April 21, 1934: The ‘Surgeon’s Photograph’ first appears in The Daily Mail.
One spring day in the Scottish Highlands, “West End surgeon” Robert Kenneth Wilson took his reflex camera out to Loch Ness to enjoy the countryside district, an area which he “[knew] fairly well.” A storm had passed; the sky was clear. The loch’s natural appeal to tourists was plain on a mild day like this - that, and the fact that Loch Ness had very recently become the subject of rumors, sightings, even blurry photographs, all of them telling of a massive creature said to dwell somewhere in the depths. Intrigued tourists trundled down the newly-refurbished road to spot the loch, and throughout 1933 the stories had accumulated. Wilson, however, had come down for a smoke and a stroll. Camera in hand, he took his smoke. And then movement in the water alerted him, suddenly, to the head of “some strange animal” rising out of the water. Too excited to “observe it properly,” Wilson was able to snap four photos before the creature “began gradually to sink from view.”
At least, that was how Wilson - the eponymous ‘surgeon’ - told it to The Daily Mail. Wilson had no guess for what it was. The Mail consulted various experts, who dismissed that it could be a seal, hypothesized that it was a bird, or offered general curious befuddlement. One said that, had the photograph been taken at sea, he might have entertained “the theory of a sea-serpent.” The Mail advised the reader to note that the long-necked monster depicted in “Mr. Wilson’s picture” was “entirely different from the whale-like Cherbourg monster.” This monster, whatever it was, was its own phenomenon, no Anglo cousin to a French original but the Isles’ own, Scotland’s own, Loch Ness’ own monster.
Generic tales of a sea monster inhabiting Loch Ness dated back centuries, but in the sense that any large natural landmark might inspire a mythos following familiar tropes. Water horses and other lake-dwelling creatures commonly featured in Scottish folklore. The modern Loch Ness monster lore was born in 1933 and was consolidated when it found its modern iconography, when the Surgeon’s Photograph appeared on the front page of The Daily Mail. Efforts to both prove and disprove the monster’s existence were energized by Wilson’s photo, which became as singularly emblematic of the mystery of the monster itself, and the mania of the search, as the Patterson-Gimlin film.
Wilson would equivocate on what he ‘saw’ that day until his death in 1969 (side-stepping the cultural phenomenon he helped stoke, he had seen only “something in the water.”) In 1994, it was revealed that, in fact, Wilson had seen in the water a modified toy submarine. Its maker was one Marmaduke Wetherell, who had previously attempted to orchestrate a Loch Ness monster hoax and, upon its failure and his disgrace, began to scheme another. The surgeon was in on it, although he could not have predicted how successfully the joke would play out.
See also:“The Loch Ness monster’s Hollywood origins” argues that King Kong (1933) directly inspired 1933′s string of Loch Ness monster sightings