Fairies

May 6th 2015, I read an article in the British Tabloid Newspaper ‘The Mirror’ proclaiming a photographer had captured fairies in a bluebell wood near to her home in Towcester, Northampton on her DSLR camera. The Story I don’t know if it’s real or fake. Still, it’s a good advertisement for her photographic business which gets free advertising through a national newspaper and bloggers. Photographing fairies using a camera is nothing new, the most famous case is the ‘The Cottingley Fairies’

In 1920, Conan Doyle received a letter from a Spiritualist friend, Felicia Scatcherd, who informed of some photographs which proved the existence of fairies in Yorkshire. Conan Doyle asked his friend Edward Gardner to go down and investigate. Gardner soon found himself in possession of several photos which showed tiny female figures with transparent wings. The photographers had been two young girls, Elsie Wright and her cousin, Frances Griffiths. They claimed they had seen the fairies on an earlier occasion and had gone back with a camera and photographed them. They had been taken in July and September 1917, near the Yorkshire village of Cottingley.

The two cousins claimed to have seen the fairies around a stream on an almost daily basis. At the time, they claimed to have no intention of seeking fame or notoriety. Elsie had borrowed her father’s camera to take pictures of Frances and the stream fairies.

Elsie’s father, a sceptic, filed the photos away as a joke. Still, her mother, Polly Wright, believed, and brought the images to Gardner (there were only two at first, not “several”). The latter circulated them through the British spiritualist community. When Conan Doyle saw them in 1920, he gave each girl a camera and commissioned them to take more. They produced three additional prints.

These photos swayed thousands over the course of the century. Still, arch-sceptic James Randi seemingly debunked them for good when he pointed out that the fairies were ringers for figures in the 1915 children’s book Princess Mary’s Gift Book, and that the prints show discrepancies in exposure times that clearly point to deliberate manipulation. The two women, Elsie and Frances, finally confessed in the early 1980s, fifty years after Conan Doyle’s involvement, that they had faked the photos with paper cutouts. Watch Randi and Elsie Wright discuss the trickery above.

The daughter and granddaughter of Griffiths possess the original prints and one of Conan Doyle’s cameras. Both once believed that the fairies were real, but as the host explains, they were not merely credulous fools. Throughout much of the twentieth century, people looked at the camera as a scientific instrument, unaware of the ease with which images could be manipulated and staged. But even as Frances admitted to the fakery of the first four photos, she insisted that number five was genuine. Everyone on the show agrees, including the host.

Throughout her life, Frances always maintained the fairies were real. Still, five years before her death, Elsie Wright decided to come clean. Speaking on the BBC programme Nationwide in 1983. Elsie explained that the ‘fairies’ were actually paper cutouts held up by hatpins. “At that time women wore great big pinwheel hats, you know, with great big crowns and they had to take hat pins about this long.” If fashions had been different, then there may well have been no Cottingley Fairies!

Elsie father’s camera eventually found a home in the National Media Museum (NMM) in Bradford. The NMM’s Colin Harding said despite Elsie’s admission, some mystery still remained. “Elsie wrote letters to the Yorkshire Post, where she finally admitted these were fake. That they were paper cutouts mounted on to twigs using hatpins and then re-photographed. Still, Frances all along maintained while some of the photos were fakes some of them were indeed real photographs.”

Fairy photographs of the prints and some objects including the first edition of Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, were sold at auction in London for ￡ 21,620 in 1998. That same year, Geoffrey Crawley sells his equipment in connection with the case to the National Museum of Cinema, photography and television Bradford, where he is now exposed. The collection includes prints of photographs, two of the devices used by girls, fairy watercolours painted by Elsie and a nine-page letter from the hand of Elsie, admitting the deception. The photographic glass plates were purchased for ￡ 6,000 by an anonymous during an auction held in London in 2001.

The case was satirised more than once, including John Crowley, or by the famous English fairy specialist Brian Froud in several of his books. Including the one he produced with Terry Jones (Monty Python) Lady Cottington’s Pressed Book of Fairies, translated into French under the dried Fairy Book name of Lady Cottington, and presented as a herbarium. In the preface of the book, and saying that his fictional photos were published in 1907. He stated that JM Barrie recognises at least one of the fairies and clairvoyants have seen Lewis Caroll rise from his grave to defend against the sceptics. Although this is a joke, it suggests how the link between Lewis Carroll and the belief in fairies is strong among the English population.

In a television interview in 1985 for Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Elsie said she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth. “Two children, a whole village and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle, well, we could only remain silent. 

“In the same interview, Frances said they had never seen the photographs as a fraud, and that was the idea of Elsie, “I had fun, and I do not understand to this day why these photos were taken or why so many people wanted to be fooled. 

“Similarly, Elsie Wright expressed his disbelief seeing that the “joke” of a child and a teenager was able to fool so many people for so many years.

Read more on fairies in the news https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-30687171

This article originally appeared on Transfigure Photography website