Page 230 - The Secret Museum

Knox needed to get the baleen, the head and the skeleton to Edinburgh. He began

with its head, which weighed 7 or 8 tons. On the first attempt the carriage that was
carrying it collapsed and everything was taken back to North Berwick.

Again, they tried to move the head. Knox describes what happened:

‘Eight, ten, twelve horses were put to the carriage. These horses were known
to be the best in East Lothian; the word was given, the eyes of the horses
flashed, their breath was in their nostrils, every muscle was in violent action,
and a simultaneous effort made, and nearly every horse freed himself by
snapping the chains which attached him to the carriage. The cranium of the
whale stood unmoved, and seemed to laugh at the vain attempt’.

With the help of double-strength chains and thanks to the extraordinary effort of

the horses, the whale head-lifting team finally managed to get the skull to Edinburgh.
From then on Knox spent three years and three months preparing and preserving the
skeleton that now lives back beside the sea, outside of Edinburgh.

Knox went on to write many papers detailing the whale’s anatomy and behaviour.
‘These animals are said to be most frolicsome when the storm rages most,’ wrote
Knox. When he was finished it was displayed in the Royal Institution, on Princes
Street, Edinburgh where visitors gawped at its majestic size. It was one of the few
blue whale skeletons on display in Europe. The model on display in the Natural

History Museum is just a model, but this is real. For centuries it took pride of place
in the museum in Edinburgh, where it was suspended above visitor’s heads.

Blue whales are popular with everyone – perhaps because they are so
astonishingly big – so why is this prize specimen no longer on display? In 2011 the
museum reopened as the National Museum of Scotland after a £47.4 million
transformation of its Victorian galleries and the whole building in which the blue
whale flew was redesigned.

The blue whale was moved out to make room for a new display. I went to see
what had replaced it in the new museum that sits on a hill, just over the road from a

statue of Greyfriars Bobby and the cafe where J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter
overlooking Edinburgh Castle.

I could see the spot where the enormous skeleton once hung. Now, suspended
from the ceiling, there is an array of swimming and flying mammals and animals from
across the globe, including a great white shark, a false killer whale and a hippo. The
jawbone from the blue whale in storage is hanging up there too, but not the rest of its
skeleton.

That doesn’t stop people asking for it. Visitors who knew the old museum always
wonder where the blue whale has got to, and every day museum attendants are asked
whether they know where it is.

I found it in the National Museum Collections Centre, in Granton, a 20-minute car