The Fall Britain's Whale Hunters: The Untold Story

This programme contains scenes some viewers may find upsetting.

'A few hundred years ago, the oceans were home to millions of whales.

'But then we found they were incredibly useful animals.'

Every single minute of people's days

would have been surrounded by whale products.

Whales were seen as commodities to produce benefits for people.

'I've seen how whaling became an important British industry

'beginning with hunts in Scotland and forays into the Arctic,

'before a British Antarctic island became the centre

'of a global enterprise.'

The whaling industry in the Antarctic

was by far the biggest fishery... fishery that there's ever been.

'Now I discover how a breakthrough in ship design

'transformed the industry.'

It's incredible, what went on on these ships.

'And why Britain became reliant on the whale

'as an essential source of fat.'

Desperate.

The whole of Western Europe was desperate for anything to eat.

'And I continue to explore the world's largest whaling station

'to fathom why it was abandoned in the 1960s.'

There can't be another room like this in the world.

An astonishing little capsule of late 1950s life.

'For decades, biologists had realised

'that whale populations were being put under extreme pressure.'

So why did it take so long for the scientists' warnings

to be listened to?

The situation was absolutely disastrous.

I don't think we have the right to bring any species to extinction.

'If I want to understand, I have to put modern environmental guilt

'to one side and see the world through the eyes of the time.'

Why were whales so valuable

and what was it like to chase them deep in the Antarctic ice?

What was it like to be a whale hunter?

Nowadays I'm one of the youngest whalers alive.

There won't be many of us left to tell the story about whaling.

I think it should be done...

..before it's too late.

'The British Antarctic in the mid-1920s.

'Whale hunting had moved on from using sailing ships

'and hand-held lances

'to steam-powered catching ships and grenade-tipped harpoons.

'The industry was expanding thanks to a growing market for whale oil

'as a cheap alternative to animal fat

'for the soap and food industries.

'Whale stocks in the northern hemisphere

'had already been decimated and a number of pioneering companies

'had turned to the last frontier of Antarctica instead.

'Some were operating from ships anchored in sheltered bays

'around the British administered Antarctic Peninsula.

'But the world's biggest whaling centre had been established

'on the remote and uninhabited island of South Georgia -

'still a British overseas territory today.

'I've come to the largest of the six shore stations on the island.'

So this is it - Leith Harbour,

in all its beauty...

..and total dereliction.

'This whole site is officially off-limits

'due to collapsing buildings and asbestos.

'And I'm only allowed here by special permission

'and as long as I wear the appropriate protective gear.

'Leith Harbour had been set up by the Edinburgh-based company,

'Christian Salvesen, in 1909.

'The peak of productivity here was 1925

'when over 16,000 tonnes of whale oil was sent back to the UK -

'equivalent to £30 million worth today.

'So why, just 40 years later,

'was this gold mine abandoned to the ravages of weather

'and ransacking sailors?'

It's like it's been burgled.

'The foundation for all this was the abundant whales

'of the surrounding Antarctic Ocean.

'A fleet of whale-catcher ships were hunting up to 200 miles offshore

'before towing their dead quarry back to the station.

'Up to 29 tonnes of valuable oil could be extracted from each whale

'by putting its blubber, meat and bone

'through different industrial processes.'

The whole whale, 80-90 tonne whale, could be dealt with

in 20 minutes.

Arriving from the sea a complete animal,

20 minutes later, totally dispersed.

'The whalers, initially Norwegian and increasingly joined by Scots,

'were using some serious industrial power.'

You were pulling wires and that so you had to be very careful.

It could be a very dangerous job.

Your attention had to be on your job all the time.

Steam winches strapped to parts of the whale and you had to make sure

you weren't standing over these,

otherwise you could be decapitated if you weren't careful.

And this wire just sprung clear and it hit me right on the...

Which side was it? It was this side.

It whipped me right across the plant deck.

Must have went about...

25 foot.

Something like that.

I could feel my hat going up, up, up.

And then the side of the head was just swelling, you know?

Certainly health and safety was not invented then.

There was knives everywhere and big, sharp ones, too.

A cutter came who wasn't a seasoned cutter.

He was a cowboy, really.

And he started swinging with this flensing knife.

The knife came out of his hand

and went flying over my head, there.

Took the beret off my... we used to wear black berets.

Took the beret off my head.

I was lucky. It could have chopped my head off, that.

That was the biggest fright I got.

'Back in London, the Colonial Office had realised

'that the stations risked becoming too effective for their own good.

'While it welcomed the tax revenue from its wild Antarctic possessions,

'it feared a repeat of the overhunting in the North Atlantic.

'It had introduced licensing and a magistrate

'to control the scale of the stations

'and banned the hunting of the already overexploited

'humpback whale.

'But Leith Harbour was still processing

'up to 1,500 whales a season.

'With hundreds of men working in such a remote location,

'the company effectively built a small town

'to provide everything from housing to medical care.'

This must be the hospital.

This looks like a ward.

I do have a picture here of a patient in this hospital.

He does not look well, the poor man.

A-ha!

Look in here, look in here.

This...is the pharmacy.

The pharmacy from hell.

Medicines everywhere. Medicines in utter chaos.

There are tablets just scattered over these benches.

What have we got? Poultice of kaolin.

I think you put that on a wound so it dries up a wound.

Suppurating wound.

Adrenalin for adrenalin shots.

What about this stuff here?

Dry human plasma.

Of course, a hospital had to be equipped for every conceivable

ailment and illness.

'One of the doctors that worked here regularly through the 1950s

'was Dr Macintosh from the Outer Hebrides.

'One of his duties in Scotland was to examine every recruit

'before they sailed south.'

What he would say to you was, how much blood is in your alcohol?

He was really quite an amusing fella.

He'd just take a look at you and he knew I was perfectly healthy.

"Fine. Off you go."

Dr Macintosh kept a diary of his life here

and he's very matter of fact about the stream of things

that come to him in the surgery in this hospital.

"Sunday, December 2nd.

"Had quite a busy day with two particularly nasty cases

"of metal splinters in eyes

"which were not nice things to deal with.

"However, with the help of lots of local anaesthesia

"and patience, everything came out all right."

He was clearly a phlegmatic and capable man.

"Quite a number of minor accidents during the day,

"including one gent who stupidly grabbed hold of a steam pipe

"to the detriment of his hand."

'As the whaling boom of the 1920s continued to build,

'the head of London's Natural History Museum, Sir Sidney Harmer,

'strongly suspected that licensing was failing

'to ensure a sustainable industry.

'He realised that the only way to rein in such profitable operations

'was to present the whalers with solid facts.

'But as very little was known about whales,

'Harmer pressed for a scientific investigation,

'funded by an increased tax on whale oil production.

'A legacy of this visionary programme

'still exists in Britain today.'

I'm here at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton,

to see their brand-new research ship, the Discovery.

'A new committee headed by Harmer bought Captain Scott's old ship,

'the original Discovery,

'for the first research voyage to the Antarctic in 1925.

'With the whale oil tax flooding in,

'they were soon able to build a more modern successor.'

To undertake research into the diet, habits and the migrations

of the whale, the Discovery Committee dispatched the royal research ship,

Discovery II into the Antarctic.

-NEWSREEL:

-The royal research ship Discovery II is leaving

St Katharine's Dock, London, on her fourth expedition to the Antarctic.

For the next six months,

they'll have continuous daylight and sunshine.

Lucky dogs.

Hello, I'm Adam. Nice to meet you.

'Professor Howard Roe is a former director

'of the National Oceanography Centre.'

-Will you show me?

-I'll show you some of what's going on.

'His career began doing biology at a whaling station.'

Here, there are cranes either side of the A-frame

for handling equipment down here.

There are bigger ones there with a heavy reach.

'The Discovery Investigations were hugely ambitious -

'ahead of their time in studying the whole Antarctic ecosystem,

'and revolutionary in being funded by industry.'

This is the winch system, the heart of the ship.

For instance, over there you have 15,000 metres of tapered warp

for trawling nets.

-The scale of it. 10 miles!

-Yes.

'Scientists deployed new devices and techniques to probe everything

'from microscopic plankton to the whales themselves.'

Here on the bridge gate is the direct link

-with the Discovery Investigations and the current ship.

-Look at that.

That is the badge of the Discovery Investigations from the 1920s.

-This is some bridge, isn't it?

-Absolutely.

I mean, this feels like a nightclub.

'A few fundamental questions form the basis of the Investigations.'

How old were the whales? What did they feed on?

How often did they breed?

Where did they migrate to? They knew they didn't stay there all the time.

How long did it take them?

In order to be able to get some feel for the size of the whale population,

and the effect that harvesting this would have on it.

The endgame was always to prolong the industry as a

commercially-viable organisation,

because of the tax revenues they got.

'Alongside the ship-based work,

'a South Georgia base was established, Discovery House.'

'Biologists spent the whaling season taking samples

'from the carcasses brought in by the whalers.'

We weighed the testes of male whales,

we weighed the ovaries of female whales,

we took counts of the corpus luteum

on the ovaries that indicated how many calves the whale had had.

'The Discovery Investigations

'also attempted the first whale tracking system.'

To start with, they had developed a whale mark like this.

You can see it has "Reward for return to the Discovery Committee."

And they each had a unique number, 4219,

and the whole thing was fired from a 12 bore shotgun.

You fire them in and it sat there

so that the surface was on the surface of the whale.

The position where the ship was was noted.

The whale hopefully is caught, sometime afterwards,

at a different position.

And when it is processed, the whale mark is recovered.

It doesn't look like it's got much a of a grip.

-Well, that was the problem.

-Oh, right.

Cos these are tiny, these little barbs, aren't they?

Hundreds of these were fired into whales,

-not one was ever recovered.

-Really?

And it was discovered that live whales are very capable

of shedding nasty parasites and things that stick onto the outside,

and in 1932 a new whale mark was designed.

It's a long steel tube with a number on it

and the information about the reward.

The position where it was marked was known,

the position where the whale was caught subsequently was known.

And you would know for a certainty that the whale must have moved

from point A to point B.

So the whole migratory pattern of the whales was found.

-The different species of whales was found by doing this.

-Yes.

Mark number 1484, this was the oldest ever recovery.

This whale mark had spent 28 years in a whale.

It went right the way through the process,

and it finally turned up in one of the meat meal boilers.

The man from the meat meal boiler came running out with it

and was very pleased to show me it, because he got a reward for it.

This was the first proof that anybody had, real proof,

that whales could live so long.

So there's no way you can know about the life of a whale,

-unless you kill it.

-Yes.

And the next step on that -

to save whales, you have to kill them.

Well...in a sense, yes. The...

..science of the large whales depended upon the whaling industry.

These are not animals which you can get to grips with

unless unfortunately they're dead.

If you can imagine walking alongside an animal 70, 80 feet long,

trying to sample it, this is not easy.

These animals would already have been killed.

They were there, so it was up to us to make the best use of them

as we could.

'The whaling companies didn't like the increased tax

'to fund the Discovery Investigations.

'But they had little choice, South Georgia was British.

'And even further south, the factory ships,

'where they butchered the whales alongside needed the sheltered bays

'of the Antarctic Peninsula, which was also British.

'And so they too had to pay the tax.'

The Norwegians had an answer to this problem

which was to take one of these whaling stations

and to put it on board a ship.

The way to do that was to make a stern slipway,

just like the slipway coming onto the plan here.

And then to use the deck of the ship as the plan.

Then take the big processing plants,

the blubber plant, the meat plant and the bone plant,

and put them down below under the deck,

so that the ship became a completely self-contained processing unit

which could go wherever the whales were.

The same machinery is crammed into a 16,000 tonne ship.

No room whatsoever to do anything.

You're crawling between pipes, up ladders.

It was hot as hell. You were always looking for water. Water to drink.

It's incredible what went on in these ships.

'The stern slipway was a revolutionary leap for the industry.

'By being able to process whales at sea, the new factory ships could

'follow their fleet of catches to wherever the hunting was best.

'This was called pelagic whaling,

'and also allowed the industry to escape regulation.

'The British only controlled the seas up to three miles

'off their territories,

'beyond which the entire Antarctic Ocean was fair game.

'The seeds were sown for the industry's self-destruction.

'As well as the station at Leith Harbour,

Salvesen's had two old-fashioned factory ships

'operating in the Antarctic bays further south.'

Very nice office. Nicest room in the whole place.

'Then a young manager visited Leith Harbour, Harold Salvesen,

'the first of the family ever to make it down south.'

He had been a lecturer in economics at Oxford

and had got fed up with that.

The family were trying to persuade him to join the firm,

so we came down here to see what was going on.

He began to apply all of those

new, rational, systematic, technocratic ways

of looking at how to run a business.

And he wrote some marvellous letters home.

"It looks, for the present, as if a normal or even poor year

"in the ice could pay handsomely."

Later on, he wrote,

"The fishing won't of course last for a long time.

"The more new factories and especially whale catchers

"are sent down, the shorter will it last.

"But possibilities and probabilities are so colossal at present

"that I cannot conceive of a well-managed, well-equipped factory

"failing to pay handsomely if sent down the next season,

"or even for the following."

He wanted Salvesen's to bank on these pelagic whalers.

He wanted to make money just as the Norwegians were.

'The first thing that Harold did on his return to Britain in 1929

'was to buy two liners to convert into factory ships

'with stern slipways.

'He also ordered 13 powerful new catcher ships.

'This modernisation of the fleet cost nearly £700,000.

'Over 100 million at today's costs.

'Harold also knew that demand in Europe was rapidly increasing.

'The process of turning whale oil into a more valuable solid fat,

'hydrogenation, had just been improved to produce

'a spreadable fat without any taste of whale.

'This allowed more of it to be used in foods

'and by 1933, 37% of the fat in British margarines was from whales.

'I visited Norway to find out the impact that this new ship technology

'and expanding market had on whale catches.

'The Sandefjord Whaling Museum houses the records

'that a Norwegian whaling bureau collated annually.'

So these are the international whaling statistics

in the years before the Second World War.

And they're putting in the numbers of whales

that they're catching every day.

Giant animals - 84 feet long, 77 feet long,

one of them pregnant, it says here it had a nine-foot foetus in it.

The very interesting thing about it is that before

those big, technological changes of the mid-1920s,

very few whales are being killed.

This is the total width for 1920 to 1922, a slim volume.

But then, after factory ships were introduced in the late '20s,

things start to expand.

By 1930 to 1931, you are up to this.

This is a measure of the vast number of whales

that were being killed.

'Meanwhile, the Discovery Investigations were

'starting to learn some important facts.

'The greatest concentration of the whales' food,

'the tiny crustacean krill, was to be found at the Antarctic ice edge.

'By the 1931 season,

'three quarters of Antarctica was surrounded by factory ships

'and their catches.

'All unhampered by any regulation.

'But when the season's record haul of whale oil

'caused the market to crash,

'the industry realised that some control was necessary.

'The two major whaling nations, Norway and Britain,

'agreed to restrict themselves to 2/3 of that bumper year -

'around 28,000 whales a season.

'Even with the catch limits,

'Salvesen's investment in their modern ships

'was paying off handsomely.

'Over the decade of the 1930s,

they posted a profit of £1.1 million,

'equivalent to 365 million today.

'Leith Harbour remained an active whaling station during summer.

'And over winter, it became the service centre

'for Salvesen's fleets of whale catchers returning from the ice.'

When the season ended,

there was a possibility of you

staying in South Georgia over the winter.

That was when all the whale catcher repairs were done

and they were all made ready for next season.

The engineers and everybody would make a list of things

that were needing done, the boat was all to be painted, inside, outside.

They've got everything in there that was required for working -

they could build a ship. I was put on the deck gang.

So that's everything from the top of the masts

right down to the water line! That's what we did.

It was very well paid and we were well fed. I do know that.

It was quite an attractive proposition.

Being out in the country over a year, you got all your tax back,

so you came home with a fairly hefty pay packet.

My payoff was £1,100 for 18 months.

So that was a lot of money at that time.

You bought a house for £600 or £700.

Maybe get a new fishing boat built, go into some sort of business.

Quite a few businesses in Shetland today

that were started on money earned at the whaling.

'Without whales to be flensed,

'the whalers that overwintered had more time to enjoy the island.'

The big events were the skiing events.

You had other stations coming in and joining in.

I thought, "I think I'll get into the ski jumping."

I liked watching this.

Danny Morrison was a good skier. He made more of it than me.

I've got a photo here...

..of the ski jump here at Leith Harbour

and I think if you come just about over here...

..I think we must be pretty well at the bottom of the jump here,

because here is a picture of a man in full flight.

So I think the jump itself must be just up there.

There is something collapsed here, into this little valley.

I wonder. I wonder. Ah, I think this is it.

I think that that is the deck of the jump itself.

Which of course is snowed up in the winter, and maybe even...

There is the kind of starting gate, there, that top framework.

So, yeah, I think this is it.

This is actually the Leith Harbour ski jump.

How exciting is that?

The jump starts near the top until the bugle blows.

And they set off down here, roaring downhill, as fast as they could...

You're heading down at one hell of a rate.

And you are all off-balance, you're trying to get your balance.

HE LAUGHS

Before you know it, you are on take off.

You must get past the big flat part

or it will be like falling off a two-storey building.

This is where you land.

Or the bit of slope you hope to get to.

As long as you got onto the downhill, when you fell, you just rolled.

Which is what happens. But my next jump was much better.

It was pretty good. It was pretty good. Danny was pretty good.

I think Danny was related to a penguin.

'But life on a remote Antarctic island wasn't for everyone.'

It's a long time, 18 months. A long time to be away from home.

Sometimes you got a wee bit fed up at night,

you wanted to wish you were back home again.

Life was what you made it.

It could be good or bad, it all depends on your mental attitude.

Dr Macintosh talks about whale sickness,

which seems to have afflicted a lot of people -

a combination of frustration and boredom

when no whales were coming into the station.

But, for some people, depression could be a lot worse than that.

'Each of the whaling stations on the island had its own cemetery.

'Whalers who died were laid to rest a very long way from home.'

They are all so young. 25, 37.

29.

There's a friend of mine down there. He found that... At the latter end,

he just lost the plot.

'A boy called Tony Ford.'

He came from Edinburgh.

Here's Tony Ford.

"Deck galley boy." 19 years old.

I've got a record here of his death.

"April, 1952, Anthony Ford.

"Mess boy. British. Cause of death, strangulation.

"Coroner's inquest, suicide. Whilst balanced of mind, disturbed."

That's a tragic story, isn't it?

A pitiable end, poor man, poor boy.

'By the mid 1930s,

'whale oil had become an essential part of Europe's food supply.'

Look at this.

Look what the wind can do here,

folding in the whole side of the tank like that.

When it was working, this tank, like the others,

filled to the brim with whale oil.

Imagine the number of whales needed to fill this.

And nearly all of that oil going back to Europe to make margarine.

'As the Second World War approached,

'several nations realised they needed to secure their own supply

'of this vital fat.

'Seven new factory ships were commissioned by Germany

'and four by Japan.'

'Britain and Norway had lost control of the industry.

'By the eve of war,

'Antarctic catches reached 46,000 whales in a season.

'Blowing apart their attempt at regulation a few years earlier.'

This is the gun that the whalers were given by the Government

to defend South Georgia during the Second World War.

But it was a hopeless old thing.

Here, amazingly, is a shell.

That went in there, I guess.

Don't know, I've never done this before.

And off it went.

Really nothing happened in South Georgia during the war.

All the whaling ships were taken away from here.

The factory ships to work on convoy duty,

bringing supplies across the Atlantic,

cos the Government thought

that was more important than getting whale oil.

And the catchers to work as minesweepers.

So the people who were left here were really left with nothing to do.

And the idea that they could have popped off at some German cruiser

coming here with this old thing was of course laughable.

I've got a list here of the Salvesen ships

and what happened to them in the course of the war.

It is a very sobering document.

"Glen Farg, torpedo, lost.

"Brandon, torpedo, sunk.

"Albuera, torpedo, sunk." One after another.

And a huge loss of life - "nine men killed," "all hands drowned,"

"presumed all lost."

On and on and on.

In fact, every single British factory ship

was lost in the course of the war.

As the war approached its conclusion,

Britain was desperately short of food, including fats.

We were absolutely on our... knackered.

'The hull of an aircraft carrier

'was given a new use halfway through being built.'

It became obvious to the Government that aircraft carriers

were not nearly as important

as something to get some bloody food into Europe.

The importance of a whaling factory ship

overtook that of an aircraft carrier.

Therefore, Balaena was converted into a whaling factory ship.

-NEWSREEL:

-So urgently was a catch needed

that the finishing touches to the factory machinery

were added after she sailed.

'The Balaena belonged to the British firm, Hector Whaling.

'Whilst Salvesen's launched two purpose-built factory ships

'of their own.'

'Scientists and some whaling bosses realised that,

'if the industry wanted a long future,

'there couldn't be a return to the 1930s free-for-all.

'In 1946, the International Whaling Commission, or IWC,

'was established to bring together industry leaders and scientists,

'including the Discovery Investigations biologists

'based at London's Natural History Museum.'

Delegates to the IWC negotiated a quota for the number of whales

that could be caught each year.

The figure they set was two thirds of the catch before the war.

That was 16,000 blue whale units a year,

which meant they could catch 16,000 blue whales

or their equivalent in smaller whales.

'One blue was considered equal to two fin whales

'or six sei whales.

'Many IWC scientists realised that this quota

'was too high to be sustainable.

'But unable to justify anything lower to a Europe desperate for fat,

'they reckoned it was better than no quota at all.'

Feels very James Bond in here.

THEY CHUCKLE

'I'm being allowed a sneak view behind-the-scenes

'with collections manager Miranda Lowe.'

Fantastic. What are they?

Well, what you can see here,

in the jars, are a lot of the oversized fish

collected on various scientific expeditions.

They are really mysterious. I mean, how old these things?

Some of them are over 200 years old.

Some of the specimens were collected by Charles Darwin.

'This building also stores a large proportion of the specimens

'from the Discovery Investigations,

'established in the 1920s to find out more about whales.'

We're in the Crustacea collection, so we're passing through the miacids,

-the amphipods...

-The amphipods.

..isopods and we're going to eventually get to euphausiids.

-Ah, these are the krill, then.

-These are the krill, exactly.

And we have cupboards full of the Discovery Investigation krill.

Look at that, it's jar after jar after jar.

Every single one of them, hauled up.

More cupboards here.

We have more cupboards here. And it keeps going on.

If you think of the months

and years of people's lives that are poured into these jars.

A massive investment, but it provides scientists with a huge amount

of baseline data that they can use to compare to more recent research.

The scale of sampling was vast.

You might have thought that the data from it should have provided

the scientific basis for sustainable whaling.

But the industry didn't want any reduction in quota,

and they soon found a way of sidelining

the scientists by claiming that not enough biology

had yet been done to prove that a reduction in quota was necessary.

So they sent the scientists off to do yet more biology.

'A lot of emphasis was placed on getting more data.'

But it's not data that's involved, it's methodology.

It's to know what to do with the data!

'While the biologists were kept busy collecting,

'the industry could continue to

'chase the large, globally-applied quota.'

Oh, my God! Look at that.

Look at that!

Fantastic. Wow!

'The catcher ships found that they were in a race,

'as every company tried to bag

'as much of the allowed total for themselves.'

Sometimes, a couple of boats would sight whales,

and it was a race to get to them, to be the first there.

It's obviously something built for drive and power,

it's got a whopping great prop on the back there.

If there was another catcher, you were shouting down to the engine,

"We need a bit more speed!

"Someone is racing us here!"

You didn't want to put up a smoke signal,

because other catchers in the distance...

Of course, a puff of smoke told them you've increased speed.

Something like 14 factory ships down at the ice at the same time.

Each of them having 14 to 15 whale catchers,

so you begin to get an idea of the size of the competition.

That's the galley, there's the cooking range.

There was radio connection between the factory ship and catchers

because obviously they would need to inform on what whales had been shot.

It was all in code,

so that the other people couldn't listen in to where you were fishing.

If there was a lot of whales in one particular area,

certainly the last thing you wanted to do

was to advertise that to competition.

'The race meant that companies invested

'in ever more catching equipment.

'And the whole quota could be caught in as few as 60 days.'

'With so much money being pumped into the industry,

'no-one wanted to reduce quotas to more sustainable levels.

'Meanwhile, Salvesen's average profits for the early 1950s

was running at around a million pounds a year,

'equivalent to 73 million today.

'Leith Harbour continued to be the nerve centre

'of their whole Antarctic operation.

'And some of the money went to improving life for the whalers.'

Ah, look at this.

It's the film archive!

There's a reel, and miles and miles of dumped film.

Every image...just gone.

Oh, wow, there it is, there's the projector.

How amazing!

The film case there.

And just imagine that noise, that wonderful cinema noise it made.

They would show pictures maybe three times a week.

But after the first three months

then you were starting to see them all over again.

What the hell was it?

The Quiet Man? The Quiet American, was it?

John Wayne.

And I thought it was terrific. I saw it 16 times down there.

So, this is the cinema. There's the projector room at the back there.

So, that was quite the highlight, you know, the films, three nights a week.

Here we go.

"Seven Brides For Seven Brothers.

"The Prisoner Of Zenda" with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr.

"The Last Time I Saw Paris" with Elizabeth Taylor.

I mean, you can just imagine them all gazing longingly

into Elizabeth Taylor's eyes.

Or cleavage.

Huge, huge up there.

FILM PROJECTOR WHIRS

Oh, look, there's...

There's film with what looks like images on here.

Let's see if I can...haul that out.

Look, it's been preserved.

Hundreds and hundreds of feet...

..just streaming out of the mound of powder.

What have I got here? Ah! Australia...

..hails the Queen.

That's what's going on - it's the Queen arriving in Sydney.

On the Britannia with the Duke at her side.

PRESENTER: The royal yacht Britannia took the Duke way down south

into Antarctica to see for himself what this ice-bound region,

inhabited by seals and penguins, was like.

'On his world tour, after leaving Australia,

'the Duke of Edinburgh was happy to be seen visiting the region's

'great contribution to the British economy.'

PRESENTER: Whaling is the chief industry in these parts,

and this is how he was transferred to the whale-catching vessel.

The Duke, who'd grown a trim beard, went to inspect the ship

and talk to her company about their jobs.

I dropped an orange box over the side and offered him

a chance to see if he could hit it with the harpoon gun.

I can't recall if he hit it or not.

PRESENTER: He also landed at the whaling station itself.

of course, it sent them into a complete frenzy

of excitement and anxiety.

The royal household were very concerned to know

whether Salvesen's had a flagstaff here which could be flying

the Royal standard as the Duke arrived.

The Salvesen managers were anxious to know

whether they should wear lounge suits for the occasion.

He was wearing a duffle coat and he looked as if he needed a shave.

In fact, he did need a shave.

'The whaling of the 1950s

'even became the centre of attention on the silver screen...'

Whales! To starboard!

'..with Salvesen's fleet providing the exotic backdrop

'for a romantic adventure starring Alan Ladd.'

Watch out for that rope!

A hit! A hit! A hit!

'Shooting whales was clearly an exciting and acceptable way

'for Ladd's dashing hero to prove his manliness and sex appeal.'

-Some business.

-I'm going to get ready to go aboard.

'By the late 1950s the price of whale oil was falling.

'It was being replaced by vegetable oils

'as the preferred fat for soaps and margarine.

'To find new markets,

'British whaling companies began their own research.'

The role of science was to develop, as far as possible,

by-products based on, particularly, whale meat.

To squeeze every last drop of value out of the whale,

the companies started to build meat extract plants like this one.

They subjected the meat to all kinds of modern processes

and out of the other end came a dark, viscous, gloopy substance.

And it was sold in Europe for the new fad of instant soups

and it made a lot of money for the companies.

By the early 1960s,

Salvesen's were making £1.3 million a year out of it.

'But by now, the effects of a quota set way above any sustainable level

'for 15 years was plain to see.'

Well, I think we all knew that time was up.

You were not getting the catches that you used to.

There was nothing left.

We were going down for the season,

hunting for ages for a fish - you couldn't see them.

The first year I went down they were all round you, they were everywhere.

'In 1961, Salvesen's saw that Leith Harbour was losing money

'and decided to run down the station and scuttle some of the catchers.'

'Meanwhile, some countries were trying to make the most

'of what was left down in the ice,

'by increasing the scale of their pelagic fleets.

'Japan bought the Baleana from Hector Whaling,

'and the Soviet Union launched the largest whaling expeditions

'the Antarctic has ever seen.'

There was that many people down there, there's that many factories

were down there - the Japanese, the Russians, South Africans.

'A push at the IWC for a more realistic quota

'had merely resulted in the breakdown of the existing system,

'and the number of factory ships in the ice reached 21,

'supplied by 270 catcher ships.

'So, why have the scientists not stopped this happening?

'I went back to the Natural History Museum to ask Professor Howard Roe.'

-Howard.

-Hello, Adam.

-How are you? Lovely to see you.

This is the place, isn't it, where whale science -

the heart of whale science - was being done in the '50s and '60s?

Yes, more or less underneath our feet...

was the old Discovery hut.

It was a black shed, basically, constructed in the 1920s

to house the samples from the Discovery Investigation.

Why did it take so long for the science, or the investigation

they were making, actually to impinge on the industry?

You could not hope to persuade the whaling industry

or any regulatory body, without the basic data to support the argument,

which was, after all, exactly why the Discovery Investigation was set up.

It was set up to provide the data which would allow regulation.

-And that is exactly what it did.

-In the end.

-In the end.

It took until the late '50s/early '60s before the group of scientists

began to encompass specialists in population dynamics,

by the appointment of Radway Allen, Doug Chapman, and Sidney Holt.

Basically, we were bringing what we now call "mathematical modelling"

from the fisheries world into the whaling world.

Biologists had been collecting information, measuring the whales,

looking at their ovaries to see how many babies they'd had

and that kind of thing.

But none of those scientists had any what we'd call "numeracy"

and it was that skill that we brought to bear on the data

that the biologists had been collecting.

Tucked in their office drawers was all this stuff about...

reproduction rates and things like that.

So the first thing we did the first two years was to assemble it all,

put it on punch cards and as soon as we looked at the data

we could tell the situation was absolutely disastrous.

Within a year the blue whales were very close to extinction.

The fin whale - tiny fraction of what it had been.

This is the earplug of a fin whale. Just the core end of it.

The outer casing goes all the way to the outside...

and it might be three feet long, four feet long.

-That much ear wax?

-Yes.

We couldn't, at the time, tell the ages of the whales,

and being able to say how old a whale is, is crucial.

This is the important bit.

This is where the tympanic membrane goes and that creates this inner core

and it creates alternate light and dark layers.

The light coloured layer, which is full of fat,

-when they're feeding...

-It's the krill-y layer.

-Yes.

And the dark layer, in the subtropics, when they're not...

Not breeding.

Pair of layers equals one year in the life of whales.

-That is exactly like a tree. A winter and summer ring.

-Yes.

So, what was the effect of that discovery

on the way people understood whales?

Well, it gave the statistical people, the modelling people,

a firm basis on which to base their statistics.

They'd know the absolute age of the animal throughout its life cycle.

We'd done our work in such a way

that it was extremely difficult to criticise it.

The science was so overwhelming they couldn't deny it.

We said that the blue whales they should stop killing, anyway.

And reduce the blue whale units, as they were,

to a quarter or a fifth of what they had been.

So, why did industry accept that things had to change?

-Was it the science? Or was it money?

-It was a combination of two.

They recognised that the science was becoming harder

and harder to argue against.

It also knew perfectly well that the number of whales was falling,

so it was economically much less profitable

to send whaling fleets to the Antarctic.

And if you had to choose between those two factors,

economics and science, which was the more powerful?

Sadly, economics.

'By the time Sidney and his colleagues

'released their damning report on whale stocks,

'Salvesen's factory ships were making a loss.'

They were sending down these factories and all these men,

and not catching fish, so therefore, he wasn't making any money.

Well, the whales were gone, weren't they? They were gone.

'Aware that the writing was finally on the wall,

'Salvesen sold their factory ship quota to the Japanese,

'bringing centuries of British whaling,

'including 55 years in the Antarctic, to an end.'

You were sorry to see your way of life go, that you enjoy.

But you understood why and I think, along with every other whaler,

would say they were glad we pulled back from the brink.

'After British whaling had ended,

'the IWC quota available to the remaining countries

'was drastically reduced,

'although more slowly than the science recommended.

'The hunting of blue whales was banned in 1966.

'With new science and anti-whaling campaigns...'

Stop killing the whales.

'..the taking of fin and sei whales was banned in the 1970s.

'Finally, in 1986, the IWC declared a moratorium on whaling,

'until a time when a sustainable approach could be guaranteed.

'Japan, Norway and Iceland continue to hunt whales,

'predominantly the small, more plentiful, minke whale.

'In total, over 1.6 million whales were killed in the Antarctic.

'So where does this leave their populations today?

'Ecologist Mark Carwardine has an up-to-date picture.'

In some species - humpback whale, for example, southern right whale -

they seem to be doing pretty well,

and some of those populations are increasing as fast as theoretically

possible, so they're doubling every ten years or so, which is fantastic.

Other species, blue whale being perhaps the frightening example,

doesn't seem to be bouncing back at all.

We don't know exactly how many there are,

maybe somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 worldwide.

And it may be that they're spread out so thinly

that there aren't to actually build the numbers back up.

So, although we stopped whaling in the nick of time,

literally the eleventh hour, before the biggest animal on the planet

disappeared altogether, it may still be that it doesn't make a comeback.

'Leith Harbour's working life didn't quite finish

'with the end of British whaling.

'In the mid-60's, Salvesen's had leased the station

'to a Japanese company to produce whale meat,

'a high-value dish back in Japan.

'But after two years even they couldn't make it pay

'and Leith Harbour was finally abandoned for good.

'Responsibility for the ghost town has now reverted to the government

'of this British overseas territory,

'who are in the process of working out just how to manage

'this decaying, but unique relic of our industrial past.'

It's 50 years now

since Salvesen's last expedition came back from the Antarctic.

It's now history.

Of course it should be remembered.

It happened, it was necessary,

it happened, and you can't deny history.

In one way, the whole history of whaling in the 20th century

is just a business story.

There was a huge market in Europe.

Companies came out here. Got the whales.

And serviced that market - and made a huge amount of money in doing it.

But, of course, it's far, far more than that.

The people who came whaling did that with enormous skill

and courage and enterprise.

These were, for me, the greatest memories,

and I would love to go back down there and just see it all again.

Right, further over. Come on, you can do it.

I'm very proud to have been a whaler.

Very, very proud indeed.

It was part of British life.

The cost was really enormous -

over a third of a million blue whales,

nearly 700,000 fin whales.

And all for what? To make margarine and soap.

I don't think we have the right to bring any species to extinction,

and we ditched that just in time.

I'm glad it's finished, you know?

Because it was...pretty cruel when you think about it.

It's deeply ambivalent, this story.

And I can't really resolve that.

And I think that what I feel in the end

is that I very, very much admire the whalers -

what they did, the courage they did it with, the skill they did it with.

But I really, really hate the whaling.

All I can say is, you know, I don't want...

whalers to be forgotten.

That's good.

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