18. THE TINTAGEL SEA SERPENT OF 1907
In September 1907, Mr Edward Spencer Dodgson MA, of Jesus College, Oxford, was staying at the Clifton House hotel in Tintagel, Cornwall, along with his friend, the Rev. TC Davies MA, of Queen’s College, Oxford, who served as chaplain of the almshouses in Sheffield. At 11.45 am on12 September, when the two friends were seated on the edge of the cliff at Gulla Stem, Rev Davies called his colleague’s attention to a dark object in the sea, moving very rapidly towards Tintagel Head. To their amazement, it turned out to be a sea serpent 20ft (6m) in length, holding its large head, which apparently had some kind of crest or mane upon it, aloft as it swam. “Unfortunately we had no telescope with us, still less a Kodak wherewith to take its likeness,” the two Oxford men lamented. Still, they made haste to write a letter to the Western Morning Post that it was now definitely proven that the great sea serpent really did exist.
The letter caused a brief but intense sea serpent mania in the West of England. Two other Oxford graduates thought they had seen the sea serpent off Land’s End, and the Plymouth man W Skinner, of 61 Julian Street, issued a picture postcard of a sea serpent he had seen in Plymouth Sound on Sunday 22 September. This creature was 40ft (12m) in length and had a small fin near its tail. But the London naturalists stood ready to nip the sea serpent mania in the bud. They knew that the ribbon fish occurred in these parts, and that a paper in the Scientific American of 1903 had pointed out that these thin and elongated fishes could greatly resemble sea serpents to the ignorant layman. Named for their ribbon-like appearance, these pelagic fishes are seldom seen alive, since they typically live in deep waters, although disease or disorientation may cause them to surface. They are typically 5-8ft. (1.5-2.4m) long, but a specimen caught in America was not less than 21ft (6.4m) in length.
By 1907, sea serpent sightings had become yesterday’s news, a silly-season story worthy of derision by a brave new Edwardian world that had no need for the hoary myths of yesteryear. “Our old friend the sea serpent, probably because it has been such a bad summer, has been absent for a long time, but the brief spell of fine weather has brought him out,” sneered the Aberdeen Journal. “More than once I have called attention to the fact that the sea serpent has fallen on evil days and evil tongues, and is by no means what he once was. A proof of this sad decadence is provided by the manner in which a tale about our old friend appearing off Tintagel, in Cornwall, has been dismissed by scornful journalists …” wrote the ‘In LighterVein’ columnist of the Derby Daily Telegraph. Exposed to ridicule in the press for their foolish credulity, Mr Dodgson and Rev. Brooks limped back to Oxford with their tails between their legs. Today, Mr Skinner’s postcard is the only memorial of this forgotten sea serpent mania of 1907, with three alleged West of England sightings of this elusive creature within the same month.
And here the story would have ended had it not been for a communication from Dr R Darwall-Smith, Archivist at Jesus College, regarding the career of the sea serpent observer Edward Spencer Dodgson (18571922). After early studies at New College, leaving without a degree, Dodgson was registered at Jesus College in 1901 and awarded an honorary MA in 1907. He was a philologist and wrote a number of papers for Notes and Queries and other learned periodicals, one of them translating Shakespeare’s epitaph into Basque. In 1913, when he was studying Gaelic in Ireland, he claimed to have found a stone that gave clues as to the whereabouts of the treasure of an old Irish chieftain, but nothing came of this. In 1918, when studying at the Bath Reference Library, he went for an excursion to Wells, where he was caught in the act improperly assaulting a lad of 17. At the Somerset Assizes, the ‘nasty old man’ Dodgson was sentenced to three months of hard labour; back home in Oxford, his name was struck off the books of Jesus College, for good. He died from ‘softening of the brain’ in October 1922, at Camberwell House Asylum in London where he had spent the declining months of his life.