Cottingley Fairies
Encyclopedia
The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley
Cottingley, Bradford
Cottingley is a suburban village within the City of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England, situated between Shipley and Bingley. It is perhaps best known for the Cottingley Fairies, which appeared in a series of photographs taken there during the early 20th century.-Governance:Cottingley is part of...

, near Bradford
Bradford
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...

 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 writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...

, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine
Strand Magazine
The Strand Magazine was a monthly magazine composed of fictional stories and factual articles founded by George Newnes. It was first published in the United Kingdom from January 1891 to March 1950 running to 711 issues, though the first issue was on sale well before Christmas 1890.Its immediate...

. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic
Psychic
A psychic is a person who professes an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses through extrasensory perception , or is said by others to have such abilities. It is also used to describe theatrical performers who use techniques such as prestidigitation, cold reading, and hot...

 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 grew up, married and lived abroad for a time. Yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination; in 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express
Daily Express
The Daily Express switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1977 and was bought by the construction company Trafalgar House in the same year. Its publishing company, Beaverbrook Newspapers, was renamed Express Newspapers...

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 continued to claim 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.

1917 photographs

In mid-1917 ten-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
Cottingley, Bradford
Cottingley is a suburban village within the City of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England, situated between Shipley and Bingley. It is perhaps best known for the Cottingley Fairies, which appeared in a series of photographs taken there during the early 20th century.-Governance:Cottingley is part of...

 in West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire is a metropolitan county within the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England with a population of 2.2 million. West Yorkshire came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972....

; 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
Photographic plate
Photographic plates preceded photographic film as a means of photography. A light-sensitive emulsion of silver salts was applied to a glass plate. This form of photographic material largely faded from the consumer market in the early years of the 20th century, as more convenient and less fragile...

 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 feet (30.5 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
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

, South Africa, where Frances had lived for 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 mid-1919, after Elsie's mother attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society
Theosophical Society
The Theosophical Society is an organization formed in 1875 to advance the spiritual principles and search for Truth known as Theosophy. The original organization, after splits and realignments has several successors...

 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
Harrogate
Harrogate is a spa town in North Yorkshire, England. The town is a tourist destination and its visitor attractions include its spa waters, RHS Harlow Carr gardens, and Betty's Tea Rooms. From the town one can explore the nearby Yorkshire Dales national park. Harrogate originated in the 17th...

, 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:

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 Spiritualists' publication Light. He 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
Magnus Magnusson
Magnus Magnusson KBE was a television presenter, journalist, translator and writer. He was born in Iceland but lived in Scotland for almost all of his life, although he never took British citizenship...

. Conan 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 Conan 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 Conan Doyle sought a second expert opinion from the photographic company Kodak
Eastman Kodak
Eastman Kodak Company is a multinational imaging and photographic equipment, materials and services company headquarted in Rochester, New York, United States. It was founded by George Eastman in 1892....

. 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 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
Ilford Photo
Ilford Photo is a manufacturer of photographic materials known worldwide for its black-and-white film and papers and chemicals, as well as its range of Ilfochrome and Ilfocolor colour printing materials. Ilfochrome was formerly called Cibachrome, developed in partnership with the Swiss company...

, 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.

Conan Doyle also showed the photographs to the physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 and pioneering psychical researcher
Parapsychology
The term parapsychology was coined in or around 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir, and originates from para meaning "alongside", and psychology. The term was adopted by J.B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement for the term psychical research...

 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.

1920 photographs

Conan 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 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:

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 Conan Doyle, by then in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

. Conan Doyle wrote back:

Publication and reaction

Conan 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 named as Alice and Iris respectively, and the Wright family was referred to as the Carpenters. An enthusiastic and committed Spiritualist, Conan 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:

Early press coverage was "mixed", generally a combination of "embarrassment and puzzlement". The historical novelist and poet Maurice Hewlett
Maurice Hewlett
Maurice Henry Hewlett , was an English historical novelist, poet and essayist. He was born at Weybridge, the eldest son of Henry Gay Hewlett, of Shaw Hall, Addington, Kent. He was educated at the London International College, Spring Grove, Isleworth, and was called to the bar in 1891. He gave up...

 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
Truth (Sydney newspaper)
The Truth was a newspaper published in Sydney, Australia. It was founded in August 1890 by William Nicholas Willis and its first editor was Adolphus Taylor. In 1891 it claimed to be "The organ of radical democracy and Australian National Independence" and advocated "a republican Commonwealth...

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
Henry De Vere Stacpoole
Henry De Vere Stacpoole was an Irish author, born in Kingstown . His best known work is the 1908 romance novel The Blue Lagoon, which has been adapted into feature films on three occasions...

 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
John Hall-Edwards
John Francis Hall-Edwards was a pioneer in the medical use of X-rays in the United Kingdom. He took the first radiograph to direct a surgical operation, on 14 February 1896. Hall-Edwards' interest in X-rays cost him his left arm, which had to be amputated in 1908 as a consequence of X-ray...

, a keen photographer and pioneer of medical X-ray treatments in Britain, was a particularly vigorous critic:

Conan 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. 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".

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
Geoffrey Hodson
Geoffrey Hodson was an occultist, Theosophist, mystic, Liberal Catholic priest, philosopher and esotericist, and a leading light for over 70 years in the Theosophical Society...

. 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".

Later investigations

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 once again became interested in Frances and Elsie's photographs. BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 television's Nationwide
Nationwide (TV series)
Nationwide was a BBC News and Current affairs television programme broadcast on BBC One each weekday following the early evening news. It followed a magazine format, combining political analysis and discussion with consumer affairs, light entertainment and sports reporting...

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
Austin Mitchell
Austin Vernon Mitchell is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Great Grimsby since a 1977 by-election.-Education and early life:...

 in September 1976, for a programme broadcast on Yorkshire Television
Yorkshire Television
Yorkshire Television, now officially known as ITV Yorkshire and sometimes unofficially abbreviated to YTV, is a British television broadcaster and the contractor for the Yorkshire franchise area on the ITV network...

. 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
Scientific skepticism
Scientific skepticism is the practice of questioning the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence or reproducibility, as part of a methodological norm pursuing "the extension of certified knowledge". For example, Robert K...

 James Randi
James Randi
James Randi is a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic best known as a challenger of paranormal claims and pseudoscience. Randi is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation...

 and a team from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry , formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal , is a program within the U.S...

 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
Geoffrey Crawley
Geoffrey Crawley was a photographic expert and journalist, and was the editor in chief of British Journal of Photography for two decades...

, 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
The Unexplained (magazine)
The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space, & Time was a popular partwork magazine published in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1983 by Orbis Publishing...

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, Princess Mary's Gift Book, published in 1914. They said 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. But the cousins disagreed about the fifth and final photograph, which Conan Doyle in his The Coming of the Fairies described in this way:
Elsie maintained it was a fake, just like all the others, but Frances insisted that it was genuine. In an interview given in the early 1980s Frances said:
Both Frances and Elsie claimed to have taken the fifth photograph. In a letter published in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

newspaper on 9 April 1983, Geoffrey Crawley explained the discrepancy by suggesting that the photograph was "an unintended double exposure of fairy cutouts in the grass", and thus "both ladies can be quite sincere in believing that they each took it".

In a 1985 television interview on Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers
Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers
Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers is a popular thirteen part British television series looking at strange worlds of the paranormal. It was produced by Yorkshire Television for the ITV network and first broadcast in 1985. It was the sequel to the 1980 series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious...

, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...

: "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 the 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
Antiques Roadshow
Antiques Roadshow is a British television show in which antiques appraisers travel to various regions of the United Kingdom to appraise antiques brought in by local people. It has been running since 1979...

in Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...

, broadcast on BBC One
BBC One
BBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...

 in January 2009, with the photographs and one of the cameras given to the girls by Conan Doyle. Christine told the expert, Paul Atterbury
Paul Atterbury
Paul Atterbury, FRSA is a British antiques expert, probably best known for his many appearances since 1979 on the BBC TV programme Antiques Roadshow.-Biography:...

, that she believed, as her mother had done, that the fairies in the fifth photograph were genuine. Atterbury estimated the value of the items at between £25,000 and £30,000. The first edition of Frances' memoirs was published a few months later, under the title Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies. The book contains correspondence, sometimes "bitter", between Elsie and Frances. In one letter, dated 1983, Frances wrote:
The 1997 films FairyTale: A True Story
FairyTale: A True Story
FairyTale: A True Story is a 1997 film from Paramount Pictures, loosely based on the story of the Cottingley Fairies.-Plot:Early 20th Century England was a time and place ripe for believing, both in scientific advancements such as electric light and photography, and in anomalous phenomena of all...

, and Photographing Fairies
Photographing Fairies
Photographing Fairies is 1997 fantasy film based on Steve Szilagyi's 1992 novel Photographing Fairies.- Themes :This film explores some of the themes of folk religion such as: possession, paganism, animism, hallucinogens, parapsychology and fairy...

, were inspired by the events surrounding the Cottingley Fairies. The photographs were parodied in a 1994 book written by Terry Jones
Terry Jones
Terence Graham Parry Jones is a Welsh comedian, screenwriter, actor, film director, children's author, popular historian, political commentator, and TV documentary host. He is best known as a member of the Monty Python comedy team....

 and Brian Froud
Brian Froud
Brian Froud is an English fantasy illustrator. He lives and works in Devon with his wife, Wendy Froud, who is also a fantasy artist...

, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book.

External links



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