The Biggest Fairy Story D 27
"So that's the first photo ever of real fairies?"
"Yes."
When Cooper was told that The Unexplained would cease publish-
ing early in 1983 he decided to write up the "truth" as he had learned
it from Frances at Canterbury Cathedral. The magazine's editor, Peter
Brooksmith, agreed and also commissioned an article from Fred
Gettings on how he had come across the Shepperton illustration in the
Princess Mary G$ Book of 1916.
Both articles appeared in December 1982, entitled "Cottingley. At
Last the Truth."
Curiously, no one remarked on the fact that fairies, which are re-
puted to take on shapes familiar to their viewers, would naturally em-
ulate the Shepperton illustration so familiar to the girls.
Frances and Elsie, says Cooper, stonily severed contact with him.
Frances curtly called him a traitor over the phone and hung up.
It was she, following The Unexplained articles, who then decided to
be the first to make a public confession. She telephoned the Times, and
the interviewer produced a story with the well-known first photo-
graph, headlined "Photographs Confounded Conan Doyle. Cottingley
Fairies a Fake, Woman Says." The story described how stiff paper
cutouts and hairpins had been used.
Frances nevertheless continued to maintain that the last photograph
was of real fairies, taken by herself.
Elsie at first refused to comment on the article but later received a
reporter and cameraman at her Nottingham home. There she was
snapped in the act of cutting out a fairy figure from cardboard.
A few days after the Times's disclosures, says Cooper, a reporter from
the Manchester Daily Express put an end to the whole affair: "Fairies?"
he quoted Elsie as saying with a laugh, "No. I don't believe in fairies.
Never have and never will. "
A sdng photograph of the eighty-one-year-old Elsie accompanied
the article under the head1ine:"The Biggest Fairy Story of Them All."
Yet after Frances died in July of 1986 at the age of eighty, her
daughter claimed her mother had maintained until the end "that fairies
were real; she never changed her mind."