The Cottingley Fairies

Many people were convinced that a photograph taken in 1917 really did show fairies at the bottom of the garden. It was many years later that it was proved that the whole thing was a schoolgirl prank that got out of hand.

A famous photograph

Four fairies dance in a woodland setting, with a waterfall in the background. Three of them have huge wings growing from their shoulders, while the fourth plays a set of fairy pipes. Behind them, on a different scale to the fairies, a young girl looks at them and at the camera. To all intents and purposes she has found the fairies at the bottom of the garden and her friend has captured the scene in a photograph.

This photograph, the most famous of a series, five in all, achieved notoriety in the early 20^th century as offering proof of the existence of fairies. The “Cottingley Fairies” convinced many people at the time, not least Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories, who wrote about the photographs in the Strand Magazine and thus brought them to wide public attention. How could they be anything other than what they purported to be, especially as the photographer was an innocent young girl aged 16?

A famous hoax

Although the photographs had their doubters, it was not until 1983 that they were finally proved to be fakes, by Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography. He confirmed this by talking to the photographer, then in her 80s, who admitted that she and her cousin had concocted the hoax as a childhood prank, but it had got completely out of hand.

Early suspicions about the photographs revolved over whether some sort of double exposure technique had been used, which was a normal method for producing “ghosts”, but this was dismissed by experts at both Kodak and Ilford. Others wondered about the exposure used for the photographs, because, although the background waterfall is blurred, the dancing figures are in much sharper focus, which would have been unlikely with the long exposure necessary to get a good image in a relatively dark setting without supplementary lighting.

Despite this, some of the “experts” who accepted the photographs as being genuine claimed to detect “movement” on the part of the fairies, but they failed to consider that this could have been due to inexpert handling of a camera by a young amateur photographer, or even produced at the developing stage if the image had been under-exposed.

What really happened

The story of how the Cottingley Fairies were created goes back to a day in 1917 when two young girls were told off for playing in the stream and getting their clothes wet. Elsie Wright lived with her parents at Cottingley Dell, near Bingley in Yorkshire. Staying with the family was Frances Griffiths, aged ten, who lived in South Africa but was lodging with her uncle and aunt while her father was fighting in the War. The two were clearly great friends and would do anything to defend each other if one of them got into trouble.

Thus, when Frances claimed that the reason why they were late back and their clothes were wet was that they had been playing with the fairies, Elsie decided to produce the proof. A few days later, Elsie and Frances set off for the Dell with Elsie’s father’s plate camera and came back with a plate which they asked Mr Wright to develop. When he did, there was Frances, playing with the fairies.

At first, the Wrights laughed off this “evidence”, so the girls went back for more, eventually producing four more examples, including one of Elsie with a gnome. Mr Wright, who was happy to go along with all this and continue developing the pictures taken by his daughter, was always sceptical about how they had been produced, but Mrs Wright took them far more seriously. She mentioned them to someone she met at a lecture on folklore, and the thing snowballed, eventually gaining the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was a convinced spiritualist, whose beliefs had been stirred after losing his son in the War and, like many others at the time, was seeking a way of making contact with his son’s spirit. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, which was particularly active in the post-war period and provided a ready audience and support for anything to do with the spirit world and parapsychology.

Conan Doyle praised the two girls to the skies, and actually gave them twenty pounds apiece. This made it very difficult for them to do anything other than stick to their original story, namely that the photographs were genuine.

Of course, they were not! Elsie Wright, although not particularly clever academically, did have some talent as an artist and later made a career as a colourist of sepia photographs. She simply copied some pictures of fairies from a book on to stiff card and cut them out. These cut-outs were then mounted on hatpins and arranged as required at the scene, along with the human model. On some of the photographs the hatpins are clearly visible, but those who did not wish to see such evidence of fakery simply did not see it. Even when Conan Doyle did detect a hole in one in the fairies’ bellies, where the hatpin had pierced the cut-out, he used it to claim that fairies must be able to reproduce as this was clearly a navel!

And so the Cottingley Fairies lived on in the public imagination, or at least in the imagination of those who would have been convinced of their genuineness come what may. The two girls, as they grew up, were always somewhat coy about what they had done, leaving open the possibility, to some people at least, that there was more than mere trickery behind the photographs. Having achieved fame from their childhood prank, they were determined to dine out on it for as long as possible. Despite Elsie’s admission to Geoffrey Crawley in 1983, she still maintained a mischievous attitude about the affair until the day she died, in 1988.

© John Welford