OLL LEWIS: Another Fine Ness

78 Years ago today, a little piece of cryptozoological history appeared in a newspaper that really should have known better. Oll Lewis investigates...

April Fool's Day has always, for me, been a day to look forward to, not least because of the many eccentric and tall tales that appear in the press. Some of my favourite April Fools have been last year’s flying penguins documentary from the BBC (which probably didn’t fool anyone but looked incredibly cute) and a fake video game preview where the aim of the game was to kill as many innocent people as possible, in a magazine called Playstation Plus. The game was obviously fake and it doesn’t seem that funny a concept, but laughs were had when a certain tabloid newspaper, upon hearing about the game decided to run a campaign to “ban this sick filth!” The magazine took great joy in pointing out that the tabloid had not only fallen hook, line and sinker for the prank, but was also guilty of copyright theft for reprinting their mocked up screenshots without permission, and served as a gentle reminder to tabloids to actually do their research before they run a story.

A hoax can be seen as a bit of jolly japery or harmless fun if the perpetrators come clean before any real damage is done. If not then it becomes a very different kind of animal indeed that can have unforeseen consequences. One such hoax occurred in the winter of 1933 on the banks of Loch Ness.

Earlier in 1933, a new section of road had been completed which, as a consequence, meant that a large number of people would get a clear view of and easy access to the shore of that part of Loch Ness for the first time ever. Sure enough it was only a matter of months before sightings of a strange animal started to filter through to the media, starting with a sighting by George Spicer and his wife on the 22nd of July 1933.





Reports of a strange animal showing up in the loch were soon tied to folkloric accounts, going back hundreds of years, of strange animals lolloping around in the waves and on the shore of the loch. Sensing that the story of the year, or possibly even the decade was about to break most of Britain’s national news agencies, and several international ones, soon had their correspondents positioned in Inverness and several other vantage points around the loch.

The Daily Mail decided to go one better though. Rather than just paying some random bloke to send them back stories of peoples sightings and negosiating the rights to any photos, their man would BE the story. The Mail basicly wanted Allan Quatermain to hunt for the monster, but as Quatermain was a work of fiction they got the next best thing, Marmaduke Wetherell. Wetherell was the perfect character to create a buzz for their paper: He was an actor and film director, so certainly knew what played well on film and cinema newsreels and he knew his stuff about hunting, having been a big game hunter in Africa for a number of years. The fact that he had the sort of looks that at the time would have caused many women to swoon in the street, also counted in his favour. The message was clear, if anyone was going to find the monster it would be the Daily Mail’s dashing action hero, you might as well not even bother reading another newspaper!

In December 1933 the Mail’s man struck gold. Wetherell found a line of large four toed footprints only a few days after he arrived in Loch Ness and took casts of them using plaster of Paris. From the spacing between the tracks Wetherell estimated that the creature must have been over 20 feet (6m) long. Wetherell sent the casts to the Natural History museum and while he waited for their staff to come back from their Christmas break so they could analyse the casts, Wetherell and the Daily Mail went public. The Daily Mail and the cinema news reels went crazy for the surrogate Quatermain’s discovery of the first physical proof of the monster’s existence, surely with Wetherell on the case it was only a matter of time before the monster itself was found. The number of Daily Mails that would be sold with a photograph of Wetherell twiddling his moustache while standing aloft a ‘bagged’ Nessie, smoking shotgun over his shoulder didn’t bear thinking about.

Unfortunately the Mail and Wetherell would come down to earth with a bump in January 1934. Upon return from their Christmas break, Natural History museum scientists eagerly unwrapped the plaster casts to take a look at them and determined that they were not only of a hippopotamus’s foot, but all of the same hippopotamus foot. It is thought that the tracks were made by somebody stamping an ashtray or umbrella stand made from a stuffed hippopotamus foot and that someone had laid out the tracks as a hoax. Who laid out the tracks is unknown; possible suspects including a local hotel owner, a rival journalist wanting to take Wetherell down a peg or two or even Wetherell himself.

Wetherell is probably the least likely suspect however as if he knew that all tracks had been made by the same foot he probably would have had the good sense not to send the casts to experts who would spot that right away. Regardless of who laid out the fake tracks, the damage was done, and all the papers, including the Daily Mail, turned on Wetherell, blaming him for the hoax. His reputation irreversibly damaged the Daily Mail sacked him and wrote damming articles about him that stuck the knife in and twisted it into the open wound whilst exonerating the Mail from any blame in the matter.

All this hurt Wetherell deeply and he, along with his son, Ian, son in law Christian Spurling, planned his own revenge on the Daily Mail. Ian Wetherell bought some plastic-wood and a toy submarine from Woolworths and Christian moulded the plastic wood to form what looked like a head and neck above the submarine before setting it afloat in the loch and taking photos. The next stage of their plan was to use a go-between, Maurice Chambers, to get a trustworthy acquaintance of his to pose as the photographer and sell their photograph to the Daily Mail. A gynaecologist friend of Chambers who had a practice in London, Robert Kenneth Wilson, obliged and the photo was published in the Daily Mail in April 1934. The photo became known as the surgeon’s photo and is probably the image most people think about when Nessie is mentioned.

Marmaduke Wetherell had got his revenge on the newspaper but never personally revealed his involvement in the hoax, perhaps believing that it would be discovered as quickly as the hippo-print hoax and leaving the Mail itself with egg on it’s face this time, but by the time he realised this wasn’t going to happen he was in too deep. It was only when a 90 year old Clinton Spurling confessed to the hoax in 1993, to Loch Ness researchers David Martin and Alastair Boyd, that the photo was finally debunked. Even after Spurling's confession there are still people who believe the surgeon’s photo is not a hoax and others who believe that because the photo was a fake this means that there is no such thing as a monster in Loch Ness.

I don’t know for certain whether a monster lives in Loch Ness or not, but one thing is sure, the fact that one photograph was fake doesn’t mean that everything is. The problem comes when people base their opinion on something on a hoax related to it and ignore any other evidence that comes along after.