Fairy tale recreated

8:20am Friday 26th October 2007

Comments (20)   Have your say »

In July 1917 two little girls fooled the world with photographs of fairies dancing at the bottom of their Cottingley garden.

Ninety years later one of their famous hoax photographs has been re-created by the Northern Ballet Theatre.

And Bradford ballerina Lori Gilchrist, who appears in the new picture, has presented it to the National Media Museum where it will go on permanent display.

The Leeds-based ballet company, in conjunction with the museum, re-created the world famous photograph of ten-year-old Frances Griffiths surrounded by fairies to promote its production of a Midsummer Night's Dream, currently on a national tour.

Lori, who is in the NBT's production of Romeo and Juliet at the Alhambra this week, appears in the picture as Frances and as various fairies, along with dancer David Ward.

The National Media Museum houses a set of the original images taken by Frances and her cousin Elsie Wright in its collection, along with other material including the cameras they used and Elsie's watercolour sketches of fairies.

The NBT's image will be used at the museum as part of daily talks on the Cottingley Fairies. A television programme featuring an elderly Elsie and Frances being interviewed is shown on request in the museum's TV Heaven floor.

Jo Mills, museum interpreter at the National Media Museum, said: "It has been fantastic to work with Northern Ballet Theatre to recreate such an iconic image. The talks about the Cottingley Fairies are a really popular part of our learning programme here and visitors are still captivated by the story of the two girls and whether the fairies in the photographs they took with their father's camera are real or not."

The original photographs were taken 90 years ago. The girls' claims that they had captured fairies on film caused an international stir, leading academics including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to debate the authenticity of the photographs.

After some basic instruction on how to operate her father's quarter plate camera, Elsie went off with Frances to an area where Cottingley beck ran behind her family home. The girls later returned with their remarkable photographs.

The cousins insisted the pictures were real and remained evasive about their authenticity for most of their lives. In an interview in 1981 they said the photos were fake, and they had simply used cut-outs of fairies and gnomes.

But Frances maintained until her death in 1986 that they did see fairies and that one photograph, showing fairies in a sunbath, was genuine.

The story inspired two 1997 films, Fairytale: A True Story, starring Peter O'Toole and Harvey Keitel, and Photographing Fairies starring Ben Kingsley.