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Parish Magazine Ashprington Cornworthy Dittisham May 2021 Away with the Fairies in 1917. My three year old granddaughter Lily loves fairy stories and so, apparently, did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. He totally believed in the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917 two talented cousins, Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9), borrowed their father's camera and went down through the bottom of the garden to Cottingley Beck, a stream near Bradford in Yorkshire. There Elsie took five photographs, beautifully composed, showing her cousin Frances watching with a rapt expression a group of fairy folk dancing in front of her. Other photographs showed fairies flying around and a gnome on the grass. The whole process took about half an hour. Such was the skill of the girls' composition that Elsie's mother believed that the little figures really were fairies. Her father, who developed the images, did not believe they were real and considered that the girls had used cardboard cut outs of fairies in the photographs. He refused to lend them his camera again. Elsie's mother Polly was a Theosophist. She went to a meeting in Bradford which happened to be about fairies. She told the president of the Harrogate Theosophists, Edward Gardner, about the photographs and he examined them. Having pronounced them genuine he later contacted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a well known Spiritualist, who was writing a piece on fairies for the 1920 Christmas edition of the Strand Magazine. Doyle was totally convinced that the images were real and asked permission to use them in his article. In 1983 both Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. in their 80s, publicly admitted that the photographs were fakes. The girls had cut out dancing figures from an old copy of 'Princess Mary's Gift Book', published in 1914, coloured them, mounted them on cardboard, and added wings. They then posed them with hatpins and Elsie took the photographs. What had stated as a prank grew out of control; neither girl dared to admit what they had done. In a 1985 interview onY orkshire television Frances said: “Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet.” She went on to say: “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.” Despite Kodak saying that they couldn't rule out fakery and Ilford saying that the photos were faked and the eminent scientist and psychic researcher Sir Oliver Lodge stating that he did not consider them genuine, other eminent people believed in them because they wanted to. Today's world is haunted by conspiracy theories and fantasy science. Many people are convinced that huge black moggies stalk Bodmin Moor, that the 1969 moon landing was filmed in a hanger in Arizona, that Elvis Presley and Adolf Hitler are shacked up somewhere in the Americas, and that the anti-Covid vaccinations contain Russian microchips and weird hormones. All these theories contain not a shred of scientific evidence. Why are these theories constantly evolving and being re-invented? Who gains from them? Are they just huge ego trips? There is no scientific evidence to prove the existence of God. If there were then what would be the point of faith? Neither is there anything in science that disproves the existence of God. There has never been a conspiracy theory that lasted for over two thousand years and elements of Christianity share the creation stories of older religions in all parts of the world from the isolated antipodes to the far reaches of Asia. Neither is there any valid clash between science and Christianity. God has given us the intelligence and critical faculty to examine outlandish theories and judge them valid or otherwise. But however much we want to believe in fairies we will struggle to prove that they exist. Laurence Green Fairies looking more real than the girls ? About the Magazine Subscription Time If you would like to receive the Parish Magazine please contact the distribution organiser for your village: Ashprington: Mr. G Gillespie 01803 731071 Payment for the magazine subscription will now run from April Cornworthy: Mrs. S. Stevenson 01803 732301 2021-April 2022 rather than as previously January-January of Dittisham: Mrs. P. Bennett 01803 722307 the next year. If printing costs and number of subscribers to the paper copy and online copy allow then the charges will continue If you would like to contribute any article, as: announcement, anounce an event or sell household articles please contact the editors: Kathi and Laurence Green £10 per year paper copy 8 Holly Villas Ashprington TQ9 7UU (black & white) Telephone 01803 732437 Email [email protected] £ 5 per year online copy (colour) Rates for advertisement: Small ad: £10/ one month If you are already an online subscriber (pre-pandemic) £25/ three months then I will be sending you an email with bank details and £40/ six months instructions asking for your payment of £5 online. If you £75/ one year subscribe to a paper copy would you please pay £10 to your Large ad: £12/ one month distributor. If you subscribe to both online and paper copies then £30/ three months please just pay £10 to your distributor. £50/ six months £85/ one year Subscribers from Ashprington and Dittisham Extra-large ad: £150/year please make cheques payable to Ashprington Parish If you would like to place an ad in the magazine Magazine. please contact Henry Trollope for further details Subscribers from Cornworthy and Tuckenhay please and payment. Design your own ad or send the make cheques payable to Cornworthy PCC. required text by email or post to: Henry, 6 Jaspers Cottages,Cornworthy, TQ9 7EY. If you are a new subscriber or if you are not sure about Email: [email protected] your subscription status please email [email protected] or Telephone: 01803 732 267 telephone 01803 732 437 and ask for Kathi and we will help. If you would like to switch from receiving a paper copy May Magazine: to an online copy then please email this request to [email protected] including information on the village Please try to have all copy to the where you live and I will let your distributor know. production editors by the 20th of As a result of not printing three issues during the first May for the magazine in June . lockdown and another three issues during the third lockdown Thank you. there should be a moderate excess of funds in the magazine account once the 2021 subscription have been collected. Because Church funds have been greatly reduced during the Thank you ... Pandemic, the Parish Magazine will be able to make a donation from this excess to each of the three Churches. Thank you to all those who have paid their Producing a monthly magazine without the usual subscriptions for the 2021 magazine; encouragement content of planned events, meetings, weddings, etc. has been a to those who have yet to pay either their distributor or challenge. A greater challenge was trying to distribute online by online arrangement. Instructions for payment are copies to all subscribers. Thank you to those who have helped in on this page. this distribution and apologies to those who missed out on receiving their copies. There were many fine articles, poems Thank you to husband, Laurence, for his fairy storey and pictures sent in during this year and if you would like any and the internet for the less than convincing pictures. past online copies please email to the above. In this month we may hopefully begin to make plans for Thank you to all subscribers. Without your dedicated summer events - please send for publication the turning of these pages the Parish Magazine could not exist. Best information that we are all looking forward to. wishes for a happy summer - freer and wiser. Below is an excerpt from Fr. Jim’s Advent 2020 letter to the Totnes Mission Community. At the time of his writing Christmas was coming, we were heading for our third lockdown and communication was limited to online. Today the thoughts expressed below seem even more relevant as we watch many countries sliding back into restrictions after enjoying their brief moments of freedom. Does our future teeter in the balance? From ‘Thought for the Week’ December 2020 I was thinking last week that, both as individuals and as societies, we tend to sleepwalk into things and also through our daily lives. The universe is so ordered that things will generally take their course and, often, we just feel like passengers. It doesn’t seem to matter if we daydream or drift or think only of how to make our time here as comfortable and convenient as possible, regardless of any impact on other beings. Yet, through Advent, we have been reflecting on the giant WAKE UP call that both this season and also the whole gospel message represents. Right now, it feels like the wake-up sirens are blaring out across the whole globe. In the Bible this is usually associated with trumpets blown by angels. But an angel also says to Mary, ’do not be afraid’, and the trumpet call sounds rather different if it is ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ that you are hearing. Veiled in flesh, in a mortal, vulnerable body, all too easily subject to suffering, pain and violence, the divine becomes manifest and makes everything holy. God is with us, whatever happens next. As St Paul might have said: ‘I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor COVID19, nor Brexit, nor the climate emergency, nor anything else in either the visible or the invisible realms can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.