Finback whale5/19/2023 ![]() There in the yard was the same tarpaulin covered lorry I’d seen 40 years ago. Hours later we arrived at a warehouse on the Belgian/Dutch border. That December we set sail from Dover to Calais on the last leg of my six year whale hunt. Jonah still existed! He’d been kept in storage for the last 30 years in Holland and Belgium. He couldn’t tell me how Jonah had met his fate… he went one better. The next week I was at his home in Norfolk. In the 60s and 70s he’d actually driven the whale lorry around Europe. In Budapest, Mike Austen, head of one of the UK’s oldest circuses noticed the story and contacted me. Yet one national newspaper took an interest and ran with my story. I contacted just about every newspaper and TV and radio station I could. The 2006 story of the London Whale stranded in the Thames captured the world’s imagination and set me back on my quest. I couldn’t really waste any more time and effort on whale hunting, remarking to my wife in 2005 that the only way anyone would ever take me seriously was if a whale swam up the Thames - and of course that was never going to happen. Despite all I’d done, people still regarded the whole thing as fiction – which is why my book ended up in many bookshops. What happened to him in the end? Finding out any more was still hopeless. I’d proved Jonah really did exist but one big question remained. I had many hundreds of responses from those who had seen the whale and who, like me had never been believed. As an educational exhibit school classes were often allowed in for free and he came to Sheffield on several occasions in the 50s, 60s and 70s, being displayed on The Moor.Īfter writing a book The Barnsley Whale – the true story of the world’s inland whale hunt published by Mainstream in 2003 I appeared on Home Truths with John Peel, BBC local radio and in the national press. Over the years he passed into the hands of circus owners and showmen and finally a Swiss business man. ![]() Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, saw him. His 25 year overland voyage took him to just about every town in Europe, Japan and Africa. On a lighter note a dormouse in a glass case was placed on his nose as a demonstration of the world’s largest and smallest mammals. ![]() Mounted on the lorry were also grisly reminders of death – the harpoon and other instruments employed in whaling. He was originally toured by the Norwegians to promote whaling (remember this was post-war Europe with a ruined economy) but he probably did far more to convince children who saw him that whaling should be stopped. Originally examined then exhibited at Oslo University his organs were removed, lungs inflated and a refrigeration unit placed inside him before being loaded on a specially constructed 100ft trailer - at the time the biggest lorry in the world. Jonah was a 70ft, 70 ton finback whale (I originally thought it was a blue whale) caught off Trondheim, Norway in 1952. There in the fading pages of an old copy of ‘The World’s Fair’ I found the proof. Dr Vanessa Toulmin didn’t laugh and as soon as I could journeyed to Sheffield. The breakthrough came with a call to the National Fairground Archive in Sheffield. Rather than ignore me or laugh down the phone people could do it in my face I left my job in London and toured the country asking my questions in pubs, on the street and in museums. But try as we might we found nothing – much to the amusement of most on the site who knew it couldn’t be true. Only when I posted my question on a Barnsley football Club website did I find a handful of people who’d had a vague dream of having seen a whale on Barnsley. "For a moment of madness I considered buying Jonah but realised that I knew very little about the practicalities of touring with a 70ft whale." Steve Deput
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