Odd this day
It’s the 91st anniversary today of one of the finest examples of a newspaper headline which poses a Question To Which The Answer Is No:
It was apparently the 1933 ‘sightings’ of the creature (that absolutely 100% lives in the famed Scottish lake) which started the industry of drivel which now exists celebrating its ‘existence’ — but I hadn’t realised before I started researching this that the first sighting was in 565 AD.
According to Adomnán of Iona, who wrote a meticulously sourced and wholly accurate biography of St Columba in around 700 AD:
the blessed man was living for some days in the province of the Picts, he was obliged to cross the river Nesa (the Ness); and when he reached the bank … saw some of the inhabitants burying an unfortunate man, who … was a short time before seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water
So, he did what any right-thinking holy chap would do, and got one of his monks, the splendidly named Lugne Mocumin, to jump in the same body of water. Lugne…
hearing the command of the excellent man, obeyed without the least delay, taking off all his clothes, except his tunic … the monster, which, so far from being satiated, was only roused for more prey … suddenly rushed out, and, giving an awful roar, darted after him, with its mouth wide open
Thankfully, Columba was made of stuff both stern and holy, and
There was a further ‘sighting’ in the 16th century, and another in the 19th, but it was the 20th — that great time for rationality and good sense — when things really took off. A website by the name of The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register says:
The first modern newspaper report of a monster was in the Northern Chronicle of 27 August 1930 which told of fishermen in a boat on Loch Ness being “disturbed” by a 6m long creature.
But it was the Inverness Courier of 2 May 1933 that gave the story legs. A couple from (the also marvellously named) Drumnadrochit
saw something strange in the waters … and the then fledgling BBC took up the story and publicised it to the world. … On 12 November 1933 Hugh Gray, a local man, took the first picture of what could be the Loch Ness Monster close to the mouth of the River Foyers. This picture appeared in the Daily Sketch of 6 December 1933 accompanied by a notice from Kodak that the negative had not been tampered with in any way.
Leaving aside the fact that no one needed to manipulate the photo because it may as well have been one of a dropped goldfish in a pavement puddle, a day later, they were reporting a Mr G Spicer seeing it on land. He swore he was “a temperate man” who wouldn’t just make something like that up – even though he clearly either did or was hallucinating.
As you may remember — if you have been paying attention, as I hope you have, to the vital source of information that is Odd this day — by 1941, the fiendish Italians were claiming to have deliberately, callously, and with beastliness aforethought murdered a lovely, innocent prehistoric monster.
My favourite bit of Nessie lore, though is the time in the 1970s when some firefighters decided they would lure the creature out with ‘sex appeal’, and fashioned a female monster from papier maché which they planned to float out onto the loch.
It got onto Blue Peter (although the only links I could find for that footage were to Facebook, and nobody wants to go there, do they?), but also Nationwide, which shows it being rigorously tested in… er, a large paddling pool.
Sadly, test conditions were not a guide to fieldwork, and
their creation was damaged due to a collision with the jetty and the mission had to be abandoned.
If you remain convinced that there is something in the loch, I would suggest that you read this:
But if you believe, facts aren’t going to help, are they?
In other news today…
…it’s the Feast of St Nicholas. You probably knew that, but what I didn’t know until this week was that one of his miracles was to reconstitute three boys who’d been murdered, cut up, and put in a barrel to cure so their killer could sell them as ham. According to Chambers’ Book of Days, Nicholas:
was warned by a vision of this horrid transaction, and proceeded immediately to the inn … [and] to the tub where the remains of the innocent youths lay in brine, and then made the sign of the cross, and offered up a supplication for their restoration to life. Scarcely was the saint’s prayer finished, when the detached and mangled limbs were miraculously reunited.
It’s also 90 years since the USA decided Ulysses wasn’t obscene, which is a great date in that nation’s history — because they learnt their lesson and never did anything so silly as banning books again. What a relief!
