Over the months that followed, the cousins gradually owned up to a prank which had started innocently but had soon got out of hand. This is the story that emerged.
In the summer of 1917, when the two girls used to play by Cottingley beck, Frances would talk of seeing fairies along its leafy banks. All too often the younger girl fell into the water and returned home to the Wrights’ house with soaking wet shoes, stockings and knickers. One night, Frances recalled, matters came to a head. Her mother was furious, not simply because Frances had wet clothes but because neither she nor Elsie’s mother could understand why the girls were so keen on playing by the beck.
She said that she and Aunt Polly had been up the beck and they’d found nothing. They couldn’t see anything at all. It was just trees and water and ferns and what-have-you. You could have that anywhere. You didn’t have to go right up the beck to see that. I don’t know why, but I’d had enough, and I blurted out ‘I go up to see the fairies’. At that time Uncle Arthur had come in and Elsie had come in, and Aunt Polly was there. They all stood round looking at me and my mother got annoyed and she said ‘Well that beats the lot! You’ve started telling lies on top of being naughty all the time and getting wet and ruining all your good shoes.’ And then she stopped and she turned round and said to Elsie, ‘Have you seen these fairies?’ And Elsie, she stuck up for me, and she said ‘Yes.’
Inevitably, the grown-ups began to tease the girls about their fairy friends. Their gentle sarcasm maddened Elsie, the protective elder cousin. She resolved to do something to stop it. Sixty-seven years later, Frances recalled how Elsie revealed her plan:
One night, as we were getting ready for bed, she said, ‘I’ve been thinking, kid (she was a real cinema-goer, was Elsie), what about if I draw some fairies and cut them out in cardboard and we’ll stick them up in the grass and see if Dad will lend us the camera and we’ll take a photograph. If they see them they’ll have to believe. It’ll stop all this joking.’
So the girls talked a reluctant Arthur Wright into lending them the Midg camera, after promising not to drop it into the water, and set off up Cottingley Glen.
Elsie had her fairies down her bosom [Frances remembered]. We went up the beck and wandered round and decided on this little bank beside the beck because I could get behind it and there were toadstools growing there and it was pretty and in the sunlight. She stuck the fairies in artistic places, one on top of a toadstool standing on one toe, which she was very proud of, and took the photograph.
That first picture, and the second one of the gnome, certainly stopped the teasing, but since the grown-ups did not believe the fairies were real, the girls never had the chance to explain how they faked the photographs. Then Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner pronounced them to be genuine. Why didn’t the girls confess the truth?
It was all very embarrassing [Elsie recalled]. We were two village kids with a brilliant man like Conan Doyle. Well, we could only keep quiet. We’d have hurt him terribly to do a thing like that. It would have been like two kids taking the mickey out of him. And Frances didn’t want me to tell because the schoolkids were giving her an awful time at school and, she says, it’ll just bring it on worse.
Frances, in her turn, had promised Elsie never to reveal their secret.
Elsie had said to me after the first one, ‘Now look, you don’t tell anybody about this. Promise?’ And I promised. And I got this silly idea that a promise was a promise and I couldn’t break it. Later on I didn’t want to, I just wanted to forget it. I didn’t want anybody to know. I thought if I don’t say anything it’ll die a natural death, but it didn’t. It was as simple as that.
Almost three-quarters of a century after the two young cousins took that first famous photograph, the story was still making headlines. When Frances died in July 1986 she still maintained to the end that although the first four photographs had been fakes, the fifth really had captured the hidden fairy kingdom she had found as a child in Cottingley Glen. When the obituary writers questioned Elsie, she took the opportunity once again to set the record straight about the long-running ‘fairy tale’. ‘The joke,’ she said, ‘was to last two hours, and it has lasted seventy years.’
The Spirit Photographers
The fashion for spiritualism was less than fifteen years old – the Fox sisters had begun it in 1848 – when a few enterprising photographers announced that, for a suitable fee, they could capture the images of dead people on photographic plates. Grieving parents, widows and widowers queued up to pose and were rewarded by the discovery of a strange, if often blurred figure hovering beside them on the developed picture, which many of them unhesitatingly declared to be a consoling likeness of their departed loved-ones.
One of the first of the spirit photographers was an American called William Mumler, who set up shop in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1860s. He had been plying his weird trade for only a few months, however, when he was caught out by several of his more sceptical sitters and run out of town. Apparently some of the ‘spirits’ – or ‘extras’, as they were known – bore more than a passing likeness to living people.
Yet he was soon in business again, and a few years later could boast a list of famous clients, including Mrs Lincoln, wife of the assassinated President. Mrs Lincoln is said to have visited Mumler under an assumed name and with her face heavily veiled, but when a figure looking very much like the recently departed Abe appeared on the finished portrait, the First Widow apparently broke down and confessed her true identity. Mumler’s career took another dive in 1869 when he was put on trial for fraud. The Mayor of New York, suspecting Mumler of trickery, ordered one of his men, Marshal J.H. Tooker, to investigate. Tooker assumed a false name and went to have his picture taken.
When a ‘spirit’ appeared on the processed plate, Mumler assured the marshal that it was the image of his dead father-in-law. Tooker, however, saw no resemblance whatsoever, and promptly arrested Mumler. But the evidence produced at the trial at Tombs Police Court, New York, was flimsy, and although Justice Bowling indicated that he believed ‘trick and deception had been practised by the prisoner’, he had to conclude that there was no case to answer.
Other ‘spirit photographers’ flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, relying for their lucrative pickings upon a combination of public ignorance of the new-fangled art of photography and the desperate desire of the bereaved to contact their dead loved-ones. They, too, were frequently caught cheating. For example, Jean Buguet, French high society’s favourite ‘spirit photographer’, was put on trial in 1875, and the court was told that many of the ‘extras’ in his pictures had been cardboard heads and elegantly draped dummies, spirited on to the plate by double-exposure.
The sceptics were hard-pressed to keep up with all the techniques used by fraudulent ‘spirit photographers’ – at least 200 methods have been identified. Most used double-exposures of one kind or another. In the shadows of the studio or the gloom of the darkroom it was easy to switch plates provided by the sitter for a set with ghostly images already imprinted upon them.
An American investigator, Joseph H. Kraus, discovered some even more elaborate tricks. One medium, Madame Eva, amazed her sitters by apparently producing a bright halo across her chest when she was photographed. According to Kraus, however, she had merely dipped the piece of gauze she wore to conceal her cleavage in luminous paint which glowed under the photographer’s lights. Others, using sleight-of-hand, slipped prepared transparencies into the lens or concealed doctored plates in secret compartments in their camera cases – a method Kraus’s fellow-sceptic, the conjuror Joseph Dunninger, was fond of demonstrating.
Hidden slide projectors, chemicals secretly dripped through the ceiling on to developing trays, walls painted with fluorescent paints invisible to the naked eye but which could be illuminated for the camera with ultra-violet lights, even radium plates and X-ray machines were all used by the unscrupulous tricksters. So many ‘spirit photos’ were taken at the height of the craze that the methods of some of the charlatans have only recently been exposed.
One of the most colourful and successful of the British ‘psychographers’ was Dr T. d’Aute Hooper, a one-legged faith-healer and medium from Birmingham – a man, according to his supporters, who was ‘far above trickery and any sordid dealing’. One day, one of Hooper’s patients, who happened to be staying with him, returned from a walk and said, ‘Doctor, I feel so queer, I feel as if there is someone with me; will you get your camera and take a snap-shot of me?’ Hooper wrote: