I have a few illustrations depicting aquatic cryptids from the Italian magazine "La Domenica Del Corriere" which translates to "The Sunday Courier". According to Wikipedia it "was an Italian weekly newspaper which ran from 1899 to 1989. It came out every Sunday free with Corriere Della Sera, but was also sold separately. It was famous for its cover drawings ...". The picture above was published on the 25th July 1954 and was produced by the artist G. De Gaspari. The text below the picture translated into English is:
Summer returns. Coinciding with the resumption of the tourist season, it was announced again this year that the famous "monster", first sighted 20 years ago, has emerged from the waters of Loch Ness in Scotland. Here's what it looks like, according to the somewhat fanciful account of a waitress at a small hotel on the lakeshore. A natural wonder? Or simply a publicity stunt?
The depiction of the Loch Ness Monster can at best be described as imaginative and looks more like the Godzilla that was to debut in Japanese cinemas a few months later. We have a woman in a waitress uniform apparently picking flowers by the loch shore only to be terrorized by the appearance of a gigantic beast. Though it is not gigantic as the large dead tree dominating the centre of the picture. What was the artist trying to say with this intrusion?
Maybe waitresses at Loch Ness have a penchant for wearing their work clothes when going out for floral walks? Who knows, but I thought I would look for any contemporary newspaper reports on the incident suspecting what they published would be somewhat different to the Italian rendition. Sure enough, ten or so newspapers ran the story across Britain and I show the clipping from the Inverness Courier dated the 13th July 1954.
Our waitress turns out to be twenty-one year old Margaret MacDonald who worked at the Lewiston Arms Hotel. However, she was in a rowing boat with a young man and not picking flowers in her work clothes. The distance of several hundred yards is a bit far though the several minutes in view allows for a decent amount of time to assess what one is looking at - three humps and a head on a long neck (checking other newspaper reports). Though it was an evening sighting, the sun sets after 10pm in mid-July.
However, we can be fairly sure it wasn't green, scaly, bearing rows of teeth with strange head protrusions as the Italian publication claimed "it looks like". Sceptics will often try and portray newspaper reporters as exaggerating what eyewitnesses reported. Maybe they should focus their attention on publications like La Domenica Del Corriere!
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