Special Guest Blogger: Frances Griffiths

I knew i was in a heap of trouble with my mother during that summer of 1917.
My cousin Elsie and I had gotten ourselves muddy and soaked while playing near a stream behind our home and when mum saw me, she sent to my bedroom where we came up with the idea that we had got into such a state while playing with fairies.
To prove it we borrowed a camera from Elsie’s father, after which Frances posed in front of a group of fairies we had clipped out of a children’s book and set in place with pins. Elsie then snapped the staged scene that would one day become one of the world’s most famous photographs.
We were shocked and surprised that it fooled anyone as it was an amateurish job and my mum wasn't fooled and immediately dismissed it.
We then produced more fairy pictures, and someone who really should have known better, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, became interested in them and he even arranged for cameras to be given to us both so that we could take some more fairy pictures and we managed to stage three more.
The creator of Sherlock Holmes had in recent years become absorbed in a new form of spiritualism sweeping Britain and to Doyle the existence of fairies simply wasn’t that far out, and he was thrilled to find evidence of them in Cottingley.
He sent letters to seeking permission to use the fairy photographs in an article he was writing on the subject for The Strand magazine and that December, the article was published.
After photography experts including Kodak declared the pictures genuine, the 100% not faked photographs were picked up by the Theosophical Society who used the pictures to prove that 'humanity is undergoing a cycle of evolution', whatever that meant.
We both married and lived abroad for a time after we grew up, and yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination and in 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper interviewed me and i said that maybe we had photographed our thoughts, just to keep the intrigue going.
We both kept our secret close for nearly seven decades because a brilliant man like Conan Doyle well, we could only keep quiet because he was a national treasure but in 1983 I felt I had to come clean and admitted the truth that the photographs were fakes and that the fairies were in fact nothing more than cardboard cut-outs from the Princess Mary's Gift Book. Sorry Conan, nice books though.