HOW did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, renowned physician, writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes, become so convinced that paper drawings, pinned to leaves at Cottingley Beck, were proof of the existence of fairies?
Last Friday historian and TV presenter Lucy Worsley was in Cottingley, filming for a three-part BBC Two series. As reported in the T&A, the programme, which has the working title Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on Holmes Vs Doyle, looks at how scientific, cultural and industrial changes led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create his famous fictional detective.
The third episode of the series, set for broadcast in November, see Lucy exploring Doyle’s fascination with the Cottingley Fairies photographs. He was convinced they were genuine - so much so that he gave the girls who took them a camera to capture more fairy images.
Lucy Worsley’s programme is the latest of many interpretations of the real life fairy story that started as a childish prank, down at Cottingley Beck, and turned into one of the great mysteries of the 20th century.
Armed with some paper fairies and a handful of hatpins, cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright created what became one of the world’s most famous photographic hoaxes, fooling scientists, academics, photography experts - and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself.
The hoax was kept secret for more than 60 years, until Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, published articles claiming to work out how the images were created. Frances and Elsie, by this time elderly women, finally admitted their photographs were fakes.
The first photographs were taken in 1917, on Elsie’s father’s Midg camera. The final photos were taken in 1920, with a camera gifted by Conan Doyle. That camera, a folding quarter-plate Cameo, manufactured by W Butcher & Sons, has been in the National Science and Media Museum collection since 2019. The museum also has the other Cameo camera gifted by Doyle and the original Midg camera.
It is difficult to imagine how Doyle could be fooled by photos which, through a modern lens, appear quaintly amateurish. But they were taken between 1917-1920, a time of great loss and trauma, and of preoccupation with the supernatural.
Doyle’s interest in spiritualism and the paranormal began in the 1880s, but the deaths of his son, nephews and other family members in the First World War appear to have further strengthened his long-held belief in the spirit world. Many people found solace in spiritualism after the huge loss of life in the 1914-1918 war.
In 2019, when Doyle’s camera was acquired by the National Science and Media Museum, head curator Geoff Belknapp told the T&A: “That period, after the First World War, was a time of great sadness and recovery. The story of these images is a big part of that. Like many people in that time of huge loss, Conan Doyle became interested in spiritualism.”
Geoff added that the photos were convincing at the time: “This isn’t a case of double exposure or messing around with negatives - they were very carefully framed images, which is why they were so believable for so long. People couldn’t see the mechanics of deception.”
The mystery of the image-making, and how the two girls managed to trick so many people, continues to fascinate. Added Geoff: “The Cottingley Fairies story is one of the most enduring in photographic history. To this day, it’s shrouded in mystery and speculation - objects relating to it remain some of the most enquired about in our collection, and continue to capture the public imagination as they did over 100 years ago.”
It was a July afternoon in 1917 when nine-year-old Frances and her older cousin Elsie,16, wandered down to Cottingley Beck with a copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book. They’d drawn their own versions of fairy illustrations in the book and pinned the drawings onto trees and leaves. Using the Midg camera belonging to Elsie’s father, an amateur photographer, they took photos of the dancing fairies.
It wasn’t until 1919, when Elsie’s mother took the photographs to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford, that they reached the attention of photography experts. Conan Doyle, a leading voice of the spiritualist movement, wrote about the photographs in The Strand Magazine and, in 1920, handed Elsie and Frances a second quarter-plate Cameo. From the cousins’ correspondence in later life, it seems they took more fake photographs to appease him.
In Frances’ memoirs, published as Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies, she recalls a trip to the beck with Geoffrey Hodson, a psychic sent by Doyle. The girls pretended to see fairies, making fun of Hodson who claimed he could see them too.
When Doyle published The Coming of Fairies (1922) ), reproducing the five Cottingley Fairies photographs as eye witness accounts of the existence of fairies, the girls became famous. Their childish prank had got out of hand.
In 1983 they finally admitted the hoax, but there was one photo that Frances insisted was genuine. Taken with the second Doyle camera, it’s of a ‘nest of fairies’. Conan Doyle called it The Fairy Bower. “The fairies in this last photograph are more translucent and ethereal, a marked contrast to the earlier ones,” said Geoff Bellknapp.
The Cottingley Fairies inspired two films, including FairyTale: A True Story, which premiered in Bradford in 1998, and fairy festivals and a sculpture in Cottingley. Just as they did with Conan Doyle, those eerie photographs continue to beguile us.
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