Fairies

In an age of unprecedented interest in the paranormal and the
inevitable attendant duplicity and fraud I believe it would be
appropriate to record the facts underlying such a phenomenon which
occurred in the county of Yorkshire almost one hundred years ago to the
day, together with some hitherto unpublished details which I have
recently discovered.

The aforementioned case first came to light when three sisters, Eliza,
Constance and Lucy Brumby reported the visitation of fairies to the
garden of their family home in Cottingley, near Bradford. What made
this case all the more remarkable was the photographic evidence
provided which clearly showed tiny creatures cavorting in the
undergrowth; this evidence was first presented at local meetings of an
esoteric religious gathering popular at the time, but the news spread
in such a manner as to come to the attention of eminent writers,
specialists in the realms of the paranormal and the national press, who
descended upon this tranquil suburb in great numbers. Of course, the
hullabaloo ensured that the little folk were understandably loth to
reveal their presence in person, and not one of the distinguished
visitors ever saw a fairy in the flesh.

Which was, of course, hardly surprising as the three young women had
engineered the whole scam, creating models which they painted and
secured in an upright position with hatpins; the primitive photographic
technology available at the time had been unable to reveal the fraud
which was only discovered when their father caught the girls
repositioning the models in preparation for another "shoot". He was far
from amused, especially as the distinguished visitors had trampled his
prize leeks and rhubarb in their efforts to uncover the fairy folk, and
promptly sent the girls to complete their education at the Dothegals
Academy for Daughters of Distressed Gentlefolk, a gaunt establishment
perched on the hills above Haworth where they were underwent training
as befitted their gender and station in life, notably needlework,
malnutrition and general physical abuse. It was about this time that
the three sisters began to concoct bad Gothic novels featuring demented
characters who prowled the neighbouring moorlands, until the stern
brooding headmistress of their educational establishment began to
recognise caricatures of herself in many of their writings, whereupon
she administered a severe birching and threw their masterpieces into
the fire, an act for which subsequent generations of readers have cause
to be unceasingly thankful.

Other historians have also written at length concerning the fate of
their only brother, Brambling Brumby, a wretched drunkard who spent his
entire waking hours slumped on a bench at Cottingley railway station
recording details of passing locomotives. However, once the girls had
been packed off to boarding school he seized his chance, sobered
himself up and obtained a position on the station staff, from which he
rose to become Chairman of the London Midland and Scottish Railway. He
was also the only member of the Brumby family whose literary efforts
survive to this day, a journal of his eventful early days bearing the
title "Trainspotting".

And so the story of the Cottingley fairies would have come to a
premature end, had it not been for the legendary Yorkshire spirit of
enterprise which led Timothy Pepper to build his famous PepperMill
village on the border of nearby Shipley, at the centre of which lay an
enormous factory dedicated to the production of tasteless fairy-related
tat, surrounded by the artisan cottages famous for their advanced
construction and state-of-the-art sewerage systems which did away with
the gruesome clearance of human bodily waste by "night soil" men;
Pepper's engineers devised an ingenious and hygienic system by which
toilet contents were sucked away through a series of inter-connecting
tubes and dropped into the River Aire in a great steaming heap. Another
local entrepreneur, Horatio Ramsbottom, invented what is known today as
a "package tour" in which he chartered charabancs to convey cramped
passengers from Leeds and Bradford to the site of the fairy phenomenon
followed by a tour of the PepperMill factory culminating in the
compulsory purchase of overpriced and mediocre fish-and-chips at his
notorious restaurant.

But what of the three sisters, without whom the exploitation of the
gullible would have remained a mere fantasy in rapacious Yorkshire
minds? Solid factual evidence is hard to glean from the turbulent
decades which followed, but the last known photograph shows Eliza,
Constance and Lucy strolling arm-in-arm with Nazi generals Unter Den
Linden in wartime Berlin. Though by now middle-aged, all were wearing
tight black leather outfits. There was not a fairy in sight.

P.S.
(The entertaining TRUE story of the Cottingley fairies can be found at
various sites on the Internet).