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The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16-years-old and Frances was 10. The pictures came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies that he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, a believer in Spiritualism, was enthusiastic about the photographs, interpreting them as a clear and visible sign of psychic phenomena. The public reaction, however, was mixed; some accepted that the images were genuine, others were convinced they had been faked.

Public interest in the Cottingly Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both girls grew up, got married, and lived abroad for a time. The photographs continued to intrigue however, and in 1966, a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who had by then returned to the UK. In an interview, Elsie appeared to leave open the possibility that she believed she had somehow managed to photograph her thoughts, and the media once again became interested in the story. In the early 1980s, both women admitted that the photographs were faked, using cardboard cut outs of fairies copied from a popular children's book of the time, although Frances continued to claim that the fifth and final photograph was genuine. The photographs, and two of the cameras used to take them, are now on display in the National Media Museum in Bradford.

1917 photographs

In the summer of 1917, 10-year-old Frances Griffiths and her mother– both newly arrived from South Africa– were staying with Frances' aunt, Elsie Wright's mother, in the village of Cottingley, just outside Bradford, in West Yorkshire; Elsie was then 16 years old. The two girls often played beside the beck (stream) at the bottom of the garden, much to their mothers' annoyance, because they frequently came back with wet feet and clothes. Frances and Elsie said they only went to the beck to see the fairies, and to prove it, Elsie borrowed her father's camera, a Midg quarter-plate. The girls returned about 30 minutes later, "triumphant".

Elsie's father, Arthur, was a keen amateur photographer, and had set up his own dark room. The picture on the photographic plate he developed showed Frances behind a bush in the foreground, on which four fairies appeared to be dancing. Knowing his daughter's artistic ability, and that she had spent some time working in a photographer's studio, he dismissed the figures as cardboard cutouts. Two months later the girls borrowed his camera again, and this time returned with a photograph of Elsie sitting on the lawn holding out her hand to a 1-foot (0.30 m) tall gnome. Exasperated by what he believed to be "nothing but a prank", and convinced the girls must have tampered with his camera in some way, Arthur Wright refused to lend it to them again. His wife Polly, however, was convinced that the photographs were authentic.

I am learning French, Geometry, Cookery and Algebra at school now. Dad came home from France the other week after being there ten months, and we all think the war will be over in a few days ... I am sending two photos, both of me, one of me in a bathing costume in our back yard, while the other is me with some fairies. Elsie took that one.

Towards the end of 1918, Frances sent a letter to Johanna Parvin, a friend in Cape Town, South Africa, where she had lived most of her life, enclosing the photograph of her with the fairies. On the back she wrote "It is funny, I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there."

The photographs became public in the summer of 1919, after Elsie's mother attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. The lecture that night was on "Fairy Life", and at the end of the meeting Polly Wright showed the speaker the two fairy photographs taken by her daughter and niece. As a result, the photographs were displayed at the Society's annual conference in Harrogate, held a few months later. There they came to the attention of a leading member of the Society, Edward Gardner. One of the central beliefs in Theosophy is that humanity is undergoing a cycle of evolution, towards increasing "perfection", and Gardner recognised the potential significance of the photographs for the movement:

... the fact that two young girls had not only been able to see fairies, which others had done, but had actually for the first time ever been able to materialise them at a density sufficient for their images to be recorded on a photographic plate, meant that it was possible that the next cycle of evolution was underway.

Gardner had the prints "clarified", and new negatives produced, "more conducive to printing", for use in the illustrated lectures he gave around the UK. The enhanced photographic prints were available for sale at Gardner's lectures.

Initial examinations

Gardner sent the enhanced prints along with the original glass-plate negatives to Harold Snelling, a photography expert. Snelling's opinion was that "the two negatives are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs ... no trace whatsoever of studio work involving card or paper models". Snelling did not go so far as to say that the photographs were of fairies however, simply that "these are straight forward photographs of whatever was in front of the camera at the time".

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a prominent Spiritualist, learned of the photographs from the editor of Light, the Spiritualists' publication. Conan Doyle had been commissioned by The Strand to write an article on fairies for their Christmas issue, and the fairy photographs "must have seemed like a godsend". He contacted Gardner in June 1920 for the background to the photographs, and subsequently wrote to Elsie and her father, requesting permission from the latter to use them in the article. Arthur Wright, "obviously impressed" that Conan Doyle had become involved in the matter, gave his permission for the photographs to be published, but refused any offer of payment, on the grounds that they should not be "soiled" by financial considerations if they were indeed genuine.

Gardner and Conan Doyle decided to seek a second opinion on the authenticity of the pictures from the photographic company Kodak. Several of the company's experts examined the prints, but although they agreed with Snelling that the pictures "showed no signs of being faked", added that "this could not be taken as conclusive evidence ... that they were authentic photographs of fairies". Kodak therefore declined to issue a certificate of authenticity. Gardner believed that the Kodak technicians may not have examined the photographs entirely objectively, observing that one had commented "after all, as fairies couldn't be true, the photographs must have been faked somehow". The prints were also examined by another photographic company, Ilford, who reported unequivocally that there was "some evidence of faking". Gardner and Conan Doyle, perhaps rather optimistically, interpreted the results of the three expert evaluations as two in favour of the photographs' authenticity and one against.

The photographs were also examined by the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, a pioneering psychical researcher, who declared them to be fakes. Lodge suggested that perhaps a troupe of dancers had masqueraded as fairies, and he expressed some doubt as to their "distinctly 'Parisienne'" hairstyles.

1920 photographs

Conan Doyle was occupied with organising an imminent lecture tour to Australia, so he dispatched Gardner to Cottingley in July 1920 to meet the Wright family; Frances was by then living with her parents in Scarborough. Elsie's father told Gardner that he had been so certain the photographs were fakes that while the girls were out he had searched their bedroom and the area around the beck, looking for scraps of pictures or cutouts, but he had found nothing "incriminating". Gardner reported back that the Wright family seemed honest and respectable. To put the matter of the photographs' authenticity beyond doubt, Gardner returned to Cottingley at the end of July with two Cameo cameras and 24 secretly marked photographic plates. Frances was invited to stay with the Wright family during the school summer holiday, so that she and Elsie could take more pictures of the fairies. Gardner described his briefing to the girls in his book Fairies: A Book of Real Fairies, published in 1945:

I went off, to Cottingley again, taking the two cameras and plates from London, and met the family and explained to the two girls the simple working of the cameras, giving one each to keep. The cameras were loaded, and my final advice was that they need go up to the glen only on fine days as they had been accustomed to do before and tice the fairies, as they called their way of attracting them, and see what they could get. I suggested only the most obvious and easy precautions about lighting and distance, for I knew it was essential they should feel free and unhampered and have no burden of responsibility. If nothing came of it all, I told them, they were not to mind a bit.

The weather was unsuitable for photography until 19 August. Francis and Elsie insisted that the fairies would not show themselves if anyone else was watching; Elsie's mother was persuaded to visit her sister's for tea, leaving the girls alone. During her absence the girls took several photographs, two of which appeared to show fairies. In the first, Frances and the Leaping Fairy, Frances is shown in profile with a winged fairy close to her nose. The second photograph, Fairy offering Posy of Harebells to Elsie, shows a fairy either hovering or standing tiptoe on a branch, offering Elsie a flower. Two days later, the girls took their last picture, the Fairies and Their Sun-Bath.

The photographic plates were packed in cotton wool and returned to Gardner in London, who sent an "ecstatic" telegram to Conan Doyle, by then in Melbourne. Conan Doyle wrote back:

170

— My heart was gladdened when out here in far Australia I had your note and the three wonderful pictures which are confirmatory of our published results. When our fairies are admitted other psychic phenomena will find a more ready acceptance ... We have had continued messages at seances for some time that a visible sign was coming through.

Publication and reaction

Conan Doyle's article for the December 1920 issue of The Strand featured the two reprinted, better defined prints; the issue sold out within days of publication. To protect the girls' anonymity, Frances and Elsie were given the names Alice and Iris respectively, and the Wright family was called the Carpenters. An enthusiastic and committed Spiritualist, Conan Doyle hoped that if the photographs convinced people of the existence of fairies, then the general public might more readily accept the truth of other psychic phenomena. He ended his article with the words:

The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life. Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been put before it.

The initial press reaction to the photographs was "mixed", but in general the response was "embarrassment and puzzlement". A leading voice amongst the critics was the historical novelist and poet Maurice Hewlett, who published a series of articles in John O' London's Weekly, a literary journal, which concluded: "And knowing children, and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that the Miss Carpenters have pulled one of them." The Sydney newspaper Truth on 5 January 1921 expressed a similar view; "For the true explanation of these fairy photographs what is wanted is not a knowledge of occult phenomena but a knowledge of children." However, some public figures were sympathetic. Margaret McMillan, the educational and social reformer, wrote: "How wonderful that to these dear children such a wonderful gift has been vouchsafed." The novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole decided to take the fairy photographs and the girls at face value. In a letter to Gardner he wrote:"Look at Alice's face. Look at Iris's face. There is an extraordinary thing called TRUTH which has 10 million faces and forms– it is God's currency and the cleverest coiner or forger can't imitate it."

Major John Hall-Edwards, a keen photographer and pioneer of medical X-ray treatment in Britain, was a particularly vigorous critic:

On the evidence I have no hesitation in saying that these photographs could have been "faked". I criticize the attitude of those who declared there is something supernatural in the circumstances attending to the taking of these pictures because, as a medical man, I believe that the inculcation of such absurd ideas into the minds of children will result in later life in manifestations and nervous disorder and mental disturbances.

Conan Doyle used the later photographs to illustrate a second article in The Strand, published in 1921, describing other accounts of alleged fairy sightings. The article served as the foundation for his book The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922. As before, the photographs received a mixed reaction. Frequent criticisms were that the fairies "looked suspiciously like the traditional fairies of nursery tales", and that they had "very fashionable hairstyles".

Gardner's final visit

In August 1921, Gardner made a final visit to Cottingley. Once again, he brought cameras and photographic plates for Frances and Elsie, but this time he was accompanied by the clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson. Although neither of the girls claimed to see any fairies during Hodson's visit, and there were no more photographs, "on the contrary, he saw them everywhere", and wrote voluminous notes on his observations.

By this time, Elsie and Frances were tired of the whole fairy business. Many years later, Elsie looked at a photograph of herself and Frances taken with Hodson and said: "Look at that, fed up with fairies!" Both Elsie and Frances later admitted that they "played along" with Hodson "out of mischief", and that they considered him "a fake".

Later investigations

Public interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually diminished after 1921. Elsie and Francis eventually married and lived abroad for many years. In 1966, a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who was by then back in England. She admitted in an interview that the fairies might have been "figments of my imagination", but left open the possibility she believed that she had somehow managed to photograph her thoughts. The media subsequently once again became interested in Frances and Elsie's photographs. BBC television's Nationwide programme investigated the case in 1971, but Elsie stuck to her story: "I've told you that they're photographs of figments of our imagination, and that's what I'm sticking to".

Elsie and Frances were interviewed by journalist Austin Mitchell in September 1976, for a programme broadcast on Yorkshire Television. When pressed, both women agreed that "a rational person doesn't see fairies", but they denied having fabricated the photographs. In 1978, the magician James Randi and a team from the Center for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal examined the photographs, using a "computer enhancement process". They concluded that the photographs were fakes, and that strings could be seen, supporting the fairies. Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, undertook a "major scientific investigation of the photographs and the events surrounding them", published between 1982 and 1983, "the first major postwar analysis of the affair". He also concluded that the pictures were fakes.

Confession

In 1983, the cousins admitted in an article published in the magazine The Unexplained that the photographs had been faked, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies. Elsie had copied illustrations of fairies from a popular children's book of the time, Claude Arthur Shepperson's Princess Mary's Gift Book, published in 1914. They had then cut out the cardboard figures and supported them with hat pins, disposing of their props in the beck once the photograph had been taken. The cousins did, however, disagree about the fifth and final photograph, which Conan Doyle, in his The Coming of the Fairies, described in this way:

Seated on the upper left hand edge with wing well displayed is an undraped fairy apparently considering whether it is time to get up. An earlier riser of more mature age is seen on the right possessing abundant hair and wonderful wings. Her slightly denser body can be glimpsed within her fairy dress.

Elsie maintained it was a fake, just like all the others, but Frances insisted that it was genuine. In an interview given during the early 1980s Frances said:

It was a wet Saturday afternoon and we were just mooching about with our cameras and Elsie had nothing prepared. I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a photograph.

Both Frances and Elsie claimed to have taken the fifth photograph. In a letter published in The Times newspaper on 9 April 1983, Crawley explained the discrepancy in the womens' accounts as "an unintended double exposure of fairy cutouts in the grass".

In a 1985 television interview on Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling the author of Sherlock Holmes: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle– well, we could only keep quiet." In the same interview Frances said: "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 to this day why they were taken in– they wanted to be taken in."

Subsequent history

Frances died in 1986, and Elsie in 1988. Prints of their photographs of the fairies, along with a few other items including a first edition of Conan Doyle's book The Coming of Fairies, were sold at auction in London for £21,620 in 1998. That same year, Geoffrey Crawley sold his Cottingley Fairy material to the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television in Bradford (now the National Media Museum), where it is on display. The collection included prints of the photographs, two of the cameras used by the girls, watercolours of fairies painted by Elsie, and a nine-page letter from Elsie admitting to the hoax. The glass photographic plates were bought for £6,000 by an unnamed buyer at a London auction held in 2001.

Frances' daughter, Christine Lynch, appeared in an episode of the television programme Antiques Roadshow in Belfast, broadcast on BBC One in January 2009, with the photographs and one of the cameras given to the girls by Conan Doyle. Christine told the expert, Paul Atterbury, that she believed, as her mother had done, that the fairies in the fifth photograph were genuine. Atterbury estimated the value of the items to be between £25,000 and £30,000. A few months later, the first edition of Frances' memoirs was published, under the title Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies.

The 1997 films Fairy Tale: A True Story, and Photographing Fairies, were inspired by the events surrounding the Cottingley Fairies.

References

Notes

1. Magnusson 2006, pp. 97–98
2. ^ Magnusson 2006, p. 97
3. Prashad 2008, p. 42
4. ^ Prashad 2008, p. 40
5. ^ Magnusson 2006, pp. 98–99
6. ^ Smith 1997, p. 382
7. Smith 1997, p. 401
8. Magnusson 2006, p. 99
9. Smith 1997, p. 389
10. Smith 1997, p. 383
11. Magnusson 2006, pp. 99–100
12. Smith 1997, p. 384
13. Magnusson 2006, p. 101
14. ^ Smith 1997, p. 385
15. Magnusson 2006, p. 100
16. Magnusson 2006, p. 102
17. ^ Cooper, Joe (1982), "Cottingley: At Last the Truth", The Unexplained (117): 2, 338–40
18. Magnusson 2006, pp. 102–103
19. ^ Magnusson 2006, p. 103
20. Smith 1997, p. 388
21. ^ Roden, Barbara, The Coming of the Fairies: An Alternative View of the Episode of the Cottingley Fairies, The Arthur Conan Doyle Society, retrieved 25 April 2010 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
22. ^ Smith 1997, p. 390
23. Smith 1997, p. 391
24. Major John Hall-Edwards, Birmingham City Council, retrieved 23 April 2010 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
25. Smith 1997, p. 389
26. ^ Magnusson 2006, p. 105
27. Smith 1997, p. 393
28. ^ Magnusson 2006, p. 104
29. Smith 1997, pp. 394–395
30. Smith 1997, p. 395
31. Conan Doyle 2006, p. 103
32. Hewson, David (4 April 1983), "Secrets of Two Famous Hoaxers (subscription required)[[Category:Pages containing links to subscription-only content]]", The Times, retrieved 26 April 2010 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help); URL–wikilink conflict (help)
33. Crawley, Geoffrey, More to Discover about Fairies (subscription required)[[Category:Pages containing links to subscription-only content]], retrieved 26 April 2010 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); URL–wikilink conflict (help)
34. "Fairies, Phantoms, and Fantastic Photographs". Presenter: Arthur C. Clarke. Narrator: Anna Ford. Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers. ITV. 22 May 1985. No. 6, season 1. 8:25 minutes in
35. 'Fairy' fakes sell for fortune, BBC News, 16 July 1998, retrieved 11 May 2007 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
36. "Sorry, Mel – they're ours!", Bradford Telegraph & Argus, 16 April 1998, retrieved 25 April 2010 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
37. 'Fairy' pictures fetch £6,000, BBC News, 13 March 2001, retrieved 11 May 2007 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
38. Antiques Roadshow. Presenter: Fiona Bruce. BBC One. 4 January 2009. No. 17, series 31
39. Cursed by the Fairies, express.co.uk, 10 May 2009, retrieved 22 April 2010 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
40. Klein, Andy (23 October 1997), "Fairy, Fairy, Quite Contrary", Phoenix New Times, retrieved 22 April 2010 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)

Bibliography

• Conan Doyle, Arthur (2006) , The Coming of the Fairies, University of Nebraska Press, ISBN 978-0803266551
• Magnusson, Magnus (2006), Fakers, Forgers & Phoneys, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, ISBN 1-84596-190-0
• Prashad, Sukhadev (2008), World Famous Supernatural Mysteries, Pustak Mahal, ISBN 978-8122305593
• Smith, Paul (1997), Narváez, Peter (ed.), "The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend", The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, The University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 978-0813109398

External links

• The Case of the Cottingley Fairies at The James Randi Educational Foundation
• Cottingley Fairies at Cottingley.Net - The Cottingley Network
• Cottingley Fairies at Cottingley Connect

• Bradford
• Fairies
• Paranormal hoaxes
• Arthur Conan Doyle
• Forteana
• Hoaxes in the United Kingdom
• Black-and-white photographs