On Sunday 1 April 1934, hockey player Edith Warwick of Peterborough was touring Scotland with three teammates from the East Angles hockey team and Kathleen ‘Rosie’ Doman, their captain and an England hockey international player. The team had been touring the north of Scotland and after leaving St Andrews their journey led them to Inverness in the afternoon. Edith recalled how the car of chatty teammates went quiet as they reached Loch Ness. Reports of the Loch Ness Monster had started in the month of August a year prior, so everyone was anxious to see if they could spot the infamous creature.

After driving past the Loch for 3-5 miles, Edith saw the creature’s head rise and then sink quickly back into the water followed by a swish of a tail. She called out to her teammates in the car but they missed the creature by mere seconds and instead caught the aftermath of “great movement of the water”.

The Easter of 1934 was quite an unusual one as it had the rare occurrence of April Fools and Easter Sunday landing on the same day. Unfortunately for Edith, her sighting landed on the same day as April Fools, which made it even more difficult for her story to be believed. Her teammates and Inverness hosts were sceptical and many jokes were made at her expense. However, the following day the East Angles team had a hockey match and Edith was met by a group of reporters who had learned of her sighting and wanted to interview her. It turned out that several other people had spotted the Monster on the same day, in the same place, at the same time as Edith. The Scotsman posted her story in a lengthy article and the touring hockey player was received in Aberdeen as a celebrity.

Edith’s sighting of the Loch Ness Monster came at a time of great excitement for the public. With little research about the creature, she was eagerly asked about the number of humps the Monster had to which she replied:

“I did not see anything intervening between the head and tail. There was a distance of about 20 feet between the head and tail. The greater part of the creature apparently had been under water. I have no doubt I have seen a creature in the water which I presume is the monster, and I consider myself lucky that I did”.

Monster hunters flocked to the Loch in the following weeks in the hope of seeing it for themselves. Her story reached international fame in an article of the Continental Daily Mail in Italy and was later published again on 25 February 1956 in an issue of Hockey Field magazine.

The Loch Ness Monster