Hello and thank you for downloading this episode of Witness History from the BBC World

Service with me, Rachel Naylor. Today I'm taking you back more than 30 years to the opening

of one of the world's most remote museums on a British island in the South Atlantic.

It remains open today and gets 15,000 visitors a year.

It's 1954 and five-year-old Jan Cheek and her family are moving to South Georgia,

an island on the icy southern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, just above the Antarctic Circle.

It's one of the world's largest wailing centres, but to say it's remote is an understatement.

It's one of the most isolated places on Earth.

It was a three and a half day boat ride from the Falkland Islands on a tiny steamer with

scientists and sheep.

The sea journey was horrendous. Seats are very rough.

We were in a very small cabin, and apart from my mother, who was an amazing sailor,

the rest of us would dreadfully seasick all the way.

Once we got there, it was exciting.

Again, one of our first impressions was of a young elephant seal falling out of the

Atlantic, because we walked up the path.

Tuscac was a very long, strong grass, which gave us something of a fright,

and then we were kept awake that night by the adult sort of grunting outside our bedroom window.

Even to a child's eyes, I could see how beautiful it was, the clear water.

But then when we looked across at the wailing station, it was very industrial.

And on days when they were flensing, that is cutting up whales,

on the wooden platform that they did that work on.

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