Yet, although the sale contained other, far more obviously desirable lots (five previously unknown letters by the American poet Walt Whitman, original manuscripts by the Victorian artist and poet William Morris, and even a painting by D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover), it was this strange and rather scruffy collection of objects which stole the limelight. For on offer that Monday morning was a dossier on a case which had first intrigued, then baffled and finally frustrated psychical researchers for more than half a century: the strange tale of the Cottingley Fairies.
The five photographs lay at the heart of the mystery, for they purported to show real fairies dancing beside a stream at Cottingley in Yorkshire. The pictures were taken between 1917 and 1920 by two young girls. Did they really prove that fairies exist?
At least one influential figure believed they did. By 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most celebrated literary figures in the world, thanks to his Sherlock Holmes novels and stories; and his support for the Boer War and other causes of the age had earned him the respect of the British public. So when the 1920 Christmas number of the monthly Strand Magazine appeared, emblazoned with the headline, FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED. AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY A. CONAN DOYLE, there was a sensation.
With the article, the great man published two of the photographs (the others followed later in the March 1921 edition) and asserted in terms which, despite some slight show of scepticism, did not really invite much in the way of contradiction. ‘Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought.’
The story Conan Doyle had to tell did indeed appear remarkable. In the summer of 1917 a little girl often called Frances Griffiths was staying with her cousin, Elsie Wright, then aged fifteen. They used to while away the days in a wild patch of countryside just below Elsie’s garden, known as Cottingley Glen.
A stream ran through the middle and on its mossy banks, the girls asserted, they regularly saw fairies. When the grown-ups did not seem to believe them, Elsie and Frances appeared surprised, and when scepticism gave way to teasing, the girls were outraged. They would, they announced, provide proof.
Elsie’s father, Arthur Wright, was an amateur photographer, keen enough to have established his own darkroom in the scullery cupboard. Neither girl had ever taken a photograph before, but Elsie persuaded her father to lend her his camera, a popular box-type called a Midg, which he had bought from his uncle for 7s. 6d. The Midg took photographs on a series of individual plates, and Arthur loaded just one of them into the camera before the girls set off for their ‘rendezvous’ with the Cottingley fairies.
Before long they were back, excited and eager for the photograph to be developed. Arthur Wright took the plate into the darkroom. Elsie, who had acted as photographer, went too. Under the safelight, the image on the plate began to look very odd indeed. Arthur could make out Frances’s face and her right arm and shoulder, but what were those weird white blobs that surrounded her?
Next day, after the picture had been laboriously printed, came the answer. It showed Frances looking thoughtful, her chin leaning on her right hand. In the foreground, the grasses and wild flowers of Cottingley Glen provided a leafy frame, while the background was indistinct. But, astonishingly, the white blobs which had puzzled Arthur Wright turned out to be four captivating fairies, dressed in swirling gowns.
One was playing a musical instrument, while the others, arms upraised and legs elegantly pointed, danced joyfully to the music. Every detail came out sharply: the veins of their wings, their silken tresses, the fingers of the fairies’ tiny hands. Arthur Wright, though by all accounts impressed by the quality of his daughter’s first attempt at photography, was apparently amused but unconvinced. Despite the ‘evidence’ so speedily furnished, tales of fairies at the bottom of the garden continued to be greeted with raised eyebrows by the grown-ups.
A few weeks later, the girls again borrowed the camera. This time it was Frances’s turn to be the photographer. The picture she took was even more remarkable than the first, for it apparently showed Elsie greeting a grotesque little gnome on a bank at the top of the glen. The creature was conventionally dressed, for a gnome, in black tights; he also wore a jersey through which his wings poked, and on his head was a little pointed cap. He certainly seemed alive, as though he had just rushed out of the long grass to greet his human friend. But once again, Arthur Wright was apparently more impressed by the children’s skill as photographers than by their claims to have proved the existence of fairies.
And there the matter might have rested if Elsie’s mother, Polly Wright, had not gone to a lecture in nearby Bradford, where she happened to mention that she had a couple of photographs of fairies at home. The lecturer asked to see them and, when they arrived, she passed them on to a friend in London, Edward L. Gardner, a confirmed believer in the existence of fairies. Gardner, in his turn, asked to see the original negatives; when they reached him, he bicycled from his home in Harlesden to consult an expert photographer, Mr H. Snelling, who pronounced the pictures genuine and furnished Gardner with a letter guaranteeing their authenticity:
These two negatives are entirely genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, [they] show movement in the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures.
Soon, Conan Doyle had become involved, and after Gardner had visited the Wrights in Yorkshire and pronounced himself satisfied that the pictures had not been faked, the famous author wrote his article for the Strand Magazine.
As Conan Doyle had predicted before the magazine was published, his revelations did indeed stimulate controversy. While he and Gardner defended the girls against any imputation that they had perpetrated a hoax upon their trusting elders, the sceptics set about trying to discover how the photographs could have been faked.
Meanwhile Frances and Elsie had come up with three more remarkable pictures, this time taken with cameras of their own which Gardner had given them. These were published in the Strand Magazine in March 1921. The first showed Frances apparently staring at a leaping fairy. Elsie featured in the next one alongside a fairy who was offering her a posy of flowers. Finally, there was the strangest photograph of all, which became known as the ‘fairy bower’. Gardner offered this interpretation of it:
This is especially remarkable as it contains a feature quite unknown to the girls. The sheath or cocoon appearing in the middle of the grasses had not been seen by them before, and they had no idea what it was. Fairy observers of Scotland and the New Forest, however, were familiar with it and described it as a magnetic bath …
In the face of Conan Doyle’s repeated assertions that the pictures were genuine, and his contention that two young girls would not have been capable of faking such remarkable photographs, the sceptics made little headway. Some, like Miss Dot Inman, a Yorkshire photographer, produced ‘fairy photographs’ of their own to demonstrate that fraud was possible: her most charming effort showed the little creatures soaring above the domes of Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre.
Others, assuming that the girls had modelled their fairies upon those in a painting or drawing, searched for the source of their inspiration: an advertisement for Price’s nightlights was deemed the most likely candidate. The public, however, was amused, and while Gardner and Conan Doyle toured the world lecturing about the Cottingley fairies, the girls themselves kept silent.
As the years passed, the story surfaced from time to time. In 1971 Elsie appeared on a BBC news magazine programme, Nationwide. Four years later, she and Frances were interviewed in Woman magazine, and in 1977 they revisited Cottingley for a Yorkshire Television film. Despite persistent questioning from the reporters, they stuck to their story.
The revival of interest in the case attracted the attention of a new generation of sceptics. In 1973 Professor Stuart Sanderson discussed the Cottingley mystery in his Presidential Address to the Folklore Society. Having begun his speech by declaring his scepticism about the genuineness of the photographs, he went on to raise a list of pertinent questions. Why, for example, had the girls been unable to photograph fairies when a third party was present? He also pointed out that Elsie might, after all, have been able to produce fakes, for not only was she a talented artist, and had been known to paint fairies, but she had also worked in a photographer’s studio.