Skegness Magazine

Source: Skegness Standard 1985/86

Whale hunters were out in force on a beach near Skegness at the weekend, after a 50ft Sperm whale was washed up dead at Gibraltar Point.

Representatives of the British Museum were pulling teeth and many local people went down just to look.
Meanwhile, Mr Malcolm Whitehead of East Lindsey District Council’s environmental services was worried.
His problem was how to dispose of it — it was dead and gradually getting very smelly.
“We had two alternatives,” he said. “The first was to wait until the weekend, when there will be a high Spring tide, and tow it out to sea.
“But there are problems with that. We’d have to sink it somehow, and I don’t know how to sink a whale. And by the weekend, it have decomposed so much that it might fall apart when we try to move it.

“The people from the British Museum advised us not to blow it up — not that we were thinking of it — because somebody tried that on the Northumbrian coast and showered Newcastle with whale!”

So Mr Whitehead’s answer was to bury it on the beach.
This has often been done with whales before, but not with one as big as this.
Mr Whitehead said that was was possibly the biggest whale ever to be found in the area, and certainly the biggest in recent years.
Mr Duncan Yeadon of Natureland identified it as a male sperm whale.
Fifty feet long and seven feet high, the whale’s lower jaw was six feet long.
The sperm whale is one of the world’s largest carnivorous creatures, and lives on squid, cuttlefish, octopus and shark, but has been known to swallow humans.

Recent Whale Strandings on Skegness Beach