The eagle, the Fraser child, and the tragedy that never was
“I hope you will forgive a stranger intruding on your sorrow, which must be so deep, but the story was so heart-rending I could not but write…” These were the parting words of a gentleman from Montrose in a letter written to Mr & Mrs Fraser of Inveroykel, written on 10th May 1904.
By Anna MacRae MacDonald
What triggered such heartfelt words you may wonder? The answer lies in a report in the previous day’s Dundee Evening Telegraph, headed “Child Carried Off By An Eagle”.
“While the little girl was playing at her father’s cottage door on Saturday evening an eagle swooped down, gripped her in its claws, and carried her off to the mountains, where, some hours later, her ...body was found by a gamekeeper”.
As the days wore on, gruesome details emerged within articles from a variety of news publications in Scotland, England and even Ireland. The infant’s name was reported as Ida Fraser, aged 13 months.
The sad events triggered a national outpouring of sympathy towards the family involved: stated as Mr and Mrs Fraser of Ochto, Inveroykel. Soon letters began arriving with Hugh & Isabella Fraser who actually lived at Keeper’s Cottage, a bit further up the hill from Ochto. They had three children, two born in Tain where Mr Fraser had worked as a Gamekeeper at Tarlogie, and the third, a girl, born at Inveroykel on 5th Feb 1903. She was 15 months old when the tragic incident is said to have occurred on or around the 7th May 1904 -a wee bit older than the 13 months that was quoted, but I guess we can forgive that small inaccuracy. Oh, and her name was Frances, not Ida – yet another discrepancy?
Not a discrepancy, but a complete fabrication – before long the story was revealed to be a hoax! Those early articles had gone into quite some detail about the purported events of the 7th May, describing how Isabella was one moment happily baking bread while her infant daughter was playing nearby, and then in a matter of hours she was trailing up to the top of “Torrymore” hill searching for her wee girl.
So, who was the source of this hoax, and what was their motivation? Well, a couple of the articles alluded to a “Dingwall Correspondent” as the supplier of such a fanciful tale. And the North Star expands on this.
“The story arrived with its maker –a young man– in Dingwall on Saturday night. He told that he was a member of the march party which discovered the child in the eagle’s nest... The story would not have got abroad had the youth, who dreamed the wonderful dream, confessed it was ‘a hoax’ on Monday morning, but he actually conducted a small party up the hill...pointing out the steep rocky location of the alleged nest”. After several hours in the hills trying to locate the (fictitious) nest and point out the Fraser’s cottage to his company, he came clean.
It seems that at this time in the Scottish Highlands, eagles were protected and gamekeepers under instruction not to kill them. They may have wished to keep tight control on bird of prey populations in order to limit their killing of game. Perhaps the hoaxer thought that one result of a story such as that of an eagle murdering a human child, would be the lifting of the protection order.
Whether the story was a dram-fuelled invention in a Dingwall pub on the preceding Saturday night or something more contrived, we are all free to speculate. But it just goes to show, don’t believe everything you read in the papers! #20thCenturyFakeNews.
Anna MacRae MacDonald - Genealogy services based in the Scottish Highlands: historical research – family and local; production of family tree charts and genealogical reports; certificate lookups and much more. Get in touch to discuss your requirements by email or find us on Facebook
