GLEN VAUDREY: The lost grey seal of Dobby's Lock

Whenever I find myself in a new place with a few hours to spare I try to visit the local museum to see what cryptozoological delights it might contain. While I have yet to find an example of anything resembling either a stuffed almasty or a glass case containing a giant spider with a body the size of a dinner plate I have nevertheless spotted a few items of interest.

The first thylacine I saw (don’t get too excited it was stuffed) was in a dusty cabinet in of all places Kendal museum, it was a while ago and all I remember about it was that it had a vague hint of purple about it. Having taken a few pictures of the unfortunate creature I then promptly misplaced them and it would be over ten years before they resurfaced. Frustrating as the search for those photographs had been I had at least the knowledge that I hadn’t lost a photo of a live thylacine.

The next rather surprising animal that I found was an out of place seal. You could say that being stuffed and put on a plinth in Warrington museum is about as out of place as a marine mammal could get and you wouldn’t be far wrong. What was truly remarkable about this grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) was how it found its way into the museum’s collection.

It was on the 17th June 1908 that the lock keeper at the delightfully named Dobby’s Lock on the River Mersey two miles upstream from Warrington noticed something unexpected in the water, an adult male grey seal. The reason that it was so unexpected is that this point is over twenty miles from the sea and considerably further still from the North Wales coast where it was believed the seal had come from.

For the creature to have reached so far it would have had to have swum up the Mersey as far as Howley weir which it was assumed to have cleared with the help of a high tide, and then continued on its way westward. The seal may have successfully negotiated Howley weir but Dobby’s lock proved more of a challenge.

Despite its obvious desire to make the journey all the way to Manchester the seal managed to get no further than Dobby’s lock for in the all too familiar ending to tales like this it was promptly shot dead. It then took a good number of men to drag the 8ft 5in long, 104 stone body out onto the quayside where it was laid out for public viewing, for a small charge of course. Word of the seal soon got around which resulted in the Warrington Museum Committee purchasing and mounting the specimen for the princely sum of £7, money well spent it seems for after it went on display in the museum’s gallery in the summer of 1908 there were an extra 14,000 visitors by the end of that year as a direct result of the interest generated in the fate of one lost grey seal.