Percy Stammwitz

Percy Stammwitz was a technical assistant, field collector and cetologist whose work helped shape how the Natural History Museum, London recorded and displayed whales. Sent to investigate and collect specimens in difficult conditions, he documented both the abundance of southern waters and the casualties appearing on British shores. His plaster models made stranded animals visible to museum visitors; the history of his work also traces a shift from collecting whales as specimens toward concern for their survival.

Fieldwork and stranded whales

In 1926 a fifteen-foot female minke whale stranded near Mablethorpe. Called from the Natural History Museum, Stammwitz tried to return it to the sea but could not. He then claimed the animal as a specimen. Newspaper accounts said it survived for a day and a half after capture and died on the journey toward the museum. Stammwitz knew it was still alive when it was put on the lorry, but reasoned that because it was unconscious, an attempt to kill it might cause greater suffering if it regained consciousness. His decision records a practical and morally difficult encounter: the effort to preserve an animal for scientific study was bound up with the question of what might happen to that animal in the process.

The museum’s collecting work took place within an emerging system for reporting stranded whales. In 1913 the Crown granted the Natural History Museum first refusal on the carcasses of royal fish, recognizing their scientific as well as commercial value. The Board of Trade asked Receivers of Wreck around the country to send telegraphic reports of strandings. Sidney Harmer, the museum’s director, collated the earliest records during the First World War. Stammwitz’s 1926 response belonged to this wider institutional practice of turning isolated strandings into records, collections and opportunities for research.

He also travelled far beyond the British coast. In 1913 G. E. Barrett-Hamilton went to South Georgia to investigate whale populations and assess whether licences could help make catches sustainable. Stammwitz accompanied him. Barrett-Hamilton died of a heart attack shortly after arriving, leaving Stammwitz to report the loss. In a letter from the period before war transformed Europe, Stammwitz described whales appearing in their thousands around South Georgia, with some reaching a hundred feet. The museum curator underlined the reference to their size and asked whether the institution could obtain a specimen. The episode holds two purposes together: recording a world of striking abundance and treating that abundance as a potential source of museum material.

Collector, correspondent and cetologist

Stammwitz’s work depended on repeated journeys and correspondence. As a young man he left his home in Turnham Green to work with the Alexander Whaling Company in the Shetland Islands. His wife wrote anxiously to Sidney Harmer to ask where her husband was and whether she should continue paying his insurance premiums. The letters register the domestic uncertainty behind the museum’s collecting operations: fieldwork involved absences whose whereabouts and duration were not always clear to those at home.

From the Shetland Islands, Stammwitz reported that fin, sei and minke whales were plentiful and that he hoped to encounter humpbacks as well. He also gathered information about whale behaviour, though some of it reflected the limits of knowledge at the time. A company manager’s answer to one question conveyed the belief that sperm whales were formidable animals and that killer whales did not attack them. Such reports show the uneven foundations of early cetology: direct observations and collected bodies accumulated alongside claims whose reliability was uncertain.

The specimens he sent back included parts of whales, from fins to foetuses. At the museum he made moulds from carcasses and used them to create replicas for public display. His annual staff appraisals, preserved in the museum library, document an extensive range of models: killer and beluga whales; pilot whales; Commerson’s and Heaviside’s dolphins; white-beaked dolphins and common porpoises; sei whales; and a young sperm whale. These were not simply a list of species. Each model translated an animal collected in the field into a durable object through which museum visitors could encounter a whale they might never see alive.

Making whales visible

Stammwitz’s skill as a maker grew out of the physical demands of recovering large animals. One difficult Yorkshire expedition involved a sixty-foot sperm whale and prompted a formal request for new boots. The museum granted him six days of special leave in recognition of the long hours and arduous work at Bridlington. The details place the replicas in the circumstances of their making: behind the finished form stood travel, strenuous recovery work and the transformation of stranded bodies into museum representations.

His models were fashioned with evident care for the animals’ appearance, and the book presents that craftsmanship as an intimate tribute to their beauty. Yet a replica is also a museum object: it converts a particular animal into a form that can be classified, displayed and viewed repeatedly. Stammwitz’s replicas hung alongside the museum’s blue whale, making his work part of a larger public presentation of cetaceans. Elsewhere in the museum, preserved bodies and labelled specimens occupy controlled storage rooms, where scientific classification determines how animals are kept and encountered. Together these displays and collections reveal how the museum made whales legible to the public, while also preserving the history of the animals gathered through fieldwork.

Whaling, conservation and legacy

Stammwitz worked at a moment when collecting and commercial exploitation advanced together. European whaling expanded into the Antarctic in the early twentieth century, and whales were increasingly caught on an industrial scale. The southern abundance he reported before the war was therefore not a stable backdrop: it belonged to a population soon placed under intense pressure. In 1918 Sidney Harmer’s records of stranded cetaceans included reports of animals used to manufacture glycerine for munitions. The same broad period in which museums documented whales was one in which whale products fed industrial and wartime demand.

The museum’s scientists and collectors also helped establish the knowledge on which later conservation efforts could draw. William Flower, the institution’s first director, had condemned the greed of whaling as early as 1885. In the account of this work, research in the Southern Ocean laid foundations for attempts to protect species just as they approached the point of disappearance. Stammwitz’s contribution was not described as a single conservation campaign; it was the sustained labour of reporting, collecting and modelling animals within an institution whose understanding of whaling’s consequences was changing.

His career continued through his family. His young son Stuart later took up the same museum post, known to curators who had watched him grow up and praised for his mechanical skill and character when sent on collecting missions with the Royal Navy. The Stammwitzs’ successive museum careers, set beside those of William Scoresby and his son, parallel the rise and decline of whaling across generations. In Percy’s work, that transition is visible in a particularly concrete form: the collector who brought whale bodies and information back to the museum also helped create representations through which the animals could be studied and remembered as more than a supply of useful material.