission a Norwegian engineer to procure a blue whale, hang it by its tail in an engraving dock, and take a mould of it. The expense of this ambitious scheme was to be allayed by selling the blubber and by marketing models made from the mould to American museums; however, its decidedly ‘experimental nature’ meant that it too was abandoned.
    Five years later, in April 1937, the museum’s Technical Assistant and taxidermist, Percy Stammwitz, suggested that he should make the model in the hall itself. Stammwitz and his son, Stuart, spent nearly two years creating the blue whale, to measurements taken by the scientists in South Georgia. Giant paper patterns, like a dressmaker’s kit, were used to cut out transverse sections in wood, which were then connected at three-foot intervals with slats. Over this armature wire netting was laid to take the final plaster coat; Stuart himself would paint the whale’s eye. It was a long and laborious task, and during its construction the workers used its interior as their canteen–much as Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had given a New Year’s Eve dinner in his half-built iguanodon in 1853, a party of scientists that one periodical portrayed as modern Jonahs swallowed by the monster.

    As it rose from its timber foundations, the model resembled a huge ship whose keel had been laid down in the museum’s hall, an ark ready for the launch to save the museum’s species before the flood; or perhaps an inter-war airship, about to be inflated with helium for a transatlantic crossing. Indeed, when it was suspended from the ceiling, painters working on the whale complained that it swayed so much that it made them seasick.
    The finished article looked so realistic that
The Times
thought it would ‘no doubt be mistaken for a “stuffed” whale by the casual visitor’. On its completion in December 1938, just before the outbreak of war, a telephone directory and coins of the realm were placed inside the model as a kind of time capsule. Thus, on the eve of host-ilities, the placid whale became a memorial to a brief peace, a cetacean cenotaph. It was a giant good luck charm, too, for the warders who put pennies on its flukes to encourage visitors to do the same, much as they might throw coins in a fountain for luck. When the museum closed for the evening, the