The sperm whale skeleton described in Moby-Dick adorned his stately home
John Chichester-Constable, who has died aged 84, was heir to Burton Constable, a splendid though crumbling pile in the flatlands of east Yorkshire. His greatest achievement was the restoration of this house, which is filled with extraordinary objects assembled by his ancestors – not least the skeleton of a sperm whale that was described in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
The largest house in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Burton Constable is a romantic compendium, substantially Elizabethan but remodelled in the 18th century, set not far from the fast-eroding coastline of the North Sea. It is over this bleak strand, from Flamborough to Spurn Point, that the Seigniory of Holderness, a title held by the owners of Burton Constable, extends an eccentric fiefdom: the right – elsewhere ceded to the monarch – to "royal fish". Any whale, dolphin, sturgeon or porpoise cast up on these shores (which have a long history of cetacean strandings) becomes the property of the lord paramount – of which Chichester-Constable was the 46th.
Thus, when a 58ft male sperm whale was found on the beach at Tunstall in 1825, Sir Thomas Constable sent his steward, Richard Iveson, to claim it as a gigantic addition to his cabinet of curiosities. Relieved of its blubber, it was articulated on a metal stand in the grounds, alongside an avenue of trees. And there, over the decades, it slowly rotted and rusted into the earth, awaiting its rediscovery.
Chichester-Constable was born in London and educated at Eton. During the second world war he served in the Rifle Brigade. In 1945 he was stationed in Germany, where his duties included clearing up Belsen concentration camp. Back in Britain, he attended the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester, Gloucestershire, and farmed in Berkshire, then worked for North Sea Ferries. He had a stint in advertising and sold encyclopedias door-to-door. He married Gay Sawbridge, an estate agent, in 1962, the year in which his father died, leaving him the house and 6,000 acres, one third of which had to be sold to pay death duties.
But Chichester-Constable had a more novel way of solving the financial burden. In 1964 he and his wife took over the management of a local beat combo from Hull, the Hullaballoos. The band sported long dyed blond hair and were photographed for their debut album cover posed on the ornate staircase at Burton Constable and billed as "England's Newest Singing Sensations". "Music has been played here since the 16th century," said their landed gentry patron. "My forebears had their minstrels, the Hullaballoos are our 20th-century minstrels." In 1965 the Hullaballos reached No 56 in the US charts with their version of Buddy Holly's I'm Gonna Love You Too, but they sank into obscurity back home.
Chichester-Constable turned instead to the restoration of the house, which had been badly damaged in 1941 when two German mines had landed on the roof. The Burton Constable Foundation was set up to return the house to its former glory, and it was as part of these renovations that the whale resurfaced. Arthur Credland, curator of Hull Maritime Museum, recalled meeting Chichester-Constable in 1969 and being asked to assess the remains. "He had come across Jay Leyda's book on Melville [The Melville Log] and the sources of Moby-Dick and as a result was stimulated to uncover the remains of the skeleton which had been totally lost, sunk in mud and covered in plant growth."
In Moby-Dick, Melville turns this relic into a teasing metaphor for imperial folly: "At a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a sperm whale … articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities – spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan – and swing all day upon his lower jaw."
As a boy, Chichester-Constable had swung from those bones. As a man, he would land his private aircraft on the field next to the avenue that had become known as the Whale Belt. With his love of gadgets – including a motor glider, a "caraboat" (a caravan/boat chimera), a microlight and a hovercraft – he brought Burton Constable into the 20th century. He still presided over his right to stranded cetaceans. He told me that he had once gone into a cobblers' in Hull to ask for a pair of boots to be made for his wife from the skin of a porpoise. The shoemaker declined on the grounds that the smell would drive their customers away.
In 2007, I interviewed Chichester-Constable for the BBC2 Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick (sadly excised from the final cut). He was graciousness itself, showing no sign of his supposedly fiery temper as he read aloud from Melville's book. Handsome and dressed in dandyish tweeds, he entertained us with tales of his famous whale whose bones, restored by Michael Boyd, now lay in the great hall. Living in a leased wing of the house, this lively, devout and dapper man seemed rather stranded himself, albeit in elegant circumstances, among the accumulated history of his ancestors, those 45 other lords paramount.
Gay died in 1989. He is survived by his daughter, Rodrica.
• John Raleigh Chichester-Constable, landowner and businessman, born 6 April 1927; died 7 December 2011