The Rewley Road giant

Four decades before Damien Hirst shocked the world by displaying a shark in a tank, Jonah the dead fin whale stopped off in Oxford during his post-war tour to promote the whaling industry.

Jonah’s story began in September 1952 when he was harpooned off the coast of Norway by, we are told, the University of Oslo and the World Wildlife Fund. Seven thousand litres of formalin preservative was pumped into him to replace his blood, and all his organs were removed. An internal refrigeration unit replaced Jonah’s original internal arrangements in order to delay decomposition. And a ten-wheeled refrigerated lorry, said to be the largest in the world at the time, was custom-built to move him from city to city.

By July 1954, Jonah reached Rewley Road railway station where all 69 tons of him lay in state, accompanied by a tasteful selection of harpoons and other whale-despatching equipment. However, it seems that by now poor Jonah was a sad sight. One witness, a girl at the time, says that as she cycled to the station she could smell the whale before she saw it –“a mixture of rotting and formaldehyde”. And she was disappointed that it wasn't blue. "It was a sort of grey and looked a bit worse for wear, with sad, beady eyes.”

“I was taken to see it,” says another witness, “along, apparently, with a good percentage of Oxford's children, and thought it very disappointing. At the age of seven I wasn't very knowledgeable about whales beyond that they lived in the sea and were caught by whaling boats and turned into margarine. I thought we would see a tank with a whale swimming in it, rather than a large dead body that whiffed a bit.”

Over the next twenty years, Jonah carried on touring, getting smellier all the time. Bits fell off. He passed into the hands of showmen who believed they saw his worth as a commercial opportunity. Reports from the early-1970s suggested that the carcass of a travelling whale had been disposed of in a National Coal Board furnace in Barnsley. But in the 2010s author Steve Deput hunted him down to a giant fridge on the Belgium/Netherlands border, and has a photograph to prove it. 

In 2019, it was reported that Jonah had been acquired and restored by yet another showman, and was about to hit the road once more. Then the pandemic hit and all plans were shelved, so today Jonah’s fate is unclear. And anyway, would he still pull crowds of amazed spectators in an age of mass tourism that has accustomed us to seeing majestic killer whales humbly jumping out of a pool to ring a bell? A far more distasteful spectacle, surely.