Cursed by the fairies

Sixty years later they admitted to faking all but one of them. It was a secret that tore the family apart and ruined reputations. Jeffery Taylor speaks to Frances’s daughter, who insists she will clear her mother’s name.

It felt a long way from home. First it was the taxi driver’s mellifluous Belfast accent as we zigzagged through cloud-capped pastures and postcard-pretty cottages on the slopes of Black Mountain, nature’s bulwark between Northern Ireland’s capital city and its airport. 

“During the Troubles the mountain was an IRA stronghold, the police vans round here still have sides a foot thick and guns were buried all over the place,” he said.

As if that were not enough to make a traveller long for familiar faces, I was in pursuit of a herd of fairies nearly 100 years old, ridiculed as the hoax of the century but today the subject of a full-scale restoration.

“When I appeared on the Antiques Roadshow in January this year expert Paul Atterbury’s face went blank when I told him I believe in fairies,” remembers Christine Lynch, 78.

Christine, accompanied by her daughter, also Christine, had shown Paul photographs of the infamous Cottingley Fairies, a prank by two schoolgirls that deceived the nation and eminent minds like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, when they were made public in 1920.

One of the girls was nine-year-old Frances, mother of Christine senior, and she went to her grave in 1986 steadfastly maintaining that one of the five pictures featuring assorted little people was authentic.

That picture, The Fairy Bower, along with the camera that took it, as well as the first published edition of Frances’s book, Reflections On The Cottingley Fairies, will feature in colour next month in an exhibition, The Art Of Fairy Stories And Mermaid Tales, at the Harris Art Gallery in Preston, Lancashire.

“The shockwaves from the First World War made the atmosphere in 1920 receptive to feel-good stories about the magic of fairies,” says Christine.

“Perhaps today’s gloomy prospects will make the little people welcome again. It’s a harmless bit of romance.”

We were talking in Christine’s end-of-terrace townhouse in Belfast’s smartest area into which she downsized from the family home on the death of her husband in 1988.

He was Dr Gerard Lynch, a leading Northern Ireland cancer specialist.

Her little house is crammed with her late husband’s family furniture and silver and studded with statues of the Virgin Mary.

Surrounded by all the symbols of middle-class comfort, it was hard to grasp that just a couple of generations ago Christine’s Grandma Griffiths reared 14 surviving children out of a brood of 22 in a Bradford tenement supported by Grandpa Griffiths, a poor man’s undertaker.

“When I first came to Belfast from Malaya in 1959 with my husband the women all wore shawls and smelled because there were no bathrooms for the lower classes,” says Christine.

“All that has changed today but seeing is believing and no, I don’t have a fairy tucked away in the spare room and I don’t mind if people laugh at me.”

So complete is Christine’s belief in her mother’s honesty that I, too, found myself teetering on the verge of conversion.

As we pored over the blown-up coloured print of The Fairy Bower, Christine pointed to a faint shadow on the picture’s edge and said: “Isn’t that the outline of another wing? There’s another fairy there, just out of sight and I think I can see her knee peeping through the grass.”

After about half an hour in her company I could see exactly what she meant.

Cottingley is a small Yorkshire village. In July 1917 it was home to Frances’s 13-year-old cousin Elsie, with whom Frances frequently spent the summer holidays.

Asked what she did while staying in the stone cottage, now owned by Emmerdale actor Dominic Brunt (vet Paddy Kirk), Frances would reply: “I go to see the fairies.”

She wrote in her memoirs of her lazy days by the Cottingley beck: “My favourite place was the willow branch.

There I would sit observing. The most common appearance was that of small green men. Then the fairies appeared, some with wings, some without.”

Elsie dreamed up a joke on her amateur photographer father and borrowed his camera.

She copied illustrations from the popular children’s book Princess Mary’s Gift Book, pinned them with hat pins to the grassy banks of the glen and framing Frances’s face in her lens took a photo that would go down in history.

While Frances was always strictly upright, Elsie never shied from colouring the truth.

Jealous of the attention received by her young cousin starring in the first picture, Elsie had to have her photograph taken with the fairies, too.

Without telling Frances, she prepared a cut-out of a gnome and on their next trip to the beck had her take the photo “What a hideous old man,” was Frances’s only comment. Elsie never claimed to see fairies but loved the attention her prank provoked and swore Frances to eternal secrecy.

In 1920 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the pictures a national cause célebre when he wrote about them in The Strand Magazine.

He wanted more pictures and gave the girls a Cameo camera each and six dozen plates. The plates were secretly marked to reveal any faking.

Elsie and Frances returned to the beck and as they sat on the grass Frances saw the bluebells swaying. She hastily pulled out the lens and snapped the shutter.

When the plates were developed that shot was obscured so it was sent to a laboratory in London where they managed to develop it and declare the negative as absolutely unfakeable.

Frances kept her promise of secrecy to Elsie for the next 60 years but in 1982 decided to own up and asked journalist Joe Cooper to help with her book of confession, which will be on sale at the exhibition, privately published by Christine.

One evening she left him alone with her notes detailing for the first time the whole elaborate scam, except for the fifth picture.

Cooper hurriedly left the next morning and without reference to Frances two weeks later published his own exposé, Cottingley: At Last The Truth, in a magazine, The Unexplained.

A public outcry ensued and Frances felt devastated at his betrayal.

“The deception ruined her life. She felt she had betrayed the fairies,” says Christine.

“My husband was well known and respected in Northern Ireland. we were very embarrassed but I knew my mother told the truth about the fifth photograph. Nothing shook my belief in fairies.”

Christine is convinced that revealing everything now in today’s more understanding society will restore her mother’s reputation and blow away any hint of wrongdoing.

She is happy to pay a high price for her mother’s redemption, a run of 10,000 copies of Frances’s book for sale at the exhibition will cost her thousands but she is desperate to clear her mother’s name.

During the ride over the mountain to catch my flight home I noticed a charred area on the roadside: drunken youths or terrorist thugs?

I couldn’t help wondering if Northern Ireland is actually ready yet for the return of the Cottingley Fairies.