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.
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Returning to understanding how the monster story developed, we now know that Mrs Mackay's object, probably only some six feet (2m) long, gave rise to the first news report by Alex Campbell in the Inverness Courier, of "The Loch Ness Monster."
As I mentioned earlier, with this being the depressed nineteen-thirties and the whole world in need of cheering up, journalists flocked to Loch Ness hoping to find more accounts of this "monster." I wonder how many hostelries these hacks visited before some really exciting eye witnesses started to materialise to take advantage of expense accounts which were liberal with the amber nectar.
The tourist industry will forever be indebted to Mr and Mrs Spicer who saw, lumbering across the road, what Mr Spicer claimed was "the nearest thing to a dinosaur that I have ever seen in my life." Now prehistoric monsters had really arrived. Cartoon at top of chapter.
It was not much later that a young veterinary student called Arthur Grant claimed that the monster, with a sheep in its mouth, had run across the road knocking him off his motorcycle before leaping the wall and disappearing into the loch.
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There are actually two versions of stories for how this Grant sighting came to the attention of the world. I must admit that they are both believable, but there would seem to be little chance today of actually finding out which is correct.
The version I had heard, from the late Joyce MacDonald of Drumnadrochit, was that Grant had fallen off his motorbike near what is now the Abriachan nursery and when he arrived home his mother asked how he had damaged his motorbike. Grant came up with the story that he had been knocked off the bike by the monster.
A friend of his, possibly many years later, told Joyce's husband, Willie MacDonald that he had overheard the story and told a journalist. The account then appeared in the newspapers.
[Willie MacDonald was the village doctor during the fifties andearly sixties, but his father would have been the Drumnadrochit doctor in thetwenties and thirties.]
Today we have no way of discovering who that friend was.
A more recent version which I heard from Dick Raynor was that Arthur Grant and a friend were calling the newspapers themselves from a telephone at a local garage owned by Alec Menzies who had overheard one end of the conversation and also heard Grant turn to his friend after the call and say, "They've swallowed it."
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