Monster Rally

A Scottish veterinary student from the University of Edinburgh was one of the first to interest the world in Nessie. He was riding home on his motorbike along the shores of a lake in the Inverness Highlands on a moonlit winter night in 1934 when he saw the beast. "I was almost on it," said Arthur Grant later, "when a small head on a long neck turned in my direction, and the object, taking fright, made two great bounds, crossed the road and plunged into the lake."

Three-Arched Abomination. Before the year was out, the elusive monster of Loch Ness had been sighted again & again. In one four-week stretch at the height of the tourist season, it was seen 20 times. Its pictures even appeared somewhat foggily in the Illustrated London News.

In the spate of speculation which followed its sudden notoriety in the press, the Loch Ness monster was variously identified as a school of otters, a killer whale, the wreck of a German zeppelin, a giant squid, an "abomination with a three-arched neck" and a seagoing dinosaur.

Whatever else it might have been, the monster was a benison to the innkeepers of Inverness-shire. Reckoning its value as a tourist attraction at a good -L-5,000 a season, the grateful Scots christened the beast Bobby and did everything they could to make him feel at home. In 1937 Dom Basil Wedge, science teacher of a local Benedictine school, reported that Bobby had hatched a brood of progeny. The little monsters, said Dom Basil, had been observed by his pupils, and each measured about three feet. At about this time the press took to calling Bobby Nessie.

In 1938, Scottish Naturalist and Explorer Donald John Munro, R.N., C.M.G., tried to form a Loch Ness Monster Co. to investigate Nessie. Then in 1941, a pilot of Mussolini's air force solemnly announced that he had bombed the Loch Ness monster out of existence.

300 Horned Mines. Quite naturally, no one in the Highlands believed the Italian, and at war's end Nessie popped up again. As recently as last August the austere Times of London reported that 15 tourists had watched Nessie gambol in the lake for a full quarter-hour.

Last week a British naval officer, grown garrulous over a pint of bitter in a Portsmouth pub, fired a salvo into Nessie that seemed likely to sink her for good. In 1918, he explained, the navy for testing purposes had laid some 300 horned mines in Loch Ness in strings of eight. When they surfaced they rolled over once or twice, giving the impression of a living organism; then they sank. "At a distance," said he, "they make a fine monster."

The Admiralty confirmed the story of the minelaying. But the old ties between trade and Admiralty were still strong. An Admiralty spokesman added: "Who are we to say whether there is or is not a real monster in the lake? We certainly don't want to do the hotel people out of their business."

The Inverness Courier rallied to Nessie's defense. It denounced publication of the naval officer's account, added: "[A newspaper] must surely have a low opinion of its readers when it expects them to swallow such a story as this."

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