Have you ever wondered whether or not there was some truth in the stories of monsters in Loch Ness? Here are all of the answers.
Loch Ness Monster Explained & Loch Ness Understood: The Co-Founder of the Loch Ness Centre Provides a Personal Perspecti...
During 1981, despite having to live on very little, the potential of my exhibition was obvious.
Even when I discovered the loss of my share of the business, I was not prepared to forego the future earnings by walking out. I was determined to make the exhibition successful and spent a huge amount of time promoting it and dealing with the myriad documentary and travelogue teams who arrived at my door.
With the sponsorship of the Project well in hand my thoughts turned into how we could create an even greater boost to the Project's funds and rescue for myself some independence from Mr Bremner.
After discussion with some hotels in Scotland, England and Wales, together with Adrian Shine, I decided to take the exhibition on tour.
The organisation of this proceeded well during the summer and we had managed to obtain venues in several middle-sized towns. We were concerned that the numbers of visitors could swamp us as there had been large queues building up at my main exhibition in Drumnadrochit. Extraordinary numbers patiently waited to shuffle through the exhibition to the shop at its end.
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Finally, the touring exhibition departed. First stop Whitley Bay where an exhausted team of helpers opened the doors to ...... just ten people.
It was a disaster. Nessie did not travel well. Adrian and myself battled tirelessly to appear on local news programmes and we had excellent features in the provincial press, but still the number of visitors stayed at miniscule levels.
After three days, there we were off to Norfolk where we had a similarly disastrous number of visitors, although we did manage to encourage local schools to visit. By this time, Ronnie Bremner had vanished and we didn't see him again until we returned to the Highlands.
Adrian set off to London while I cancelled all the remaining venues. We realised that we had misjudged the uptake in the provinces and needed to recoup our losses in the capital.
Adrian secured an apparently good venue at Blackfriar's Bridge, just a stone's throw from St Paul's cathedral.
Despite excellent PR, two appearances by Adrian on London evening television news and the handing out of hundreds of flyers, the number of visitors failed to cover the cost of the team's lunch on the final day.
This was an extremely important lesson. The Loch Ness Monster did not travel well and although Nessie documentaries are popular throughout the world, books on the monster usually in the best-sellers lists worldwide and hundreds of thousands of people are prepared to pay to visit the exhibition at the loch-side, no one wanted to even cross the road to visit a touring Loch Ness exhibition. The picture shows the queue at Loch Ness.
However, nineteen eighty-two was to be a great year for research. The Loch Ness Project began to obtain a series of forty strong sonar contacts which were a great shot in the arm for this flagging believer. I spent a lot of time on the Project's vessels, including an iron-hulled Humber sailing barge.
