| AdminHistory | Now part of the Mammal Galleries, Gallery 24 was opened as the new Whale Hall in 1932, replacing an iron building lined with match boarding erected in 1898. The old Whale Room was located at the western end of the Museum, intended only as a temporary home for the cetacean displays until the Queens Gate wing of the Museum was built according to Waterhouse’s original designs. Being temporary, there was insufficient room to display large skeletons – a Greenland whale was represented by a jawbone, the Blue and Humpback whales simply by flippers.
By the 1920s it was clear that the Waterhouse extensions were never going to be built, and the parlous state of the Whale Room, along with general concern about whaling at this period – an issue that Sidney Harmer, Keeper of Zoology, was particularly involved with – lent urgency to the campaign for new accommodation for the cetacean collection.
The location at the rear of the Waterhouse building was only decided upon after plans for the western end of the site were abandoned. Furthermore, the Hall as it stands today is only half the size of the original plan – it was designed to be built in two stages, so from the architect’s point of view it has never been completed.
Designed by John Markham from the Office of Works, the aim was for the hall to be lit by as much natural light as possible, and the overall impression is not dissimilar to the top-lit galleries at the back of the Waterhouse building. The intention was maximum simplicity so as not to detract from the exhibits, so the steel framework, initially left showing, was encased and the internal surfaces plastered. The architect did add some dark blue decoration to the ceiling, to emphasize the form of the building and prevent the monotony of continuous white plaster. However, the border and the stars around the ceiling grilles were later painted out, being considered too distracting. The ‘very high class linoleum’, selected by Markham as ‘cleanly and cheerful but above all silent to walk on’ and patterned to reflect the structure of the building, has also since been replaced.
When the new building (or the first half of it) was finished, there were insufficient funds to install the whale skeletons and other exhibits. So the opening display in the new Whale Hall was an exhibition of the game animals of the British Empire, which ran from May 1932 until March 1933. The hall then lay largely empty until the installation of the whale skeletons and other models began in January 1934.
It was first proposed to make a cast of whale, more accurate than ever before attempted, in 1933, but it was not until 1937 that work began in the Hall itself to build a life-size model of a 90ft (27m) Blue Whale. A wooden frame was covered in wire mesh and plaster, and completed in December 1938. The measurements were taken from carcasses on whaling ships or beaches. Since the development of underwater photography, we now know that the shape of the model is slightly distorted – a live Blue Whale at rest has more streamlined, torpedo-like shape – but it is not entirely inaccurate, as the grooved throat sac can be seen while the whale is feeding. |