Some years back I acquired a copy of Captain Alastair Mackintosh's autobiography entitled "No Alibi". It was F. W. Holiday's 1968 book, "The Great Orm of Loch Ness", which was published seven years later, that alerted me to this book. That all revolved around a Loch Ness Monster story in the book, but a couple of other stories caught my eye. Alastair Mackintosh (above) was born in Inverness in 1889 and spent his early years around the region of Loch Ness before embarking on a military career. The first excerpt is that eyewitness account of the creature seen on land.
Loch Ness was so much a part of my boyhood and youth. Its beauty and splendour apart, there has always been - for me - a belief in the existence of its monster. Loch Ness remains one of the great geological mysteries. Since the waters receded from the earth it has put on minor atomic displays without any assistance from scientists.
The monster is usually observed in the summer. It was many years later that I missed seeing this monster - always supposing it to exist - by a matter of minutes. Oddly the occasion was linked with the British Aluminium Company since it was Alec Muir, the estate carpenter at the works, who had allowed his 'T' Ford to block the narrow road just beyond Dores. Bubbles were to be observed on the loch water. As I greeted Alec warmly, I thought he looked distinctly peculiar. The way a person is said to appear after seeing a ghost.
"What's the matter, Alec? What are you stopping for, eh?"
He regarded me with his round, blue eyes and said portentously:
"I've just seen the Loch Ness monster, Mr Alastair. It crossed the road in front of me not a wee while back. It came as high as the top of the bonnet of the car and was so long it took ten minutes to pass."
I went round to the front of the Ford. Sure enough, there was the track of the monster where it had entered the loch. Alec alighted and we followed the marks on the other side of the road and into a wood of birch trees. It was spring. Our feet sank softly into a carpet of moss and primroses. We had gone hardly a hundred yards when we came upon a clearing in the trees. Showing in the moss was an immense depression, where the monster obviously had lain down to rest.
This account was the reason for the reference in Holiday's book and I also covered it in my own book on land sightings where I wrote the following opinion:
Thus ends the account leaving perhaps more questions than answers. For a start, practically nothing is said about the appearance of the monster itself. It is said to have reached as high as the bonnet of a model T Ford which I estimate to be about four feet seven inches. It left a trail leading to the loch by which means broken and depressed flora. The immense depression suggests that the beast had some girth - I would assume it was at least as wide as it was tall - nearly five feet - but this "immense" depression suggests more. The bubbles on the loch surface are also interesting. Does this imply the monster is an air breather or that is discharges air for some reason after a land excursion (e.g. decreasing buoyancy)?
The most extraordinary feature is that the creature took ten minutes to cross the road! From this we infer that Alec Muir had one of the clearest views of the monster in the annals of Nessie sightings - yet we have practically no details. If we assume the road was seven feet wide (it was a narrow road) and the creature was just appearing onto the road as Muir saw it until its 30ft bulk was clean across, then it was travelling at an average speed of 0.04 mph. From this ridiculously slow speed we suspect that the creature had stopped in the middle of the road for some period of time.
Why would the Loch Ness Monster simply stop on the road? If it did this today, we would have a carcass on our hands and the mystery would be solved. One can only guess that something had captured the beast's attention just over the loch side of the road. It also seems it nonchalantly continued on and stopped again near the shore leaving this "immense" depression before finally entering the loch. All in all, the monster seemed rather blasé about what was going on around it and saw no threat from Mr. Muir and his model T Ford. A curious case for which one wishes there was more detail!
Do I have anything to add since I wrote the above words in 2018? I had another look for this account in various online resources, but Mackintosh's book remains the sole source of the story and indeed I could not confirm the personal details about Alec Muir. That does not mean Muir did not exist or held down that job at the Aluminium Works, such mundane details do not always end up in newspaper print. You basically have to take it or leave it as a factual story. The next story from the book involves no monster but is nonetheless spectacular.
Around this period, when I was in fact twelve years of age and at home, I remember being awakened one night by the violent shaking of my bed. All the bells—the handpull type, electric ones were still unknown - rang madly. I was and still am faintly uneasy in the dark. What with the shaking bed and clanging bells, I was really frightened until Mother came in to reassure me.
"It's only an earthquake, dear," she said.
Next morning Father ordered our wagonette and drove me over to Urquhart Castle with him. This is situated upon the north bank of Loch Ness, where the loch reaches its greatest depth - over six hundred feet. To my amazement the loch seemed to be boiling. For over a quarter of a mile there were enormous bubbles, each the height of a man. It was like a vast cauldron of sizzling water or, to provide a more modern image, balloons of detergent waste.
"What is it?" I asked my father excitedly. "It looks like a giant's washing-day."
"Must have been an earthquake in Italy last night," was his laconic reply.
He told me that whenever Mount Etna erupted, it affected Loch Ness and Inverness. Though never proved, it was thought that there must be some subterranean connection with Sicily.
The author's age of twelve places this around 1901 and indeed the newspapers of the time relate this event as occurring about 1:30 in the morning of Wednesday 18th September. A series of foreshocks and aftershocks accompanied this event, although it was not a major earthquake being more the type that shakes plates off cupboards and chimney pots off roofs. Some seismologists believe the epicentre was near Dochgarroch, just north of the top end of Loch Ness. It is a well known fact that Loch Ness lies along a major fault line comprising the Great Glen running South West to North East but there are other subsidiary fault lines which could have been the stress points for this event.
I did not find any newspaper report which corroborated the massive bubbling event at Loch Ness, but I have no reason to doubt it as it has been confirmed and studied elsewhere in the world (see link) and a lot of this phenomenon is attributed to the release of methane gas from deposits deep below. But what exactly Mackintosh witnessed is not so clear. We can be sure it had nothing to do with Mount Etna in Italy which was quiet at that time.
The event happened somewhere out in the loch near Urquhart Castle but was confined to an area of about 400 metres, perhaps an extended area as he describes it as being like a "cauldron of sizzling water". So did the quake cause a fissure to open up down below releasing a pocket of methane? This seems more likely than layers of silt further up having any pockets of gas being shaken out of them. The energetic nature of the bubbling and its limited location dictates against this theory.
The bubbles "each the height of a man" likely were not that size when they escaped from the bottom due to the higher pressures below and expanded as they rose to the surface. Interestingly, looking at a geological map of the loch, we see that this area is the confluence of three different bedrock formations colour coded in the map below as shades of purple, green and brown. These each denote in order old metamorphic, old sedimentary sandstone and newer sandstone structures, all meeting at a point halfway across the loch where the main fault line runs. Quite possibly, these boundaries provided zones for ruptures to open up.
The only other effect reported from the loch was from the Dundee Evening Post of the 21st September which recounted how the quake caused the Caledonian Canal and River Ness to combine into a tidal surge heading northwards towards Inverness. But an effect of a more curious nature were strange lights seen by some locals as recounted in the Northern Chronicle of the 25th September.
Lights around the loch area has been discussed on this blog before. This is a phenomenon poorly understood but believed to be associated with tectonic activity. It is not a fleet of UFOs but perhaps a form of ball lightning. It is speculated that a combination of certain geological features around a fault line such as the Great Glen Fault could produce these atmospheric effects.
But to end our look at the life of Captain Mackintosh, I read with interest his time as an apprentice at the Aluminium Works beside the village of Foyers on the banks of Loch Ness. The picture of him at the top of this article portrays him at the time he was working there. Amongst his recollections of excessive drinking and Gaelic speakers from the Western Isles whom he did not understand, he talks fondly of "Foreman Gray" or to be more precise a man by the name of Hugh Gray.
When I read this, I initially assumed this was Hugh Gray, the man who took the first photograph of the Loch Ness Monster in November 1933 thus giving us an insight into the man himself. Actually, it turned out to be his father, also named Hugh. Mackintosh entered his apprenticeship in Edwardian times, too early for our Hugh Gray who was still a child then. The story is shown below and I would not recommend doing this today!
Ours was a happy factory where men worked industriously, untroubled by class-wars and restrictive practices. That was until we had our first socialist agitator. I can see him now standing by the gates as we were all going out to lunch, telling us in a very loud Glaswegian voice that we were fools not to strike for more pay and less work.
"Join the happy band of brothers under the leadership of Keir Hardie . . . wealth and prosperity to all of us . . . Except the capitalists. Hang 'em from the nearest lamp-post."
They had said the last bit during the French Revolution .. . Foreman Gray nudged my arm, jerked his head and took me aside.
"Alastair," he said, "we're going to teach this chap a lesson. We're going to tie the b------ to one of the trolleys. I want you to go down where the railway line turns off to the pier. When you hear him and the trolley - and he's bound to be hollering blue murder - nip out, jump on and stand on the brake. Stop him just short of the edge of the pier."
Normally the trolleys were loaded with the aluminium bars, run down this way to the steamers to be taken off for rolling. Each truck weighed two tons. Considerable momentum would be gathered down the incline to the pier. Whilst I set off for the quay willing helpers were assisting Gray to hoist the protesting Glaswegian on to the makeshift tumbril. He was made fast and set moving.
Had I tripped running out of the birch-wood near the pier, or failed to jump on to the trolley as it passed, I shudder to think what might have happened. It might have plunged off the rails straight into Loch Ness, which was at least four hundred feet deep at that spot. As it was, I stopped him ten yards short of a very unpleasant end. Gray, accompanied by Mackenzie, the mechanics' foreman, untied the agitator, giving him a veritable king of kicks as they bade him walk those twenty-three miles back to Inverness and never return.
Hugh Gray Senior died some years later in 1921, seemingly a well liked and upstanding member of the community there in Foyers, though it sounds like he did not suffer fools gladly! Meanwhile, Alastair Mackintosh, like many in those days, went to seek his fortune abroad in the British Empire, but eventually ended up living in London, having worked as a Royal Equerry as well as employment at Rolls Royce and United Artists. By the time he wrote his autobiography in 1961, a new wave of Nessie interest was rising on the back of Dinsdale's film and one suspects his inclusion of such stories was no coincidence!
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