The Loch Ness 'Surgeon's Photograph'

APR 21 1934

The Daily Mail published the photograph on 21 April 1934, crediting the London gynaecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson, and its silhouette of a long neck became the standard image of the Loch Ness Monster. It was staged by Marmaduke Wetherell, a big-game hunter the Mail had publicly ridiculed after his 'Nessie footprints' proved to have been made with a hippo-foot umbrella stand. Wetherell, his son Ian, Maurice Chambers and the model-maker Christian Spurling built the creature from a toy submarine topped with wood putty. Spurling confessed in 1994, aged 93, shortly before his death.