To this, Mr. J. A. Sparvel-Bayly, of Billericay, wrote (1879, p. 58):—
“In the little village of East Tilbury in Essex, situate on the banks of the Thames, and not far from Romford, is a house known as ‘Whalebone Cottage,’ in front of which is an arch composed of the jawbones of a huge whale. From their weather-worn appearance they may possibly have belonged to that alluded to by S. P.”
In reply to this, Mr. W. Phillips (p. 338) stated that—
“The jawbones spoken of by Mr. Sparvel-Bayly as being at East Tilbury, ‘not far from Romford’ (it is twelve miles from Romford as the crow flies), cannot be identical with those mentioned by S. P., whose account I can corroborate, so far as knowing the jawbones he mentions, forty years ago, when travelling on the box-seat of the old Colchester Coach alongside a coachman of the Mr. Weller sort, of some sixty-five summers. The two bones were then in existence on the north side of the road near the tenth milestone, and two miles the London side of Romford, in front of a roadside public-house with the sign of the ‘Whalebone,’ which my coachman said used to be the resort of the many highwaymen that once infested Chadwell Heath close by. He spoke of his being told when a boy that the bones had been there from the time of Cromwell.”
From the foregoing, it is clear that there were formerly two pairs of bones set up near together; indeed, Mr. J. Perry distinctly says there were. One pair has now entirely disappeared. The other pair still stand (although S. P. seems to have overlooked them), as described, over the entrance of an adjoining house, known to this day as “Whalebone House” or “Lodge,” and marked as such in local directories. There is also in the immediate vicinity a “Whalebone Farm,” as well as a “Whalebone Lane.” The bones (of which an illustration is here given) are of the following dimensions:—
| Feet. | Inches. | |
| Height out of ground (along curve) | 15 | 6 |
| Circumference (at base) | 3 | 3½ |
| “(near top) | 2 | 0 |
| Breadth at base (flat inner side) | 1 | 5 |
| “(round outer side) | 1 | 10½ |
If, as seems probable, the bones are those of the Greenland whale (Balœna mysticetus), it is extremely unlikely that the creature which owned them was ever stranded in the Thames. The following letter from Prof. W. H. Flower, F.R.S., is of much interest. He says—
“Pairs of the lower jawbones of the Greenland whale, erected usually as gate-posts, occur in many parts of the eastern counties, especially in the neighbourhood of the old whaling-ports—the Thames, Yarmouth, Hull, Whitby, &c. They have all been brought from the Arctic Seas by whalers, at any time since 1611, when the first ships left England for the Spitzbergen whaling, which (with the Baffin’s Bay whaling) has been carried on with more or less success ever since, though now confined to Peterhead and Dundee. I very much doubt Defoe’s ‘28 feet long.’ Twenty feet, following the curve, is the maximum of the Greenland whale, and no other whale has such large jaws. I also doubt the story of the creature being stranded, because, if so, it cannot have been a Greenland whale—a species which never visits our shores.”
Larwood and Hotten, in common with nearly all heraldic writers, innocently treat of whales and dolphins as fishes, as they were commonly supposed to be in the Middle Ages. A writer in All the Year Round, so lately as the year 1879, commits the same absurd error.