The first is interesting for having occurred on the water. According to the writer of the card, a certain Pauline, the following events occurred on 16 August.
On Friday last the captain of the excursion steamer Gondolier plying Loch Ness, and all his passengers, sighted the Monster.
This is a fascinating anecdote, for relatively few mass sightings of the Monster had been recorded to this time. While I have tried and failed to identify the captain of the Gondolier, she was indeed a famous paddle steamer constructed in 1866 that, in her final years, plied the waters of Loch Ness an the Caledonian Canal. Here she is depicted on another postcard, issued by Valentines of Dundee:
The captain may or may not be identical with Cap. John MacDonald, who in 1933 saw, and later retracted his sighting, who was known to command several different ships plying Loch Ness. Be that as it may, the sender of the card then goes on to recount the circumstances of yet another sighting, which is even more spectacular:
On Sunday evening two girls watched it gambolling for half an hour.
As for the intrepid senders themselves, who had only recently arrived at their lodgings at the Bught House Hotel in the suburbs of Inverness, they had enjoyed no such luck. Nevertheless,
We for our part can testify that Urquhart Castle exists, for we visited it this afternoon. The chain of evidence is surely complete!
The somewhat droll joke here, of course, is that the image on the postcard depicts Urquhart Castle alongside Nessie. As such, proof of the existence of one (the Castle) is surely proof of the existence of the other (the Monster).
With this in mind there is no reason to doubt the senders' honesty concerning the reality of the sightings she relates, which can now be added to the numerous other Nessie sightings of 1935 in due course.
The appearance of these accounts on the back of a postcard begs a few questions. The first is, where did Pauline and her travelling companion hear of these sightings? It is possible that they were told of them during their visit to Urquhart, or indeed by their Inverness hotelier.
Both, however, may have been mentioned in an article published in Inverness Courier on 20 August 1935, as Roland Watson has indicated. On this date, an article appeared summarising several recent sightings, including those of the serial Nessie-spotter Godard Adriaan Hendrik Jules, Graaf Aldenburg Bentinck, a Dutchman who claims to have seen the Monster on 10, 12, 24, 29 and 30 August 1935. For good measure, he also saw a sea serpent on the boat ride over from the Netherlands on 8 August; make of that what you will.
A second is, how many unrecorded or unknown sightings could be documented in ephemera like this postcard, and might never reach the ears of "official" Nessie bean-counters? Indeed, the erstwhile Count Bentinck, who spoke extensively with Loch-side residents and holiday-makers during his visit in the summer of 1935, remarked that
only rarely did I meet with someone who hadn't yet been fortunate enough to see the monster one or more times.
Some of these encounters might very well have been described in letters and postcards sent home to loved ones. As such, be sure to examine the backs of your Nessie postcards thoroughly, for they may contain even more surprises ...
To conclude, just a few words about the postcard itself. This particular design was among the earliest batch of Nessie postcards manufactured by J.B. White, with some examples already postally-used in December 1933. The card pictured above, however, is a later printing, probably issued in the second half of 1934, and can be distinguished by its lower case lettering, and sepia tone.
Series: Best of All
Type: Real Photo
Date of Issue: second half of 1934 (for this version)
Artist: Unknown
Usage: Inverness, 23 August 1935
I was just thinking that the monster depicted in the postcard above may have been inspired by the account at the Halfway House of September 1933. We have a sketch by one witness which looks like this cartoon with the double hump, long neck and fluke tail.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for your comment; I hadn't noticed that particular correspondence between the Altsigh sighting and this card. I will follow it up in a future post!
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