A high-jumper at the same Olympics, Dora Ratjen, admitted 19 years later that she was in fact a man who had been forced by the Hitler Youth to compete as a woman “for the honour and glory of Germany”.”It can get easier with the passing years where people have kept a secret to protect someone else,” says Dr Clarkson. “But where the secret is one of shame, which is in conflict with the moral sense, it can get harder and harder to stay silent.”Privacy may be healthy, but generally secrets are not. People often find relief in confessing them to a priest or a counsellor. She simply packed her bags and departed with the enigmatic words: “Well, I’m off then.” She took her secret to the grave.”More secrets are kept than come out,” says Dr Petruska Clarkson, a psychotherapist with 35 years’ experience. “Often, the more solid a person looks, the bigger the secret they’re hiding – secrets of sex, crime, money, abuse, scandal or lies about their social circumstances.”Indeed.

My immediate colleagues guiltily unearthed:A maiden aunt who disappeared every Wednesday for 20 years to have sex with a married man;A grandfather who, at his funeral, turned out to have another life and another family 50 miles from his first home; his wife thought he was a dissolute rake who spent his nights, and often subsequent days, in drunken gambling when in fact he kept a pipe and a pair of slippers elsewhere;A married aunt who, for more than two decades, vanished for a week three times a year No-one knew where she went. But when it comes to guilty lifelong secrets he is not alone

It is not just the famous who have something to hide. True, there was Marje Proops who revealed in her autobiography that her happy marriage was a myth which disguised a life-long infidelity.
Then there was the playwright JR Ackerley, who discovered when his father, Roger, died that the old man, a director of the fruit importer Fyffes and an apparent pillar of bourgeois respectability, had led a double life, maintaining a mistress and three daughters for 20 years just a few miles from the family home in Richmond.Just ask around the office and you will find a forest of dark secrets which emerge, through confession or accidental disclosure, after a lifetime in the shadows. Francis Hodgson, a photography critic, said: “Time and time again these cases come up. But if the picture is wonderful, and it did what it was designed to do, so what? Nobody ever said photography was a scientific record.”.

There is more of it about than you might imagine. A 75-year-old American has confessed, after the death of his wife, to being the man in the celebrated photograph in which a sailor gives a passionate kiss to a young nurse in New York’s Times Square on VJ Day in 1945. It was exposed by Philip Knightley, the historian, who demonstrated in another picture that the same soldier subsequently stood up.Mr Knightley said: “Life magazine presented it as the Moment of Death, and Capa was stuck with it from then on. What was he to do, say the picture that made his name wasn’t true? He told a series of conflicting stories about what really happened from then on.”But other experts have suggested it is the picture that should endure, not the circumstances in which it was taken. It has been immortalised in a bronze statue at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington. But Rosenthal has spent the past 50 years fending off accusations that the stirring image was posed by the photographer after the real flag-raising.Robert Capa’s portrait of a loyalist soldier in the Spanish civil war, known as the Moment of Death, used by Life magazine, has also prompted scepticism. It had the air of a lucky snapshot, but was in fact the result of a long afternoon photo-shoot in which he was forced to use two chorus girls as models.There has also been controversy over great war images, including Joe Rosenthal’s flag-raising over Iwo Jima in 1945, in which five marines and a Navy medic lifted the Stars and Stripes following the bloodiest battle in the Pacific in the Second World War.