The Two-Headed Whale

Sandy Winterbottom

(Birlinn, £14.99)

Just over five years ago, Sandy Winterbottom went on a journey. After leaving the University of Stirling, where she lectured in Environmental Sciences, she had worked in the renewable energy sector, finding suitable sites for wind-farm developers. At 50, with two kids in their late teens and a husband suffering from depression, she needed a break. Having always loved sailing, she signed up for a voyage on the Europa, a three-masted Dutch barque, which was heading from Uruguay via South Georgia to the Antarctic.

The Two-Headed Whale, her memoir of that trip, gives the impression that she expected Antarctica to be a pristine blank canvas, a place where she could leave the industrialised world behind and lose herself in the purity of nature. If that had been her hope, it was shattered when she set foot on South Georgia, once a hub of the whaling industry and now a “dispiriting scrapyard” of detritus from its boom years.

Winterbottom, an environmentalist and animal-lover, had always had a particular hatred of whaling, and was filled with disgust and fury by these leftovers from an era in which literally millions of the creatures were slaughtered. Then, something caught her eye. It was the gravestone of a young man named Anthony Commiskey Ford, born in 1933, who hailed from Granton in north Edinburgh and died at the tragically young age of 19 in the bleak landscape of South Georgia – at a whaling station named, ironically, Leith Harbour.

“I’d imagined the whalers as hardy men with little compassion, killing and slaughtering their way through dwindling communities of every kind of whale,” she writes. But this boy was barely older than her own son, and came from a city she knew well.

For the remainder of her time in the icy Antarctic waters, she was preoccupied by thoughts of Tony Ford, and upon her return to Scotland spent two years researching whaling so that she could piece together as much about his life as she could. She recalls how her Christian education had encouraged her to see the world in binary terms, as right or wrong. But in the South Atlantic she had started to feel “a rising wave of compassion towards the men who lost their lives here”, men engaged in a trade she had always believed was morally indefensible.

Although Tony Ford left no written records behind, Winterbottom’s reconstruction of what he might have experienced on his demanding four-year stint as a whaler is remarkable. Interwoven with an account of her own trip to Antarctica, it follows him as he applies, aged 15, at the Salvesen office on Edinburgh’s Bernard Street for the post of a mess-boy aboard the factory ship Southern Venturer, which sailed from Newcastle in 1948, up to the point when the 19-year-old Tony finds himself stuck, seemingly indefinitely, in the “stench and filth” of South Georgia.

Considering it was written by someone who detested whaling, it’s a triumph of research which recreates Tony’s world in incredible detail. Winterbottom confronts her readers with the almost unimaginable scale of the industry, both in terms of sheer numbers (ships bagging 2000 whales in a season get a telegram from Salvesen’s head office admonishing them for slacking) and in how each slaughter of an individual whale on a factory ship’s slipway was a gargantuan spectacle of butchery. And it brings home how gruelling a job it was, physically and mentally, taking a terrible toll on its workers. Above all, it’s a moving and compassionate eulogy for a young man who, without Winterbottom, would have remained anonymous and unremembered.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT