Four years later, Fred Gettings, a researcher well-versed both in art and the paranormal, came across an important clue. He was leafing through a copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book, a compilation of stories, pictures and poems sold in aid of charity and a bestseller in 1915, two years before the Cottingley fairy photographs were taken. One contribution was a poem by Alfred Noyes called ‘A Spell for a Fairy’, illustrated by Claude A. Shepperson. The final vignette on page 104 of the Gift Book stopped Gettings in his tracks. He recognized it as:
without doubt, the original picture from which the fairies of the first Cottingley picture were constructed. The remarkable thing is that the girl who copied this (presumably Elsie, as she was the older and more artistically talented of the two) actually made no significant change to the individual figures of the fairies in the Shepperson drawing – they merely appear in the photograph in a different order. Elsie’s drawing is clumsier, and she added butterfly wings to the figures.
At least one other person might have been expected to have reached the same conclusion more than fifty years earlier, for on page 23 of the Gift Book begins a story called ‘Bimbashi Joyce’. Its author? None other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!
In 1980 arch-sceptic James ‘the Amazing’ Randi devoted a chapter of his book Flim-Flam, to the debunking of the photographs. Randi revealed that the latest ‘computer enhancement’ techniques, designed to bring out the smallest details of satellite photographs, had ‘put a very large nail of doubt in the already well-sealed coffin of the Cottingley Fairies’. The computer had been asked whether the fairy figures were three-dimensional.
No, they weren’t, it replied. The conclusion was obvious: the fairies were cardboard cut-outs. In a second test, the computer searched for threads or supports which could have been used to prop up the figures. It found something suspiciously like a thread in the fourth picture, although Randi was less convinced by this than by the earlier finding. He concluded:
The Cottingley fairies were simple fakes made by two little girls as a prank, in the beginning. Only when supposedly wiser persons discovered them were they elevated to the status of miracles, and the girls were caught up in an ever-escalating situation that they wanted out of but could not escape.
For the sceptics, the case of the Cottingley fairies was frustrating. They were certain the pictures were faked, yet they had no absolute proof and, as the years passed, there seemed little prospect of obtaining any. ‘Quite how they were faked,’ mused Stuart Sanderson in his 1973 address to the Folklore Society, ‘we shall probably never know.’
Yet we now do know, and indeed would have done so a few months before Sanderson’s speech if Sotheby’s experts had looked with greater understanding at a letter which Elsie had sent with her Cottingley memorabilia for sale in 1972. It contained a detailed explanation by Elsie of how the two girls had hoaxed the world. But because the letter was obviously recently written and the sale was of antique literary documents only, the experts returned it to Elsie; and unwittingly delayed the final solution of the mystery for another decade.
The Cottingley Mystery solved
The breakthrough came when two investigators, independently of each other, took a fresh look at the case in the 1980s. One was Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the prestigious British Journal of Photography; the other was Joe Cooper, a sociologist who had long been interested in the paranormal. Crawley’s investigation, which began its serialization in the BJP on Christmas Eve 1982, was exhaustive and fascinating but also quite technical – exactly what might be expected of a top photographic expert.
One of Crawley’s first decisions was to examine not only the five pictures but also the cameras used by the girls. Fortunately, the Midg camera that Elsie had borrowed from her father was still in existence: it had been one of the mementoes she had sent for sale at Sotheby’s in 1972. Crawley borrowed it, took a few test photographs, and noticed something that all the other investigators had apparently missed.
The lens of the Midg camera could not possibly have provided a photograph of the depth and clarity of the first published fairy picture. The implication was clear: the picture of Frances and the dancing fairies (Crawley labelled it Photograph A), which had been accepted for more than sixty years as the original, had been heavily retouched and then re-photographed. The same went for Photograph B (Elsie and the gnome).
Then Crawley had the kind of luck that comes to the diligent researcher. A different version of Photograph A turned up in Cottingley itself. It was far less sharp than the one originally published: Frances’s face and hair have a washed-out look, the fairies are little more than white blobs, and the foliage in the foreground is indistinct. It was exactly the type of photograph Crawley would have expected from a novice like Elsie using an unsophisticated camera like a Midg.
Crawley next turned to Photograph B. Although he was unable to trace an authentic first print of it, a close examination of what had always been held to be the original negative, kept in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, revealed a telling detail. A photograph taken with a Midg camera always showed certain marks, yet there were none on the ‘original’.
The sheath in which each plate was held would also have imprinted its shape on to the image, yet there was no trace of it on Photograph B. Another clue was that the colour of the ‘original’ prints was wrong. Surviving family photographs show that Arthur Wright, like most amateur photographers of his day, used daylight printing paper.
He always fixed the negative to the paper and left it out in the sun to develop. The resulting prints were sepia-coloured. But the published fairy pictures were all a rich blue-black which could only have been achieved in a darkroom.
By looking at the negatives of the improved photographs, Crawley was even able to tell how the pictures had been retouched. But who had been responsible? The most likely candidate was Edward Gardner’s friend Mr Snelling, who had guaranteed the authenticity of the photographs in the first place. Snelling was an acknowledged expert in the technique of improving photographs – an art more widely practised in the first two decades of this century than it is today.
While Crawley’s revelations did not prove that the girls had faked the original photographs, they did increase his suspicions about their authenticity, and his examination of the last three pictures reinforced his doubts. He concluded that each of them was a superimposition, difficult to achieve with a Midg but easy with the new Cameo cameras the girls had been given.
In photographs C and D, Crawley suggested, a cut-out fairy was first photographed indoors; the plate was then re-exposed down in Cottingley Glen. One clue supporting this theory is that in the finished photographs neither of the girls manages to look directly at the fairy. The final picture, Crawley believed, was an accidental double-exposure. He agreed with another photographic expert, Brian Coe, who suggested that the girls had tried to take two separate photographs of some cut-out figures in the grass, but had managed to mix up the plates so that both images appeared on the same one.
Meanwhile Joe Cooper had been to see Elsie and Frances. Both were old ladies, and Frances, then seventy-five, finally broke her long silence. She admitted that the first four fairy photographs were fakes, and that she had always felt guilty about the first one, in particular. ‘My heart always sinks when I look at it,’ she said. ‘When I think of how it’s gone all round the world – I don’t see how people could believe they’re real fairies. I could see the backs of them and the hatpins when the photo was being taken.’ She confirmed that the fairy figures had indeed been cut-outs. Elsie had drawn them, and the dancing figures in the first photograph had been copied from Princess Mary’s Gift Book, as Fred Gettings had deduced. But there had been nothing fake about the fifth photograph, she claimed. It had been of the real fairies that lived in the glen. According to Cooper, ‘Elsie, on the other hand, insists that all five photographs are of cut-outs.’
Elsie then wrote to Geoffrey Crawley, who had sent her some sections of his series in advance. Her letter was, he realized, ‘the authentic document confirming that the so-styled “Cottingley fairy photographs” taken in 1917 and 1920 were not of paranormal phenomena’.
Dear Mr Crawley [the letter began],
Thank you for your letter revealing so much depth and understanding of the pickle Frances and I got ourselves into on that day back in 1916 [sic] when our practical joke fell flat on its face, when no one would believe we had got pictures of real fairies. Just imagine (if they had) the joke would have ended there and then, when we would have told all, when I was 15 years old, and Frances was 8 [sic] years old.