Memoir brings a fairytale to life (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Memoir brings a fairytale to life

8:30am Monday 3rd August 2009 in Search By Emma Clayton

It was an overcast afternoon in 1920 when Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright wandered down to Cottingley Beck, armed with an expensive Cameo camera.

Using a hatpin, the girls stuck a paper cut-out of a fairy holding a harebell on to some leaves. Another cut-out, of a leaping fairy, was pinned to the branch of a willow tree.

After photographing their ‘fairies’, the girls hoped it would be the end of a childish prank that had got out of hand.

As they sat by the beck, Frances absent-mindedly pointed the lens towards a bird’s nest “in a cocoon-like mist”, and clicked. It was the fifth and final photograph of the Cottingley Fairies and would haunt Frances for the rest of her life.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called it ‘The Fairy Bower’. Scientists called it ‘utterly unfakeable’.

The girls’ hoax photographs fooled the world. Brought to public attention by Conan Doyle in 1920, they were scrutinised by intellectuals and scientists. Sixty years later, the cousins, by then elderly women, finally admitted they were fakes.

In a letter to Elsie, Frances wrote: ‘I hated those photographs. At nine years old I had no idea that what we were doing would haunt me all my life.”

The women fell out over the last photograph; Elsie claimed she’d taken it and, like the others, it was a fake. Frances insisted she took it, and that the extraordinary image that emerged when it was developed – of transparent fairies surrounded by tiny faces peering out of a nest – was genuine.

Frances wrote about her experiences, but in 1982, after a magazine article exposed the photographs as fakes, she felt so betrayed she abandoned her memoirs. She died in 1986 and is buried in Scholemoor Cemetery.

Now Frances’s memoirs have been published. Reflections On The Cottingley Fairies tells the story of that summer of 1917 in her words, revealing how she was hunted by reporters, psychics and Conan Doyle’s “big guns”, and was devastated by betrayal. Frances’s daughter, Christine Lynch, took the memoirs to the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow last year. Presenter Paul Atterbury advised her to publish. “There has been so much written about the Cottingley Fairies. This is the only first-hand account,” says Christine.

She was 15 when her mother told her about the fairies. “I never doubted her,” says Christine. “To her, fairies were part of nature. They lived in woods around the beck, as did other wildlife. They were no different from tadpoles or blackbirds.”

In 1917, Frances arrived in Cottingley from Cape Town. While her father served in the First World War, Frances and her mother stayed with her aunt’s family. While her cousin Elsie, 16, worked at Manningham photographers Gunstons, nine-year-old Frances played at the beck.

She describes her first fairy sighting: “I looked across the beck and saw a willow leaf twirling around. I thought it odd as there was no breeze. The leaf was held by a little man…about eighteen inches high…walking purposefully down the bank on the willow side, twiddling the leaf in his hand.”

Sightings of ‘little men’ and fairies became commonplace for Frances. Her secret was revealed when her mother scolded her for coming home with wet shoes. Asked why she played at the beck, she cried: “To see the fairies!”

“She was to regret saying that for the rest of her life,” says Christine.

With Elsie falsely claiming she also saw fairies, the girls were teased by the family. Elsie decided to photograph paper cut-outs, using her father’s camera, as a joke at the adults’ expense.

The first photo was of Frances with dancing fairies Elsie drew from a picture in a book. Afterwards they “tore the cut-outs into tiny pieces and stuck the hatpins into the earth, getting rid of the ‘evidence’,” writes Frances.

The girls took two fairy photographs that summer. Developed by Elsie’s father in his makeshift darkroom, they drew gasps from the family, but went no further. Until, that is, in 1920, when Elsie’s mother, Polly, took them to Bradford Theosophical Society. Soon Conan Doyle was involved.

By then, Frances and her parents lived in Scarborough. “Frances had moved on, although Elsie had sworn her to secrecy about the fakes,” says Christine.

In 1920, an article by Conan Doyle contained the photograph of the cut-out dancing fairies. The press found the girls. “My life was a misery,” writes Frances. “I couldn’t go out without men with notebooks crowding me. I couldn’t tell the truth but was horribly uncomfortable about the cut-outs. It wasn’t a joke anymore.”

Conan Doyle gave the girls a camera each and requested more photographs. The book contains an amusing account of a trip to Cottingley Beck with Geoffrey Hodson, a psychic sent to accompany the girls. Mischievously, they pretended to see fairies – and Hodson claimed to see them too! Frances was irritated by this “phoney”. She had no time for “theosophists, mediums, spiritualists and the rest” and found their intrusion “unbearable.”

“Conan Doyle published an account of Hodson’s ‘sightings’ in his book, The Coming Of Fairies,” says Christine. “This man, who’d written Sherlock Holmes, was so gullible. Frances said he was only interested in the photographs, he never asked her to take notes.

“Frances was surprised the fakes fooled so many. To her they looked nothing like the real thing. But this was a time of great loss, because of the war, and people turned to the supernatural.” After moving to Shrewsbury, the past caught up with Frances again when Edward Gardner, a theosophical speaker, gave a lecture, showing slides of the Cottingley Fairies. Frances was persuaded to attend. “She was surrounded by people wanting to ask questions, to touch her,” says Christine.

“She told me years later, ‘That was that. I determined I was never going to be talked into having anything to do with it again!’ And she didn’t, for 55 years, until the BBC contacted her in 1976.”

Frances reluctantly joined Elsie for interviews, but they fell out over the ‘Fairy Bower’. “Elsie enjoyed the publicity. She probably claimed credit because this photo most excited Conan Doyle,” says Christine. “It’s the only one in which neither girl appears. The figures are transparent and wings outlined against the skyline. The harebells and grass are full of fairies. It’s extraordinary.

“Elsie never explained how she faked the figures, what materials she used or how Frances hadn’t seen her setting up this complex arrangement.”

Sworn to secrecy as a child, Frances kept quiet about the fakes. But years later, when she learned Elsie had broken the promise, by telling her son about the fakes, she felt free to reveal the full story.

She didn’t get chance. In 1981, the fakes were revealed by Leeds University professor Joe Cooper in an article in The Unexplained. Christine claims he had been working with Frances and Elsie on a book. “The article left my mother disillusioned and betrayed,” she says. “Journalists around the world had a field day.”

Today, the camera belonging to Elsie’s father, on which the 1917 photographs were taken, and the camera given to her by Conan Doyle, are at the National Media Museum.

The case was highlighted in 1997 with the film Fairytale: A True Story, starring Peter O’Toole and Harvey Keitel. “I didn’t like its portrayal of Frances as a miserable loner,” says Christine. “She was a happy child. She went to Bingley Grammar and had friends.”

Several years ago, Christine visited Cottingley, staying in the old family house at the invitation of Emmerdale actor Dominic Brunt, who bought it in 2000.

“The story continues to fascinate people. I’ve often wondered why there’s no museum in Cottingley,” says Christine. “Then again, Frances wouldn’t want hordes of tourists at her beloved beck.”

• Reflections On The Cottingley Fairies is available, priced £8.99 plus £1.40 postage and packing, from Christine Lynch at JMJ Publications, 1 Thornhill, Malone, Belfast, BT9 6SS or by e-mailing orders@cottingleyreflections.com