Looking for the "Beast" : a rare Postcard from 1934

Publisher: Unknown 
Series: N/A
Catalogue: N/A
Type: Real photo
Date of Issue: 1933 or 1934
Artist: Unsigned
Usage: 11 May 1934, Inverness 

This is one of the more superb smaller-run cards from 1933 or 1934. By smaller-run, I mean that this is a card that was not produced by either of the two major firms of J.B. White or Valentines, both based in Dundee.

This card might have been produced by a firm in or around Inverness. In any event the card was certainly bought and posted from there on 11 May 1934, thus early in the summer season. By this time, sightings of the monster were becoming to come in thick and fast, particularly after the publication of the so-called "surgeon's photo" in the London Daily Mail in mid-April caused an international sensation.

The message on the card is interesting, inasmuch as it documents the appeal of Nessie for tourists. This is a matter that will be dealt with in greater detail in future posts. It reads: 

Here for the day looking for the "beast". Hope both well, will write soon. Love, Minnie.

The card was sent to correspondents in Fenwick, south of Glasgow, so ended up travelling a fair distance from Inverness. 

A "real photo" type, this card was produced like many of the others of its time. A photograph of a view down the Loch, perhaps snapped from the back of a steamer, has had a monster and glorious swell painted upon an acetate overlay by an artist. The whole has then been re-photographed, with the very pleasing result seen here. 

The monster itself is depicted horse-like, with a long neck as in the surgeon's photo. The head is crowned with two horns. Interestingly, Nessie here is pictured with something of a thick mane or coat of hair, with a long tongue protruding from its mouth. Such a tongue appears in a couple of early Nessie sightings, as well as in several other postcard depictions of the monster. So too the mane. 

Another curiousity is in the caption, which clearly reads Loch Ness 'Monster'. The card was likely issued in a time, then, before the designation 'Monster' had been routinely used to describe Nessie.