The Gourock Sea Serpent: Charles Rankin's 27-Foot Carcass on the Clyde

Gourock sits on the Firth of Clyde, looking out over the Tail of the Bank. In 1942 that water was a naval anchorage, and the upper Clyde was a restricted wartime area. Charles Rankin was the town's Burgh Surveyor, and by one account its sanitary inspector too. When something large came ashore on the beach at Ashton, near McInroy's Point, it became his problem.

Early June 1942. Rankin stood before "an animal the like of which neither of us had seen before." It measured 27 to 28 feet long and 5 to 6 feet deep at its broadest point. It came in three parts. Torso, neck and tail.

The head was "relatively small" and flattened. Seal-like, but with a sharper, pointed muzzle and "prominent eyebrow ridges." Large eyes sat on the sides. Both jaws held "large, pointed teeth" in a single row. There were two pairs of L-shaped flippers and a long, rectangular tail.

The skin was smooth, thin but tough. It carried many 6-inch bristles, "tapered and pointed at each end like a steel knitting needle," yet more flexible. Rankin pulled one from a flipper and kept it in his desk. It shrivelled until it "resembled a coiled spring." He found "no bones other than its spinal column."

The flesh was deep pink and blubbery. In the stomach lay "a small piece of knitted woolen material as from a cardigan" and a scrap of cotton tablecloth. To Rankin, the whole thing resembled "a huge lizard."

Rankin asked the naval headquarters for permission to photograph it. The answer was no. He was warned he "would be well advised not to be caught photographing in this particular area." So he drew it. Then, before "the smell became really offensive," he had it cut into manageable pieces, burned at the municipal incinerator and buried there. That ground later became the playing field of St Ninian's RC Primary School.

Rankin wrote to Dr A. C. Stephen, Keeper of Natural History at the Royal Scottish Museum, enclosing his sketch. Stephen identified the bristles as "dermal rays which make up part of a shark fin." His verdict was a basking shark, like a carcass found at Deepdale Holm in Orkney. The author Rupert T. Gould replied that such carcasses washed ashore worldwide but were "something science would not admit." The Greenock Telegraph and the Gourock Times both reported a basking shark, 27 feet in length.

The basking shark remains the majority view. As one rots, the jaws and gill arches fall away, leaving a small head on a long neck. Its fin rays look like bristles. Karl Shuker and Markus Hemmler both reach this conclusion.

A basking shark's are only millimetres long, in several rows. Michael Newton rejected every known identification. Paul Harrison suggested a seal. Glen Vaudrey raised the possibility of a hoax, since Rankin is the only source, and his story shifted from an "advanced state of decomposition" to "absolutely complete. Unmarred." Hemmler called it "a combination of both genuine and non-genuine observations."

In September 1980, Rankin finally told his story, to the Strathearn Herald and then in the "Monsters of the Deep" episode of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. His letters survive in the National Museums Scotland "monster files." In 2023, Christopher McEleny of the Alba Party asked Inverclyde Council about the case. A spokesperson said "Mr. Rankin claimed that he found a sea monster washed up on the shore." Whatever it was, it was burned and buried, and little of it is likely to survive.