A walk back in time to the whaling days of The Bluff

A tour to the abandoned Old Whaling Station, now a world heritage site, brought up memories of a regrettable bygone industry, writes Yvonne Fontyn.

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The tour to the derelict Old Whaling Station in The Bluff, KwaZulu-Natal, is one of the most popular offered by Durban Walking Tours (DWT), even though, thankfully, whaling was outlawed in South Africa in the 1970s.

Clearly, this relic of a now-abandoned industry holds a strange fascination.

You have to book early to get in, our tour leader, Ruth Hagen, told me when I went in November 2024.

Like many other DWT tours, this particular one cannot be conducted every month, as permission for every outing must be obtained from the South African National Defence Force, which owns the land.

In October 2019, the World Cetacean Alliance announced that The Bluff had become the world’s first certified whale heritage site. Announcing upcoming tours to The Bluff whaling station, DWT says in its newsletter that, during its years of operation, it was one of the largest land-based whaling stations in the world. Established in 1907, it continued operations until 1975.

“At its peak in 1965, it processed over 3 640 whales killed by its fleet. In the early 1900s, it became common knowledge that more whales passed closer to Durban's shores than any other coastal city in the world,” according to the newsletter.

HUGE INCENTIVES

The Union Whaling Company (UWC), founded by Norwegian-born businessman Abraham Larsen, was the main operator and offered crews huge incentives.

“In a year, a worker could make enough money to buy a car and pay for a year’s study at university,” explains Hagen. It was one of the first whaling stations to be established.

In his book on the whaling company, titled A Whale of a Time, former general manager Peter Froude notes that in 1952, a gunner earned £25 000 (about R15 million today!) for three months’ work, with senior personnel on the factory ship being accommodated in some comfort.