The Cottingley Fairies
The
Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by
Elsie Wright (1901–88) and Frances Griffiths (1907–86), 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 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had
been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand
Magazine. Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the
photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of
psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images
as genuine, but others believed they had been faked.
Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both
girls married and lived abroad for a time after they grew up, yet the
photographs continued to hold the public imagination. In 1966 a reporter
from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who had by then returned
to the UK. Elsie left open the possibility that she believed she had
photographed her thoughts, and the media once again became interested in
the story.
In the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were
faked, using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular
children's book of the time, but Frances maintained that the fifth and
final photograph was genuine. The photographs and two of the cameras
used are on display in the National Media Museum in Bradford, England.
The second of the five photographs, showing Elsie with a winged gnome
Frances Griffiths (died 1986) - Scan of photograph (Public Domain)
Elsie Wright with a fairy
1917 photographs
In
mid-1917 nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her mother—both newly
arrived in the UK from South Africa—were staying with Frances' aunt,
Elsie Wright's mother, in the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire;
Elsie was then 16 years old. The two girls often played together 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 darkroom. 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-tall (30 cm) gnome. Exasperated by what
he believed to be "nothing but a prank", and convinced that the girls
must have tampered with his camera in some way, Arthur Wright refused to
lend it to them again. His wife Polly, however, believed the
photographs to be authentic.
Towards the end of 1918,
Frances sent a letter to Johanna Parvin, a friend in Cape Town, South
Africa, where Frances had lived for most of her life, enclosing the
photograph of herself 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 mid-1919, after Elsie's mother attended a meeting of the
Theosophical Society in Bradford. The lecture that evening was on "fairy
life", and at the end of the meeting Polly Wright showed the two fairy
photographs taken by her daughter and niece to the speaker. 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 of 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.
Elsie Wright (1901–1988) - Scan of photograph (Public Domain)
Frances and the Leaping Fairy, the third of the five Cottingley Fairy photographs
Initial examinations
Gardner sent the 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 ... [with] no
trace whatsoever of studio work involving card or paper models". He did
not go so far as to say that the photographs showed fairies, stating
only that "these are straight forward photographs of whatever was in
front of the camera at the time". Gardner had the prints "clarified" by
Snelling, and new negatives produced, "more conducive to printing", for
use in the illustrated lectures he gave around the UK. Snelling supplied
the photographic prints which were available for sale at Gardner's
lectures.
Author and prominent spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle learned of the
photographs from the editor of the spiritualist publication Light. Doyle
had been commissioned by The Strand Magazine to write an article on
fairies for their Christmas issue, and the fairy photographs "must have
seemed like a godsend" according to broadcaster and historian Magnus
Magnusson. Doyle contacted Gardner in June 1920 to determine the
background to the photographs, and wrote to Elsie and her father to
request permission from the latter to use the prints in his article.
Arthur Wright was "obviously impressed" that Doyle was involved, and
gave his permission for publication, but he refused payment on the
grounds that, if genuine, the images should not be "soiled" by money.
Gardner and Doyle sought a second expert opinion from the photographic
company Kodak. Several of the company's technicians examined the
enhanced prints, and although they agreed with Snelling that the
pictures "showed no signs of being faked", they concluded that "this
could not be taken as conclusive evidence ... that they were authentic
photographs of fairies". Kodak declined to issue a certificate of
authenticity.] Gardner believed that the Kodak technicians might 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 Doyle, perhaps rather
optimistically, interpreted the results of the three expert evaluations
as two in favour of the photographs' authenticity and one against.
Doyle also showed the photographs to the physicist and pioneering
psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge, who believed the photographs to
be fake. He suggested that a troupe of dancers had masqueraded as
fairies, and expressed doubt as to their "distinctly 'Parisienne'"
hairstyles.
Frances Griffiths (died 1986) - Scan of photograph (Public Domain)
Fairy Offering Posy of Harebells to Elsie, the fourth of the photographs of the Cottingley Fairies
1920 photographs
Doyle was
preoccupied with organising an imminent lecture tour of Australia, and
in July 1920, sent Gardner to meet the Wright family. Frances was by
then living with her parents in Scarborough, but Elsie's father told
Gardner that he had been so certain the photographs were fakes that
while the girls were away he searched their bedroom and the area around
the beck (stream), looking for scraps of pictures or cutouts, but found
nothing "incriminating".
Gardner believed the Wright
family to be honest and respectable. To place the matter of the
photographs' authenticity beyond doubt, he returned to Cottingley at the
end of July with two Kodak 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 in his 1945
Fairies: A Book of Real Fairies:
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.
Until 19 August the weather
was unsuitable for photography. Because Frances and Elsie insisted that
the fairies would not show themselves if others were watching, Elsie's
mother was persuaded to visit her sister's for tea, leaving the girls
alone. In 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 by her nose. The
second, Fairy offering Posy of Harebells to Elsie, shows a fairy either
hovering or tiptoeing on a branch, and offering Elsie a flower. Two days
later the girls took the last picture, Fairies and Their Sun-Bath.
The plates were packed in
cotton wool and returned to Gardner in London, who sent an "ecstatic"
telegram to Doyle, by then in Melbourne. Doyle wrote back:
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.
Frances Griffiths (died 1986) and Elsie Wright (died 1988) - Scan of photograph (Public Domain)
Fairies and Their Sun-Bath, the fifth and last photograph taken of the Cottingley Fairies,
the one that Frances Griffiths insisted was genuine.
Publication and reaction
Doyle's article in the December 1920 issue of The Strand contained two
higher-resolution prints of the 1917 photographs, and sold out within
days of publication. To protect the girls' anonymity, Frances and Elsie
were called Alice and Iris respectively, and the Wright family was
referred to as the "Carpenters". An enthusiastic and committed
spiritualist, Doyle hoped that if the photographs convinced the public
of the existence of fairies then they might more readily accept 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.
Early press coverage was "mixed", generally a combination of
"embarrassment and puzzlement". The historical novelist and poet Maurice
Hewlett published a series of articles in the literary journal John O'
London's Weekly, in which he 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." Some public figures were more
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 [Frances'] face. Look at Iris's
[Elsie'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
treatments 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.
Doyle used the later
photographs in 1921 to illustrate a second article in The Strand, in
which he described other accounts of fairy sightings. The article formed
the foundation for his 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies.[8] As
before, the photographs were received with mixed credulity. Sceptics
noted that the fairies "looked suspiciously like the traditional fairies
of nursery tales" and that they had "very fashionable hairstyles".
Fairy Tale: A True Story
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Gardner's final visit
Gardner made a final visit to Cottingley in August 1921. He again
brought cameras and photographic plates for Frances and Elsie, but was
accompanied by the clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson. Although neither of the
girls claimed to see any fairies, and there were no more photographs,
"on the contrary, he [Hodson] saw them [fairies] everywhere" and wrote
voluminous notes on his observations.
By now Elsie and Frances were tired of the whole fairy business. 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".
One of Claude Arthur Shepperson's illustrations of dancing girls, from Princess Mary's Gift Book
Claude A. Shepperson (1867–1921) - Illustration by Claude A. Shepperson from “A Spell for a Fairy,” by Alfred Noyes, in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914, 104.
Illustration of dancing fairies, 1914.
Public interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually subsided after 1921.
Elsie and Frances 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
given that year 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
became interested in Frances and Elsie's photographs once again. 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 and scientific sceptic James Randi and a team from the
Committee for the 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.
Montage of Cottingley Fairies and illustrations from Princess Mary's Gift Book
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