Beside them in Sabin’s office are two jars of noodlish-looking nematode parasites, a giant pair of antelope horns, a squid beak, a whale rib honeycombed with age and wrapped in tissue paper, two or three posters of cetacean types, a computer, and a framed copperplate document listing exemptions to the Royal Fishes Act.

It is that Act which explains the eyeballs. Royal Fish - or, more correctly, Fishes Royal - are those cetaceans (whales, sturgeon, porpoises, dolphins, and ‘generally whatsoever other fish having in themselves great or immense size or fat’) which were once claimed by the Crown. These were not whales or porpoises killed during commercial hunting, but those which had - either deliberately or accidentally, dead or alive - stranded themselves along the shores of Britain. It remains a matter of debate why cetaceans beach themselves, but the fact is that they always have, and that they continue to do so.

Until very recently, the by-products from cetaceans were considered extremely valuable. Almost every part of a whale could be used for something - baleen plates in filter-feeders became whalebone for corsetage, spermaceti oil lit the Scottish lighthouses, ambergris was used as a fixative by the perfume trade, the teeth could be decorated with scrimshaw, the tendons were threaded into surgical catgut, the bones supported furniture, the skin became bootlaces or bicycle saddles. Whale and porpoise meat - considered by one early consumer to be of; ‘very hard digestion, noysome to the stomack, and of a very grosse, excrementall and naughty juice,’ was nevertheless considered a mediaeval delicacy.

Since ambergris alone was worth more than its weight in gold, the Crown, which in any case retained the rights to anything of value washed up on British beaches, appropriated the rights to cetaceans as well. The king, it was thought, should get the head of any dead whale, and the Queen the tail - it being erroneously considered that the tail yielded more whalebone for corsetage than the head.

By the 20th century, however, there were far fewer uses for a dead whale. Baleen had been replaced by plastic, spermaceti oil by electricity, and whale meat by foods that were actually edible. Dead whales came to be regarded as useless for anything other than zoological research. In 1913, the Crown handed over its prerogative to the Natural History Museum in London, giving them first refusal on any future strandings.

Which is how Sabin - a gentle, wry man with an evident passion for his job - came to be responsible for 7,500 assorted cetacean parts, several jars of nematode worms, and two eyeballs. Any whale, dolphin or porpoise washed up along British coasts is reported to him, logged on the museum’s strandings database and then either claimed for science or disposed of.

All of which sounds quite straightforward in print, but is less so in reality. There are some very interesting logistical difficulties in getting, say, a 16-ton, 40-ft fin-whale from some stormy cove in the Outer Hebrides to Central London. In the early days, says Sabin, ‘Most of the big animals were brought back here. How, I’ve no idea, but they brought humpback whales, sperm whales, into Central London and de-fleshed them.’ By what means, exactly? ‘We’ve got photographs of humpback whales being lowered into a pit in the ground at the back of the museum where the Darwin Centre is now. They’d be left in the ground to rot for a few years, then the bones would be pulled up, cleaned, pinned and put on display in the whale hall.’ Right. So the museum had decomposing whales on site in the middle of Kensington? He smiles. ‘Yes.’

Sabin has several explanations for the apparent increase in strandings over the past few decades - modern fishing practices, the consequences of pair-trawling, sonar interference, competition for feeding - but, just as often, strandings are the consequence of age or disease. He leads me off into a large ante-room filled with locked metal cabinets containing a few of the museum’s several million specimens. On a trolley by the door are two large skulls - one, weirdly asymetrical, belongs to the same pygmy sperm whale as the eyes. Below it sits the lower jawbone, which looks at first sight like a rare and elegant flower - two graceful flutes of translucent bone joined by a pale stem. The other skull is older, and in less good condition. It is also completely toothless, and the back of the skull has been worn to lacework by cancer.

The skull belonged to a bottle-nosed dolphin which found its way up to Tower Bridge on the Thames two years ago. She was sick, malnourished, disorientated, and very much weakened by several weeks in fresh water. When she died, Sabin and the river police retrieved the corpse. ‘The police,’ says Sabin, ‘were quite upset by the process - we used a body bag that would normally have been used for a human retrieved from the river. They said, well, we’re used to pulling people out of the river, but dolphins are a different matter.’
He personally deals with only those strandings which present problems, or which, because of the rarity of the species, most interest the museum. The most frequent strandings, almost half of the average annual total, are harbour porpoise. The rarest are the whales - sperm whales, minkes, killers, Sei whales and Fin whales - which occasionally turn up in British waters. And since, in many cases, the museum already has all the specimens it needs, what exactly you do with a putrefying Minke on your pristine blue-flag beach becomes a whole other question.

Which is where Sophia Exelby comes in. Exelby is the sole custodian of what may well be the most beguiling - and most exclusive - job title in Britain. She is the UK’s only Receiver of Wreck, a post that was once filled by eighty separate Receivers in different parts of the country, and is now administered by a couple of women in a dank Southampton office block. Receivers were created by the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 to deal with the consequences of shipwreck. Originally part of the Customs and Excise, they were charged with reuniting wreckage with its owners, and in preventing the looting and plunder of ships. But she also has juristiction over Fishes Royal, and what exactly happens to them when science is no longer interested.

Exelby is young and brisk, but when I ask her about whales, she smiles. ‘Yes,’ she says wrily, ‘It’s one of the less salubrious parts of the job.’ When Sabin and the Natural History Museum can’t put a stranding to good zoological use, Exelby is responsible for ensuring its disposal. Which, as usual, is more complicated than it sounds. ‘Now, of course, whales are what’s technically termed a ‘managed waste-product’ under EC regulations,’ she says, ‘which means that you can’t do what might be considered to be the most sensible thing, which would be to tow them back out to sea, weight them down and sink them naturally. So you then have to think of other methods of disposal - incineration, burial - either in situ or on a landfill site. Certainly in the past various methods have been tried, such as blowing them up and burning them - things that don’t prove terribly successful.’

Those of a ghoulish disposition may find it educational at this point to type in the words ‘exploding whale’ to an internet search engine and admire the results. In 1970, a 45-foot, eight-ton Pacific Grey Whale stranded itself on a beach at Florence, Oregon. The US State Highway Division concluded that burial or dismemberment were not suitable options, so the best way to dispose of the animal would be to blow it up. The final clear-up job would, they hoped, be completed by seagulls and scavengers. News of the stranding had got around, and by the time the highway division had stuffed the whale’s belly with half a ton of dynamite, a large crowd of spectators and a local TV news crew had gathered on the beach nearby. The resulting video shows the detonation, accompanied by an admiring murmur from the crowd, and then the unmistakeable sound of curiosity changing to fear. Blasted high into the air by the explosion, half-ton lumps of decomposing whale blubber began to rain down on the spectators and their cars. Though no-one was badly hurt, the seagulls sensibly kept their distance. In the end, the Highways Division was forced to bury the remains.

How many strandings does Exelby have to deal with? ‘So far this year, (2002) we haven’t had that many - we’ve had a handful, but I’d say a dozen or less. Of the big whales, we’ve only had two or three. And then a lot of dolphins. The dolphins are so much smaller that it’s very much easier for someone to just put them on the back of a pick-up truck and drive them to the local landfill site. They’re easy to deal with - it’s the big whales that are the real problem.’

Since dynamite is evidently not much of an option, those responsible for British strandings may find themselves confounded. Down on the seafront at Deal in Kent, Andy Roberts mans the coastguard station. He’s a good-natured character with an air of bluff competence you’d trust your life to in a crisis. But the crisis he dealt with two years ago was of human devising. A whale had been spotted, stranded on a beach over at Sandwich and still alive. Initially, they thought it was a Minke whale - the most frequently stranded of all the whales. Roberts got in touch with both the RSPCA and a local marine life organisation, who told him to keep the whale upright. Roberts, remembering the conversation, laughs. ‘I said, this whale is nearly 40 ft long and about 22 tons, and if he wants to lie there on his starboard side, he’s damn-well going to lie there on his starboard side, and there’s not a lot I can do about it.’

When the vet arrived, it transpired that they were dealing not with a Minke, but with a Humpbacked whale - the only humpback to have stranded in Britain, in fact, for the past 100 years. And Humpbacks are not small animals - they are filter-feeders between four and six metres long when newborn, and up to 19 metres when fully developed. This particular humpback was also, ‘not well - not well at all,’ Roberts says. ‘I remember standing next to the whale and asking the vet what the prognosis was. The vet put his arm around my shoulders, led me about 40 yards away from the whale, and whispered, ‘not so good, I’m afraid.’ It was odd, that thing of leading me away - I think he felt very emotional about it, almost as if it was his granny dying, and that you wouldn’t say anything about her condition in her presence.’

Since it was now evident that the whale would not survive to be refloated, the decision was made to have it put down, or - more correctly - to euthanase it. Unfortunately, euthanasing a whale was evidently going to take something far stronger than the barbiturates commonly used to put down dogs or cats. ‘They used a drug called Imobilon,’ remembers Roberts, ‘which is 10,000 times more powerful than morphine. Most vets only carry enough to kill a horse, so the vet had to contact all the other vets in the area and see if they had further supplies. He ended up with enough to kill an elephant, but that still wasn’t going to be enough, so then he contacted Howlett’s Zoo nearby. They’ve got elephants, so they need to keep supplies of Imobilon, but they wouldn’t come out because of the Foot & Mouth outbreak. So in the end, the vet injected all the Imobilon he had into the whale. Gradually his breathing and heart rate slowed, and he died.’

Once dead, the responsibility for the whale passed from the RSPCA to the Natural History Museum and the Coastguard. Having completed a post-mortem on the whale, the NHM vets established that the humpback was a young male, 10.66 metres long and 16 tonnes in weight, and profoundly malnourished. It had also been suffering from a kidney disease, which was probably the cause of stranding.

They then had to find a method of disposing of the body. It was generally agreed that neither burial nor incineration were possible, and because of EU rules it was therefore necessary to take the whale’s remains to a nearby landfill site. Matters were further complicated by the risk of contamination by Immobilon, and the difficulties in keeping the public away. ‘You don’t really have that much chance of disguising a 30-ft humpback whale, do you?’ points out Roberts. ‘His flukes were about 15-20 ft across, and this whale had to be driven through the historic town of Sandwich with a bit of plastic over it, without anyone seeing it - it was tricky, believe me.’

Roberts’ colleague, Tess Vandervliet, remembers the difficulties they had in wrapping the whale and lifting it onto a low-loader. When they did finally complete the loading, Vandervliet went with the truck to the landfill site. It was then that the organisational difficulties of the stranding gave way to more profound considerations. Throughout our conversation, Vandervliet refers to the humpback as ‘she’, despite knowing that it was male. Listening to her, I realise that there’s a kind of logic to this switch of gender - ‘she’ restores the whales’ identity, rescuing it from being merely a lump of intransigent blubber to a creature which once had a far richer story than the one which ended on a Sandwich beach.

As Vandervliet says, ‘II found it quite upsetting, the way she was disposed of, just pushed into a huge hole like that. It was such an undignified end, so ungainly. The landfill site was the only possible option, but it was still terribly sad; I cried while it was happening. You look at humpbacks, and they’re such wonderful, elegant creatures in the water. But when they’re dead, they’re just this huge unwieldy lump to be disposed of.’

Though the humpback had stranded itself in a relatively populous area, cetacean carcasses are often left to decompose naturally in more isolated parts of the country. Once in a while, however, the darker spirit of British enterprise still intervenes. Part of the Receivers’ original mission was to curtail the activities of wreckers - those who were prepared either to actively engineer a shipwreck, or to passively filch the proceeds. Though it is the Cornish who generally carry the infamy for wrecking in Britain, there is good evidence that it occured in almost all coastal areas, and that it extended to far more than just general cargo.

And, as Richard Sabin found, even whales can still be considered fair game. In 1995, he was called out to a 60ft fin whale on the Pembrokeshire coast. It had been dead for several weeks, and was already decomposed, ‘to the point,’ says Sabin, ‘where the skin and blubber of the animal had started to split, and the skeleton and skull had started to slide out of the skin ... But by the time we got to the cove, the skull had gone, most of the vertebrae had gone, virtually all of the ribs except one had gone, and one of the scapulae had gone.’

Frustrated, Sabin began asking around. ‘I discovered that a local fisherman had backed his boat up as far as he could into the cove, tied a rope around the skull, and used his boat to pull the skull off. He took it across the bay and around the headland over to the National Museum at Cardiff. He called them and said, ‘I’ve got this whale skull, how much will you give me for it?’ They said, ‘That’s a royal fish, you’ve broken the law, mate, we can’t do anything for you.’’ The fisherman, disgusted by his lack of success, cut the rope there and then, and the skull sank.

‘When I got down there, we heard all these stories - there’d been a pregnant woman and two children sitting down there next to the carcass having a picnic. And when they’d finished, they took a couple of the vertebrae, stuck them in a couple of bin liners, and went back up the cliffs.’ They found later that, ‘there were people with the bones in their gardens, one of the scapulae appeared hanging up outside a workshop, cleaned and signwritten - traditional things to do with them, but a bit annoying as far as we’re concerned. I ended up with one rib, one scapulae, and about six tail vertebrae, and that was it - the whole thing had gone.’

Sabin picks up the honeycombed whale rib in its tissue paper. Ribs like these, he explains, were once used to build houses. In some ways, whalebone was the ideal construction material; it had durability, flexibility, tensile strength, and - for those lucky enough to live in areas where there were frequent strandings - it was free. Though many whale species have been hunted to the point of extinction, there is something equally terrible about a stranded animal finding its final resting place in a landfill site. Whales were once too useful for their own good; now they have no use at all, except as souvenirs, specimens, or jokes. Which, you wonder, is ultimately the worse fate?