(Image: Peter Hall/Keystone Features/Getty Images)

Created in the 1930s, the life-size model blue whale at London’s Natural History Museum has lost none of its ability to thrill crowds

THIS month, thousands of people will fall under the spell of a giant.

But this is no fairy tale or pantomime giant. It’s a life-size model of the blue whale, the world’s largest mammal. Now celebrating its 75th birthday, the 28.3-metre-long model dominates the mammal gallery at London’s Natural History Museum, dwarfing whale skeletons and other mammals.


Richard Sabin, the NHM’s principal curator of vertebrate collections, says the model was “incredibly ambitious” when it was built in the 1930s. He saw it as a 10-year-old on his first trip to London, nearly 40 years ago. “I was absolutely blown away,” he recalls. Back home, he raided school and local libraries for whale books.

When the model was unveiled at the end of 1938, it was the world’s only life-size replica of a blue whale. But other museums soon wanted to copy it. Some museums in the US made a point of making their version fractionally longer.

The giant was created by Percy and Stuart Stammwitz, a father and son team in the museum’s zoology department, using photographs and measurements made by scientists on British whaling fleet vessels in the south Atlantic. Although it was accurate for its time, modern underwater photography shows the model doesn’t match reality, says Sabin, probably because it was based on carcasses that became distorted as they were dragged on to ships.

Built in situ in the museum’s Whale Hall, the model drew on technology used to make first-world-war planes. The general foreman, William Sanders, suggested building a wooden frame, covering it in lightweight wire meshwork, then coating it with plaster and painting over that, rather than using traditional plaster casts.

The replica whale has gone on to feature in books and movies, and is also the stuff of urban legend. Some of the best stories concern what went on inside its hollow belly before the trapdoor was sealed shut forever. They feature everything from hidden time capsules to romantic trysts and gambling dens. Only one story is true, Sabin reckons: that workmen used to take their lunch and cigarette breaks inside the whale.

The whale remains a magnet for children. Sometimes when Sabin overhears chattering school parties, he hopes that among the more excited children lurks the next generation of marine biologists who will keep the magic of the whale alive.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Whale of a time”