Elephants Troop Past Fenwick's, Northumberland Street, Newcastle.

My favourite mammal is the Elephant.  I’ve seen many in the wild and stood within metres of a few.  I could go on to tell many a tale involving Elephants, animals certainly not to be messed with, but that is not the reason for this blog.

With time on my hands and as Chuck Berry once said, no particular place to go, I’ve begun to go through old family photographs of which there are many in my home.  I knew within this collection there was at least one which showed Elephants trooping past Fenwick’s on Northumberland Street, Newcastle, and I was lucky enough to find it in the first batch of photographs I pulled out yesterday.

I have in the far recesses of my memory a picture of me standing on Northumberland street as a small child watching an Elephant or Elephants, which I think were on the way to a Circus or an Exhibition on the Town Moor.  That would have been in the early 1950s and I can’t be certain this photograph is of that occasion.  However, I do know this photograph would have been taken probably in the early 50s by my mother. I find it hard to imagine this was only a few years after the ending of the World War Two.  I’m thinking I might be able to make out tramlines on the road, but I don’t know for sure when they were removed.  Trolley buses ran when I was a small child but perhaps the tramlines were still in place.

I have no idea how many times Elephants have trooped up Northumberland Street, which was of course the main AI at the time this photograph was taken.  Does anyone remember being there I wonder?

I’ll save my story of me having been bitten by a monkey on the Town Moor for another occasion.

I have a clearer memory of going to see a large cetacean at Blyth.  Cetaceans are up there with my favourite mammals too.  In this case it was not alive and it was some years after the troop of Elephants.  It would have been either the late 1960s or early 1970s.  Now if you were around at this time you must remember the appearance of Jonah the Whale.

I tend to keep all things associated to visits outings etc, so have an odd assortment of information from my past years and I have a small leaflet which gives facts about Jonah, but is lacking any dates.  I must have read it at the time, but having read it more recently much of the information seemed new to me, so maybe I had just put it to one side and forgotten it.

Having done a little research I’ve found that Jonah was one of three Fin Whales killed for ‘scientific reasons’ in a joint project between the Norwegian Whaling Industry and the World Wildlife Fund.  The whales were hunted and killed around 1952/53 and Jonah had been involved an earlier tour of the UK in the 1950s.  Initially this all seems to have been an attempt by the whaling industry to seek positive publicity.  I can’t believe the WWF would get involved in such a project these days!  I’ve read the Jonah eventually fell into the hands of showmen, and it is they perhaps that were responsible for the showing at Blyth, although the WWF are still shown on the leaflet as being involved in the sponsorship.   Do the remains of Jonah still exist I wonder?

Below is an image of the leaflet giving information.  

Click to enlarge

I have put this information on my blog as it is historically interesting.  I would not wish any reader to assume I support in any way the killing of Cetaceans and the use of Elephants in shows of any kind.  I prefer to watch wildlife where it ought to be, in the wild.