A new project launching this week in Dundee brings together long-lost stories, photos and personal artefacts from Scottish whaling communities, not to glorify the industry, but to preserve its human history.

They came from Shetland, from Leith, from fishing towns scattered along Scotland’s northeast coast. Most were young, many still teenagers. Drawn by the promise of adventure, wages and a route out of poverty, they travelled nearly 8,000 miles to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, right into what was then the booming centre of the global whaling industry.

Over the past two years, the South Georgia Heritage Trust and the South Georgia Museum have worked closely with former whaling communities in Scotland to create the Whalers’ Memory Bank. The project was made possible thanks to the support of National Lottery players and funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

From Friday, their voices and memories will echo online in the Whalers’ Memory Bank, a new digital archive curated by the South Georgia Museum. Described as a “living growing digital time capsule”, the project brings together photographs, oral testimonies and personal belongings from former whalers, their families and communities, with the aim of preserving the social reality of life in the shadow of the harpoon.

“We’re not celebrating the industry or condoning whaling,” says Jayne Pierce, project director and curator at the South Georgia Museum. The project, indeed, aims at telling the story of the men who went there through their hardships, the camaraderie, the reasons they went. Somehow, stories that have never really been told.”

A people’s history of whaling

Modern whaling in the Southern Hemisphere began in 1904 and continued until the mid-1960s, with Britain, and particularly Scotland, playing a central role. British companies ran the operations, but it was working-class Scots who made up much of the workforce. For decades, whaling was considered ‘just another job’, albeit an extreme one.

The Whalers’ Memory Bank reframes the story away from statistics and industry profits, and towards the everyday lives of the men who lived and worked on South Georgia. Through donated items and oral history interviews, the archive provides a rare glimpse into a rugged existence that combined isolation, physical hardship and surprising creativity.

“We’ve gathered a lot of photographs,” Pierce explains. “The industrial companies’ archives focus on ships and factories, but the ones we received from the men themselves show something else. They speak of life behind the industry.” 

Since the launch of the project in June 2023, the South Georgia Museum has held several workshops with former whalers, who shared their stories, knowledge, and personal collections. The museum has also collaborated with other Scottish institutions and received several hundred objects, all now part of the Memory Bank.

The platform offers a valuable insight into the daily lives of whalers in South Georgia, 8,000 kilometres from home. Whaling stations and factory ships functioned like small towns, with a wide range of roles: processing whales on land or at sea, working as radio operators, kitchen assistants, blacksmiths, or even helicopter pilots tasked with spotting whales. These lived experiences are told through films, oral histories, photographs, and other archival materials.

Visitors will also be able to take a 3D virtual tour of a South Georgia whaling station, where no fewer than 176 000 whales were processed across the island.

Among the most evocative objects are hand-carved whale teeth shaped into penguins, pieces of knitted clothing, and improvised tools used in daily life. Long forgotten in drawers and attics, these items have only recently been recognised for their quiet historical value. They offer a deeply personal glimpse into what mattered to the men who lived and worked in South Georgia, revealing not just the harshness of the job, but the humanity of those who endured it.

Last voices from the ice

While the Memory Bank includes institutional archives, it is the testimonies of former whalers that form its heart. Only around 30 to 40 veterans are still alive today, mostly in their 90s, and the team worked closely with ex-whalers’ associations in Shetland Island and Edinburgh to capture their stories.

Interviewing the former whalers has been an emotional and deeply rewarding experience for Jayne Pierce and her colleague Helen Balfour. “Some haven’t spoken about it in years. To sit with them, to hear their memories in their own words, it’s powerful.” What struck her most was how close the past still feels. “We tend to think of the whaling industry as something distant, but it’s not. It’s tangible,” she says. 

The conversations have helped dispel myths, she says, including the widespread assumption that whaling was exclusively Norwegian or American. “From a British-UK point of view, many people believed that it was somebody else doing it. It was the Norwegians or the Americans, when it was actually a very important element of British social history.”

A memory made accessible

Accessibility is central to the project’s design. All of the archive is freely available online through a Creative Commons licence, and from Friday, visitors around the world can explore it at whalersmemorybank.sgmuseum.gs.

Broadcast live on the South Georgia Heritage Trust website, the official launch takes place today in Dundee, Scotland, with the participation of historian Dan Snow. A recording will later be made available on YouTube. A 3D virtual tour of the Grytviken whaling station is also in development.

But the project’s reach doesn’t stop at British shores and may only be a beginning. “We’ve already started working with the Sandefjord Whaling Museum in Norway, and we know South Georgia had workers from Germany, Argentina and Spain too. We’re going to expand to include those other stories that are more international.”

Remembering, not romanticizing

For Pierce, the Memory Bank is as much about reckoning as it is about remembering. Whaling, she notes, left a devastating ecological impact that continues to shape conservation efforts today. But within that painful legacy lies a human story worth telling, with honest, not nostalgia.

“Some of the men were chasing adventure, some just needed to feed their families,” she says. “Yes, it was a terrible industry, and we need to acknowledge that. But we also need to understand why it happened, and who the people were who lived it.”

After two years spent immersed in these stories, Pierce says the experience has affected her more than she could have imagined. “It’s been really quite a powerful project. I’ve been working in museums for 20 years and I think this social history project has been really fulfilling.” 

The true power of the Whalers’ Memory Bank lies in its ability to connect past and present, not through statistics or grand narratives, but through the quiet dignity of lived experience. These stories, objects, and voices offer more than a window into history; they remind us that behind every industry are human lives shaped by necessity, resilience, and memory.

Live event : Friday 27 June, 11:00 BST. Stream via South Georgia Heritage Trust

To explore the Whalers’ Memory Bank: whalersmemorybank.sgmuseum.gs

Short film about the project: Watch here