A Cottingley Confession

I have wondered for whom I am writing this confession and have come up empty. Perhaps it is only for me, Elsie, and my own feelings of guilt for what we did. That feeling is unavoidable despite the years of others telling me there really was no harm in it all, that the fault lay in the adults around us. When I try to reconcile that sentiment with the whole story every single moment when we could have told the truth eats away at my conscience. As Frances once said, we were having a bit of fun. It was a game. She couldn’t understand why they were taken in. She concluded that they wanted to be taken in.

My cousin Frances arrived from South Africa as a nine-year-old bundle of fun. At sixteen it was left to me to entertain the girl. More used to the exotic landscape of Africa, Frances was fascinated by the woods and becks around Cottingley. I would take her around and name as many of the plants as I could, somewhat in the manner of a schoolteacher. She began to tell me stories of the spirits and demons that pervaded the lives of the people she knew in Africa. Perhaps I felt a tinge of jealousy when I began to try to outdo her stories by telling her about the fairies that lived in the very places we would visit. She was excited by the prospect and demanded to know what they looked like. A moment of inspired improvisation found us leafing through my much loved copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book and telling Frances that the fairies looked very much like the dancing girls in my book’s illustrations.

Frances had the great idea of making copies of the drawings, cutting them out and arranging them in the places I said I had seen the fairies. Her plan was to draw the fairies themselves out. She actually referred to the idea as “ticing” them out. I guessed that she meant “enticing” but chose not to correct her English. In the selfish thrill of being the elder of the two of us I took charge, my inner schoolteacher surfacing once more, and drew copies of the dancing girls, adding wings to their backs because, although I had never actually seen a fairy, everyone knows they have wings. Frances was delighted with the drawings and we raced down to the beck and put them in place. They looked wonderful.

They looked so wonderful, in fact, that we were not to be satisfied with our own private game. What fun it would be, we decided, if we were to capture a photograph of our little scene that we might share our woodland fantasy with others. Father was happy to lend us his camera and so we took the first photograph. When our parents asked what we did all day down at the beck we mentioned the fairies we could see with a nonchalance we hoped would add credibility to our childish claims. When Father very kindly developed the picture for us we could not have been happier at the result. It looked so real.

For our second picture I insisted that I be photographed as Frances had appeared in the first. So now we had Frances with the dancing fairies and me with the winged gnome. Father became a touch irritated with us. I think he saw the pictures as harmless fun until Mother expressed her belief in the existence of the spiritual beings for weren’t the two pictures undeniable proof? Cowering in our bedroom listening to Mother and Father arguing about the pictures was the first moment in all of this that I remember wanting to tell the truth. Frances burst into tears and begged me not to when I told her what I intended to do. She said that to lie was a sin but to be caught in a lie was much worse.  I relented and the argument downstairs dissipated quickly enough. Everything returned to normal except Father would no longer lend us his camera. Peeved at the time, I now understand. Lending us the camera had led to an argument between him and Mother so the logical thing to do was to deny access to the camera. That should have been the end of it.

The pictures were not mentioned in our house again for two years. Frances and I continued our forays into the countryside, describing to each other the fairies we were pretending were all around. We did not, having no further access to the camera, take any more pictures.

Mother told nobody what she intended to do. I think she, like the rest of us, had forgotten the whole thing until some notice or other in a newspaper or magazine reminded her of the photographs, rekindling her belief in our honesty. Unbeknownst to us all she attended a gathering of the members of the Theosophical Society, the name meaning nothing to me at the time but one that sends a shudder through me when I hear it now. A man by the name of Mr. Gardner took an excited interest in the two pictures Mother presented to him that night. He took them as proof of a theory he espoused regarding the evolution of the human species. Did he think we were all to sprout wings and go dancing in the woods as the fairies in our pictures did? Mother did not mention this jaunt of hers and, as before, that should have been the end of it.

One year later Father called me to his study as evening drew in. I began to tremble when he asked me if I remembered the fairy pictures. Of course I remembered them, albeit with a modicum of shame that they had led to a falling out between my parents. Then Father did something that he very rarely did. He admitted that he may have been wrong. Perhaps, he suggested, dismissing the photographs as a childish prank had been too hasty a decision. I almost fell off my chair. I was on the verge of confessing the truth to him. Knowing Mother to have placed her trust and faith in me regarding our claims, I could not bear to think of Father succumbing to the lie as well. Before I could get the words sorted in my head and out of my mouth, Father asked me if I knew of an author named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Confused by the change of subject I told him that I did, although I was yet to read any of his work.

How it had come to be I do not know, but our two pictures, given to Mr. Gardner by Mother, had made their way from him to the attention of Sir Arthur and that same distinguished author was requesting permission to use them in a forthcoming article he was writing about fairies. Father was so impressed that a man of Conan Doyle’s standing and intelligence regarded the images as genuine that he forgot all the good sense that had led him to the conclusion that they were anything but.

Frances and I were horrified that our innocent game was now loose in the world, gathering, it seemed, momentum. We agreed that our confession was long overdue and determined to find the right time to tell my parents it all. The right time never came as we also had the understanding that to confess was to make a fool of my mother. Mother had, against even her husband’s scorn, believed in us, believed in our fairies. Every moment that presented itself as an opportunity to come clean passed as I pictured the shame that wonderful woman would experience when I revealed her for a fool. All Elsie and I could do was to hope and pray that Sir Conan Doyle’s article would never make it to publication.

By this time Frances and her parents had moved to Scarborough but she was brought back to my house for the summer. A large number of important people had seen our two photographs and a consensus on their verity had proved impossible to reach. To settle the matter once and for all, Mr. Gardner, of the Theosophical Society, arrived at our house with two cameras. These were for Frances and me and we were to use them to capture more pictures of our winged friends, thus proving their existence.

Overcome with the thrill of having adults listen to and believe us, a rare treat at the time, Frances and I debated long and hard about what we should do. Once again the urge to tell the truth almost won us over. In the end we were too frightened to do so. With so many adults involved we dreaded to think of the punishments we would endure for our fakery. The simple excuse that the fairies would not show themselves if others were watching allowed us the freedom to be on our own and to create three more photographs. Whatever we were thinking in the woods, by the beck and along the glen was no friend to common sense and so the leaping fairy, the fairy with harebells and the fairies and their sun-bath were created and received with adulation, a potent temptation for two young girls.

Another year passed and still the situation grew. Sir Arthur published our first two pictures for a second time and they prompted the same disagreements among his fellows as they had between my parents. Many believed them to be real and just as many that they were fakes. Mr. Gardner returned to the house with a Mr. Hodson in tow. With this new expert around Frances and I did not, thankfully, have the opportunity to stage any more scenes for our cameras, but that did not prevent Mr. Hodson from claiming to have seen fairies everywhere while he was with us. As we had done before, Frances and I shied away from exposing this adult as being as fake as our very own photographs. We played along, something which had by now proven itself to be the easier of paths open to us. To say that Frances and I were fed up with fairies by this point would be to express the understatement of the century.

After all of this hullabaloo, Frances and I were so relieved when the interest in our pictures faded away. No more prominent authors, Societies or publications requested information. We were left to live our lives for a good long time. Even when a journalist tracked me down some twenty years ago to ask about the pictures from forty years before I could not gather the fortitude to confess. We were adults and no longer had the excuse of childishness to forgive our fabrication. My heart skipped a beat as I told the reporter something along the lines of the fairies being a figment of my imagination. Did I then explain the rather ingenious way we had created the scenes? No I did not. I left the poor man with the distinct impression that, somehow, the camera had captured my thoughts. The power of a lie long told to stifle one's rational self is nigh on insurmountable.

Echoing the events of our childhood, interest gathered steam although this time we were aware enough to avoid ever saying that we had really seen the fairies, hinting over and over again that some strange power had photographed these beings of our imagination. Even when we announced that a rational person doesn’t see fairies during an interview, we could not bring ourselves to admit the truth. Had the right questions been asked we might have told all but, as I have mentioned before, Frances concluded that they all wanted to be taken in. I would guess that even if we had plucked up the courage to tell the whole truth a great many people would have disbelieved us, so strong was their desire for the fairies to be real.

My hope that the truth would be revealed by anyone but us almost came to fruition when a man known for debunking supernatural claims, Mr. Randi, took a look at our case. I had to dismiss his conclusion, however, when he said his computer analysis of the images revealed strings holding our fairies up. Whatever he said thereafter meant nothing to me. He was as fake as everyone else. We did not use strings. Our fairies were held upright by concealed hat pins. His "strings" were as made up as our fairies.

Relief finally welcomed Frances and me into her embrace only five or six years ago when, after years of falsehood and obfuscation, we told the truth for an article in a magazine. Even then, Frances tried to maintain some mystery by saying the fifth photograph, the sun-bath one, was genuine. It wasn’t. I know because I took the picture. Two years later I appeared on a television programme and told Mr. Clarke, the presenter, why we had kept the truth hidden for so long. I was being honest when I told him that we could only keep quiet after we learned that we had fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. How could we have someone of such importance championing us for us then to admit to the lie? The heart of it, for me at least, still sits with my mother’s belief in us. To brand her gullible was unthinkable and that sweet, kind, encouraging woman did not deserve to be lambasted for her faith in her daughter. Even as I write that I blush at the thought. That is still the seat of my shame.

And so I conclude my private confession. Frances passed two years ago and I have the feeling I will not be long for this world myself. No, I have not had a premonition nor have fairies informed me of this. There just comes a time in a life when you know things are winding down.

Though none may ever read this my heart is more at rest now, my shame subsiding. I may well be on the way to forgiving myself. I wonder if Frances ever managed to. I shall choose to imagine she did.