The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (57 page)

In March 1994 it was revealed that one of the most famous photographs of the Loch Ness Monster, the so-called “surgeon’s photograph”, was a hoax. As described in the above article, the photograph was taken in April 1934 (the 19th – not, as stated above, the 1st) by a eminent Harley Street gynaecologist Colonel Robert Wilson, who claimed he was driving towards Inverness when a friend who was in the car shouted: “My God, it’s the monster” and Wilson took four photographs with a plate camera.

The true story, apparently, begins several months earlier, and concerns a self-styled big game hunter and self-publicist called Marmaduke Arundel Wetherell. He had been hired to track down the monster by
The Daily Mail.
On 18 December 1933, Wetherell went to Scotland with a
Daily Mail
photographer, and forty-eight hours after arriving, claimed that he had found two footprints of the monster on the south shore near Fort Augustus. The “spoor” was, he declared, “less than a few hours old”. It was “a four fingered beast, and it has feet or pads about eight inches across, a very powerful soft-footed animal about twenty feet long”.

Plaster casts were taken of the footprints and sent to the Natural History Museum, but on 4 January it was announced that the footprints were those of a young hippo. It was probable, said the expert, that the foot was in use somewhere as an umbrella stand. Understandably, Wetherell was upset by the gale of derision that greeted this announcement. The Loch Ness story ceased to be front-page news.

And then, three months later, came the “surgeon’s photograph”, and the laughter died away.

What no one knew is that the photograph was also the work of Duke Wetherell.

Colonel Robert Wilson was the friend of a man called Maurice Chambers, in association with whom he leased a wildfowl shoot on the Beauly Firth, near Inverness. And Chambers was also a friend of Duke Wetherell.

Another important clue was never revealed to the public – that Colonel Wilson was extremely fond of a practical joke.

The true story of the “surgeon’s photograph” began to emerge in December, 1975, when a diary story in
The Sunday Telegraph
reported that Wetherell’s son Ian claimed he and his father had fabricated a photograph of the Loch Ness Monster. The article did not specify which photograph, but it named Maurice Chambers as a coconspirator.

David Martin, a zoologist with the Loch Ness and Morar Scientific Project, and Alistair Boyd, a fellow researcher, recalled reading that Chambers was a friend of Duke Wetherell.

At the time of the diary piece, Ian Wetherell was sixty-three and running a Chelsea pub. But when Martin and Boyd arrived at the pub eighteen years later, he was dead.

The trail then led to Duke Wetherell’s stepson, living on the south coast and in poor health. Christian Spurling was then close to ninety, and he was willing to tell the whole story.

When Duke Wetherell returned from Scotland to his home in Twickenham in January 1934, he was furious with
The Daily Mail
, which had made it clear what it thought of his hippopotamus footprints. “All right”, he told his son Ian, “We’ll give them their monster”.

Ian, twenty-one, was sent out to buy the raw materials – a toy submarine and some tins of plastic wood. His step-brother Christian, the son of a marine painter, was a keen model maker. He received a message from Wetherell saying “can you make me a monster”?

Spurling made a small monster of plastic wood with a long neck and a head like a dinosaur. The neck was built over the conning tower of the toy submarine, leaving a space for the clockwork key. A piece of lead was soldered underneath to prevent it from capsizing. The model was tested out on the local pond, and then Duke Wetherell and his son returned to Loch Ness, found a quiet day, and floated the “monster” out into the shallows. It was Ian who took the photographs.

What Wetherell now needed was someone “respectable” who would be willing to claim he had taken the photographs.

Chambers’ friend Colonel Robert Wilson entered into the spirit of the thing, took the four photographic plates to a chemist shop in Inverness, and announced that he had photographed the Loch Ness Monster.

In the storm of publicity that followed, the British Medical Association told Colonel Wilson that the story was likely to bring his profession into disrepute, whereupon Wilson began to drop hints that he could not talk to anyone else about his sighting because the companion who had
shouted: “My God, it’s the monster” was a married woman with whom he was having an affair.

Wilson died in Australia in 1969, and Duke Wetherell and Chambers died in the mid-1950s. Christian Spurling died in November 1993, after recording the story.

As to the toy submarine, it is presumably still somewhere in Loch Ness – when they had photographed “the monster” they heard a water bailiff approaching, and Duke Wetherell put his foot out and sank it.

An equally interesting development in the Loch Ness story came to light in April 1999, through another “hunter” of strange anomalies called Erik Beckjord.

As mentioned in the article above, one of the most eminent investigators of the Loch Ness Monster was the aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale, who became fascinated after reading an article about the monster in a magazine called
Everybody’s Weekly
. Dinsdale filmed some of the best-known footage of the monster, and became widely known for his theory that it was some kind of dinosaur – a plesiosaurus. This was in 1959.

But twenty-four years later, Erik Beckjord learned from Dinsdale himself that he no longer believed his own theory.

Beckjord describes how he was on his way to a canal-barge holiday with his girlfriend Kathy Quint when he stopped in Reading, where Tim Dinsdale lived. They went for a drink in a nearby pub, and Dinsale confided to Beckjord that his wife had her reservations about his fame as a monster hunter.

The problem, it seemed, was that Dinsdale had become totally convinced that the Loch Ness Monster was a ghost. Ted Holiday, he admitted, had been right all along.

He told Beckjord how, through many long nights watching the Loch, he had experienced a number of paranormal (or abnormal) happenings and became increasingly certain that he was dealing with some aspect of the supernatural. Apparently what convinced him beyond doubt was a night when he anchored his small cruiser off Boleskine House, where the magician Aleister Crowley had performed the occult ritual of Abrahamelin the Mage seventy years earlier, and that, according to Dinsdale’s account, “he endured a series of ghosts, ghoulies, ‘demons,’ crawling into his boat and coming at him. They never harmed him physically, but they finally killed off the plesiosaur idea for him”. He was absolutely certain that these were not fatigue-hallucinations, but real events.

He now realized he was faced with a dilemma. A large part of his
income came from his books and lectures on the monster. His audiences would simply not want to hear his theory that the monster was somehow “supernatural”. Financially, this would be a disaster. He would also be labelled a “nut”. Altogether, it would be better to keep silent.

So, according to Beckjord, Dinsdale hid his knowledge from his publishers and his audiences, but at least he confided in a number of researchers.

When, in the mid-1980s, Beckjord pressed him to make plans for his estate, Dinsdale said it was all taken care of. Beckjord himself became totally convinced that the Loch Ness Monster was somehow paranormal, and found that he was shunned by traditional researchers at Loch Ness. In 1987, Beckjord attended the International Society of Cryptozoology in Edinburgh, and was not even allowed to speak at the main conference. However, he showed a 16mm film after the sessions were over and many people agreed that it showed a white, shape-shifting thing that was not a reptile. Tim Dinsdale was there and saw the film, but said nothing to Beckjord. But Dr Jack Gibson, co-sponsor of the meeting, told Beckjord in a voice that could be overheard by Dinsdale that the film was “the most important he had ever seen of Nessie”.

Six months later, Dinsdale died at the age of sixty-seven.

32

The Man in the Iron Mask

On 19 November 1703 a masked prisoner died in the Bastille after a brief illness. He had been imprisoned for thirty-four years, and even the king’s Lieutenant in the Bastille, Etienne du Jonca, did not know his identity. He made a note in his journal: “I have since learnt that they called him M. de Marchiel”. The unknown prisoner was buried the day after his death, under the name of Marchioly, and was quickly forgotten.

He became famous nearly half a century later, as a result of a book by Voltaire,
The Century of Louis XIV
, in which Voltaire finally exposed the mystery of the “man in the iron mask”. According to Voltaire, a few months after the death of Cardinal Mazarin (which occurred in 1661), a young prisoner wearing an iron mask – or rather, a mask whose chin was composed of steel springs, so he could eat without removing it – was taken to the prison on the Ile Sainte Marguerite. Orders were given to kill him if he removed the mask. This prisoner, “of majestic height . . . of a graceful and noble figure”, was allowed to have anything he desired. His greatest pleasure was fine linen and laces. He was obviously a man of high rank, for the governor seldom sat down in his presence. Even the doctor who attended him was never allowed to see his face. The stranger died in 1704, said Voltaire (getting the date wrong by a year), and the strange thing is that when first he was incarcerated on the Isle of St Marguerite no person of any rank disappeared in Europe. According to Voltaire, the mysterious prisoner once scratched something on a plate, which he threw out of a window of his prison. It was picked up by a fisherman, who took it to the prison governor. “Have you read what is written on it”? asked the governor. The fisherman confessed that he was unable to read. “You are lucky”, said the governor . . .

Voltaire’s story created a sensation. There had been rumours about a masked prisoner, but no one had ever dared to speak about them openly. In fact a rather absurd novel called
The Iron Mask
, by the Chevalier de
Mouhy, had been banned five years earlier, although its story took place in Spain and it bore no resemblance to the true story of the masked prisoner.

But who was the masked prisoner, and what had he done? Twenty years later, in
Questions on the Encyclopedia
, Voltaire revealed the answer or what he believed to be the answer. To understand his story, we must know a little of French history. King Louis XIII was rumoured to be impotent, and was in any case on bad terms with his wife, Anne of Austria. Anne was far closer to the king’s great minister Cardinal Mazarin; politically they were hand in glove, and it is fairly certain that he was her lover; she may even have secretly married him after the death of the king. This then was Voltaire’s theory: that Anne of Austria bore Mazarin a son, and that this happened before the birth of Louis XIV; the child, naturally, was kept secret from the king. So Louis XIV had an elder brother, who might have challenged his right to the throne. Which is why Louis kept his brother in prison, his face concealed by a mask, in case the family resemblance gave him away . . .

Nearly a century after Voltaire’s “revelation”, in 1847, Alexandre Dumas published his famous novel
The Man in the Iron Mask
, one of the many sequels to
The Three Musketeers
. This became by far the most famous account of the mystery, and was the basis of the popular Hollywood film. According to Dumas, the unknown prisoner was the twin brother of Louis XIV. This was not Dumas’s own theory; it was first put forward in a work called
Memoires of the Duc de Richelieu
, published in London in 1790. This work claimed that Louis XIV was born at noon, and that his twin brother arrived at 8.30 in the evening, while his father was at supper. The younger twin was hidden away, so as not to cause problems with the succession. But these
Memoirs
are in fact a forgery by the Duc’s secretary, the Abbé Soulavie, so this story is probably an invention.

In his introduction to an English translation of Dumas’s novel the literary critic Sidney Dark writes:

Sidney Dark was not quite correct. The man that many scholars thought was the masked prisoner was Ercole Mattioli, who was born in 1640, and was Secretary of State to the Duke of Mantua. The “obscure intrigue” that aroused the wrath of Louis XIV was a piece of double-dealing. In 1632 France had bought a stronghold in Italy called Pinerolo, or Pignerol. Thirty years or so later, Louis thought he saw a chance to acquire another useful piece of Italian territory by the same means: the town and citadel of Casale, near Turin, which belonged to the Duke of Mantua. Apparently the Duke was financially embarrassed and might be willing to sell. But negotiations had to be carried out with great caution, for Louis was quarrelling with Spain, and the Duke of Mantua was surrounded by friends of Spain. In fact Mattioli allowed news of the proposed deal to leak out to Louis’s enemies, with the result that it fell through. Louis was furious, but there was not much he could do about it while Mattioli was on Italian territory. First of all, Mattioli had to be kept in the dark about the king’s anger. Next he had to be lured to Pignerol, apparently to conclude the deal. The moment he was on French territory he was arrested, and thrown into goal in the fortress of Pignerol, which was in the charge of a governor named Saint-Mars. The whole thing was kept secret; Mattioli simply “disappeared”, and remained in prison until his death; no one knows quite when this was, but the likeliest guess is that it was about fifteen years later, in 1694.