Away with the fairies

SOME subjects just seem to be in the ether at any given moment: right now, it's fairies.

It all started with the appearance of fairy houses near Gelt Wood in the north of the county. An artist with an imagination put some fairy doors at the base of trees in the wood, giving local families and hikers a smile. One might have expected vandals to have uprooted the glazed-pottery doors but they remained all summer untouched. Indeed, children (and adults) left gifts at the doors in the way of fruit and flowers. Even  if a door handle or lock fell off, it was left carefully placed by the door for the return of the artist. I popped up last week while I was on holiday to take some photos (see my flickr stream). Her indoors then said she wanted to go and see them so we returned on the Saturday - only to find they had vanished. We feared vandals or council workmen had cleared them out.  But the 'fairies' wrote to The Cumberland News to explain they were vanishing for the winter but would return in the Spring. Then, this week I was trawling through an 1860 copy of The Whitehaven News for our Memory Lane slot when this headline caught my eye: "THE WHITEHAVEN FAIRIES". It transpired that in a court case in 1860 a man's defence to handling stolen goods (his daughter had taken gold sovereigns from an old lady in Whitehaven) was that he thought the fairies had left them in his house. He was acquitted. Not, I should hasten to add, because the court also shared his view that fairies could conjure up gold sovereigns, but because he was obviously so simple-minded that he sincerely believed a deception engineered by his daughter and wife. Here's a sneak preview of the case ahead of it appearing in our Memory Lane in a couple of weeks...

"THE WHITEHAVEN FAIRIES: It seems that we have not yet come to an end of the supernatural visitants who, if the quacks and the mediums are to be believed, are hovering about in the circumambient air and in the mephitic vapours of the coal cellar. We take great delight in the fairies, when they are confined to prettily illustrated children’s books. As to the fairies in real life, we imagine them to be as dead and gone as the dun cow that swallowed Tom Thumb, or the Dragon of Wantley. It appears that we were deceived. At the quarter sessions, one Daniel O’Hara and his wife, were indicted for receiving fourteen sovereigns, well knowing them to have been stolen by a little girl, their daughter. It appears that young Miss O’Hara had for some time past been employed to perform little offices about he person of a penurious old woman at Whitehaven, who had hoarded up these fourteen sovereigns in a box. The thievish little girl stole them while the poor old woman slept. It seems that she had taken the stolen money home and the mother accounted for the possession of the gold to her husband by saying that the “little fairies had likely sent it”; and Mr O’Hara, being apparently of a warm and imaginative temperament, confidently believed the fantastic fraud, and gaily helped his wife to spend the money. When Mr O’Hara and his wife got into trouble about receiving the money, the man told the inspector of police the fairy legend, and further stated that when he and his wife rose in the morning they frequently saw the little fairies sitting by the fire and counting their money; but that when disturbed in this pleasant occupation they abandoned Tom Tidler’s ground, and flew up the chimney. Mr O’Hara and consort were hospitable to these liberal fairies, and often set down milk for them while little Miss O’Hara used to get tobacco, your true fairy being as is well known, exceedingly addicted to a quiet pipe. In Daniel O’Hara’s faith in fairyland its denizens we are bound to place implicit confidence, for he was acquitted of the charge preferred against him; but his wife was convicted, and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment and hard labour from which durance vile we are afraid that the “little fairies” powerful as they are known to be, will be unable to extricate her. As to her daughter, we should strongly recommend her to have nothing more to do with the “good people”."