Museum inherits treasure from movie’s historic adviser

The art of scrimshaw persisted well into the 20th century, and Hull Maritime Museum, which has the largest collection on this side of the Atlantic, has recently been donated a modern piece of engraving, showing a factory whaling ship marked Season 1954-1955.

Assistant curator Tom Goulder said: “We know there were Hull men working in the South Atlantic whaling trade in these years that’s why it is quite important to us, but we don’t know whether it comes from one of these men.”

The piece was donated to the museum by Thurstan Binns, whose late father Alan, a senior lecturer in mediaeval English at Hull University, collected it.

Alan Binns was a technical adviser to the 1958 film The Vikings starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis and in the early 1980s helped recreate a longship that sailed from Iceland to the Isle of Mann. Thurstan said: “The Vikings were his academic speciality but it was more than that. His whole life he was fascinated by the sea. I went in couple of weeks ago and was very proud to see it in the cabinet.

“It feels right it has ended up there.”