From: andrewst@u.washington.edu (Andrew Steinberg) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban Subject: Nessie: The 2nd Article Date: 16 Mar 1994 03:31:20 GMT Copyright 1994 The Sunday Telegraph Limited Sunday Telegraph March 13, 1994, Sunday SECTION: Pg. 3 LENGTH: 1488 words HEADLINE: NESSIE AND BIG-GAME HUNTER'S MONSTER EGO Clockwork submarine and plastic wood fashioned a legend BYLINE: by James Langton BODY: FOR 60 years this photograph has been the subject of intense debate. For many, it is the cornerstone of their belief that a large aquatic animal unknown to science lives in Britain's largest freshwater lake. In fact, the "monster" is no more than a toy submarine bought for a few shillings in Woolworths with a head and neck modelled from plastic wood. The photograph has always thought to have been taken on April 19, 1934, as a Harley Street gynaecologist, Colonel Robert Wilson, drove north alongside the Loch towards Inverness with an un-named friend. Wilson's friend is said to have seen a commotion in the water, and shouted: "My God, it's the monster." Wilson took four photographs with a plate camera. After two minutes, the story continues, the creature vanished. Later he handed over the four plates to be developed at a chemist. Two were blank and a third showed a small blob above the water. It was the fourth which caused a sensation, published three days later as a Daily Mail "world exclusive". In reality, the story begins not on April 19, 1934 with Lieutenant Colonel Robert Wilson, MB, BChir Cambs, FRCS, MRCS, LRCP but several months earlier with Mr Marmaduke Arundel Wetherell, actor, film producer, self-styled "big game hunter" and self-publicist. Duke Wetherell had been hired by the Daily Mail to track down the Loch Ness monster. Stories of a mysterious beast in the loch had begun to circulate from spring 1933 when a new road opened alongside the north shore of Loch Ness. First published in the local papers, they gradually began to filter south. For the British public, and Fleet Street in particular, the monster was a welcome relief to the unremitting diet of economic depression and the rise of the great dictators. The "Duke" was a flamboyant character who enjoyed seeing his name and face in print. In 1927 he produced two talking parrots in court after claims that they had been annoying the neighbours. That the case came shortly after the opening of his latest epic Robinson Crusoe was, of course, coincidence. To readers of the Daily Mail, he became "Mr M. A. Wetherell, the Central African big game hunter" (he had blasted a few wild animals while filming Livingstone), hired to find the monster and, in particular, scoop the rival Daily Express. With a lucrative contract in his back pocket and a Mail photographer and "special correspondent" at his side, Wetherell arrived at the Loch on December 18, 1933. Even the Mail was astonished at how quickly he got results. " Loch Ness Monster Is A Fact, Not A Legend" the paper trumpeted on December 21. A succession of smaller headlines told the story: "Hunter's Deduction from New Find. Tracks Only A Few Hours Old. Tests To Be Made." The cause of all the excitement was two footprints in soft mud on the south shore of the loch near Fort Augustus. Wetherell had stumbled across them less than 48 hours after landing on the beach by motor boat. The "spoor" he declared was "less than a few hours old". The animal was an amphibian: "A four fingered beast . . . and it has feet or pads about eight inches across . . . a very powerful soft-footed animal about 20 ft long." Plaster casts were taken of the footprints and sent to the Natural History Museum. All through Christmas and New Year, the world - or at least that part of it egged on by the Daily Mail - waited in breathless expectation for the museum's verdict. On January 4 it came. The footprints were identical and from a young hippo. It was most likely that the foot was in use somewhere as an umbrella stand. A gale of laughter swept Fleet Street. The Mail's Loch Ness coverage shrank with the speed of rapidly deflating balloon. Wetherell quietly returned to London on January 18 with suggestions that the footprints were the work of pranksters. Nessie was dead. Until the "Surgeon's Photograph", published in triumph by the Mail three months later. Unlike the humiliation of the previous expedition, here was conclusive proof that something did exist in Loch Ness, and with a respectable surgeon and former officer as its source. Except that Colonel Robert Wilson did not take the famous photograph. It also was the work of Duke Wetherell. The key to the mystery is Maurice Chambers, named in original newspaper reports as the co-lessee with Wilson of a wildfowl shoot on the Beauly Firth near Inverness. What has remained concealed for 60 years is that Chambers was also a friend of Duke Wetherell. The real story has been uncovered by David Martin, a zoologist with the Loch Ness and Morar scientific project and Alastair Boyd, a fellow researcher. Their first clue was a small diary story, ironically in The Sunday Telegraph in December 1975, reporting that Wetherell's son Ian claimed he and his father had once fabricated a photograph of the Loch Ness monster. The article did not mention which photograph or mention Colonel Wilson - the surgeon - but it did name Maurice Chambers as a co-conspirator. Then David Martin remembered reading of Chambers before - but as a friend of the more dubious Wetherell. At the time of The Sunday Telegraph interview, Ian Wetherell was 63 and running a Chelsea pub. When Martin and Boyd arrived at the pub it was 18 years later and they discovered he was dead. The trail led to Duke Wetherell's step-son, living on the south coast and in poor health. Christian Spurling, now nearly 90, had kept the secret of the Loch Ness monster for nearly six decades. Faced with a series of straight questions from Martin and Boyd, however, he gave straight answers. It was an angry and irritated Duke Wetherell who returned from Scotland to the family home in Twickenham in January 1934. The Mail, in particular, had made it clear what they thought of the hippo footprints. "All right," he is said to have told his son Ian, "We'll give them their monster." Ian, then 21, wassent out to buy the raw materials - a toy submarine and several tins of plastic wood. Christian, the son of a marine painter, was a keen model-maker. "All I got was a message from Wetherell saying 'Can you make me a monster?' " he recalled. Wetherell's sons worked out the details together. "I said 'well, it's a monster so it's got to have long neck, I suppose," remembered Christian. "I just sat down and made it. It was modelled on the idea of a sea serpent." The "monster" took eight days to make. The head, neck and body were built over the conning tower in stages as the plastic wood hardened with a space for the clockwork key.Lead soldered underneath gave it stability. Sea-trials were conducted in a pond and then, probably in February or March, Ian and Duke Wetherell returned to Loch Ness. In a quiet bay the monster was floated out into the shallows. Ian took the photographs. What happened next is not completely clear. Duke Wetherell clearly confided in his friend Maurice Chambers. It was a bit of harmless fun, but to make the hoax work, he needed someone convincing who would enter into the spirit of the thing. Did Chambers know anyone suitable? He did. Robert Wilson. Wilson was given his lines and four photographic plates to take to the Inverness chemist shop. With the resulting photograph was also developed the myth of Loch Ness. Why has the full story remained secret for so long? The Surgeon's Photograph has withstood rigorous scientific examination. It has been enhanced by computers; explained variously as a plesiosaur, a tree trunk or an otter. No book or article on the Loch Ness monster is complete without it. From the waves, the monster's neck has been calculated at more than a metre. Observers have noted a "flipper" in the water in front of the beast. None have realised they are seeing the deck of toy submarine. Why did those involved keep their silence? No one realised Wetherell and his sons were involved and so they were never approached. All were certainly overwhelmed and unprepared by the publicity the photograph generated. Their little joke had got out of hand and the least painful solution was to keep quiet. Later the surgeon, Robert Wilson, never claimed more than to have seen "something in the water". The British Medical Association had warned him the story was in danger of bringing his profession into disrepute. To ward off subsequent inquiries he hinted to researchers that he could not say more because his companion on that fateful morning was a married woman. Today all those involved are dead. The surgeon died in Australia in 1969. Duke Wetherell and Chambers were dead by the mid-Fifties. Spurling died last November, shortly after recording his version of events. What about the "monster?" As Duke and Ian Wetherell waded on the shores of Loch Ness with their camera and model, they heard a water bailiff approaching. Duke put his foot out and sunk it. And there it probably lies to this day, a small lump of rusting metal and some crumbling plastic wood. All that remains of the Loch Ness Monster.