Remember when a whiffy dead whale toured the country on the world’s largest lorry?

There was a refrigeration unit in its belly and a set of fairy lights around its teeth so that you could look down its throat.

Some people even remember entering the carcase through a door cut in its skin near its mouth and exiting through another doorway which must have been near an appropriate orifice.

And it smelled. It had a powerful whiff of the formaldehyde with which it was injected daily, and of rotting whale flesh.
Poor thing – but it was all done in the name of science, and in the best possible taste.

According to a leaflet that was distributed when the whale, whose name was Jonah, came to Darlington in the mid-1950s, it was one of three harpooned off the Norwegian coast by the University of Oslo and the World Wildlife Fund and it was on a "cultural and educational exhibition".

And it worked. It made an everlasting impression on all who saw this leviathan of the deep when it pitched up on a low loader in Darlington’s Bondgate or Bishop Auckland’s Market Place.

In fact today, many people believe their memories are playing tricks when they recall seeing letalone when they remember stepping into the belly of the unfortunate beast – only a week or so ago in the Echo, there was a throwaway line from reader John Hill asking if he really had once seen a dead whale on a lorry in Darlington.

He did. The leaflet told how in September 1952, the boats of hunters from the university and the WWF “sped through white-crowned waves of the icy northern waters" in search of prey.

"The heavy harpoon, made of wrought iron and with an explosive grenade screwed on its point, had been placed in the harpoon-gun, " said the leaflet. "The strong nylon rope was nearby carefully rolled.

16.09: The whale swims near the surface. From time to time his massive blue black appears out of the high waves. Carefully, our gunner takes aim, waiting for a shot at close range.

"16.11: Now! The whale is hit and dispatched in a quick and humane manner."
The hunting boats towed the whale at great speed back to a whaling factory where scientists raced against time to replace its 7,000 litres of blood with the same amount of formalin preservative.

A young boy inside Jonah when it appeared at Oxford in 1954
"Entrails have to be cut out, including the liver which weighs about 12,000lb (equivalent to six standard cars), and the tongue weighing 4,800lb, or nearly as heavy as three standard cars, " said the leaflet.
There seem to have been three finback whales slaughtered for this experiment. Two, named Hercules and Goliath, toured the mainland of Europe while Jonah was shipped to Britain, entering the country at Dagenham docks where he was unloaded by the largest crane in the country. 
Then Jonah began his tour in the capital where he was seen by our very own John Phelan. John, of Crook, wasn’t in London for whale-watching but to go to Wembley to see Bishop Auckland play Crook in the FA Amateur Cup final. Therefore, he can date his encounter with the whale precisely: Saturday April 10, 1954.
From London, Jonah went out into the provinces. In 2012, Andrea Bergg of Newton Aycliffe told Memories how she had encountered the whale at St George’s Field in York.
She said: "Its mouth was propped open with a long wooden pole so you could easily see inside. To me, at that age, it seemed like a huge cave with a sort of frill round it - I remember we were told that the frill allowed the whale to sift its food."
The leaflet that went with the whale explained: "The mouth contains hundreds of baleenplates. . . which filter its food from the water."
Andrea also remembered: “It did smell, but the man in charge said this was the grease they had covered the whale with in order to preserve it.”

The front of the souvenir booklet given out when the whale’s tour reached Darlington

There are reports that as the whale decomposed, its eye popped out, and this was kept in a glass jar that travelled with it.
"The whale has stayed in my memory probably because of its huge size to a little girl and the fact that my mother told us that this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a whale,” said Andrea.
After York, the whale visited Darlington where it stopped on a derelict plot in Bondgate – perhaps where later the ring road was built. It also visited Stockton.
Following these 1954-55 appearances, the whale’s trail goes cold. Its fellow exhibits on the continent wound up in such hot countries that not even the formaldehyde could protect them, and Hercules was destroyed in Spain and Goliath in Italy.
The UK Jonah – or Jonas, as it was sometimes called – seems to have gone into cold storage from where, in the early 1970s, it was bought by a showman who took it out on another tour of smaller towns.
We believe that in Durham, it was displayed outside County Hall, and that in Bishop Auckland it stopped in the Market Place, where it was filmed for Look North.
"It was covered in tarpaulin and when they uncovered it, it was absolutely huge,” June Howell told us in 2012. "I can't remember having to pay anything to see it. The children were absolutely awestruck."
This was the whale’s swansong, and it was never seen in the North-East again.

Whale photos are very rare, but here crowds press to see it on a visit to Oxford in 1954
There are reports that in the early-1970s, a whale's travelling carcass was disposed of in a National Coal Board furnace in Barnsley but, more recently, there are stories that the body of a whale called Jonah has been found in a giant fridge on the border of Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2019, it was reported that it had been bought by another showman was about to hit the road once more.
Perhaps it was a good thing that the pandemic struck when it did and the poor whale has been able to rest in peace.

• We would love to hear from anyone who has any memories or memorabilia from Jonah’s tour in the 1950s or the 1970s. Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk if you have any whale-related stories at all.