One summer's day in July 1917 nine-year-old Frances Griffiths came back into the house she shared with her cousin Elsie Wright, 16, and their two families during the First World War.
Her shoes and clothes were soaked from playing in the stream at the bottom of the garden. When her mother demanded to know why she said: "I go to see the fairies".
Determined to support her cousin, Elsie convinced her father to lend her his camera, saying she would bring back proof of Frances's claim.
When the girls returned an hour later, Elsie begged her father to waste no time. He had a dark room in the cupboard under the stairs. She remembers how she waited anxiously while he developed the plate and was excited about how it was going to come out. Elsie's father said "I'll tell you how that picture is coming out. It's very untidy, you've been eating sandwiches and the sandwich papers are all sticking up. Then he said, "what are these little leg things down here?" Elsie shouted, "They've come, they've come out!" The picture showed Frances surrounded by four prancing sprites, they were adamant the image was real.
A few weeks later they snapped another photo showing Elsie with a dancing gnome.
Dr. Merrick Burrow, guest curator of a forthcoming exhibition on the Cottingley Fairies, said the girls made a pact never to confess how they had taken the photos but with their parents stumped for the next three years the pictures were nothing more than a puzzling family anecdote.
"I do not think anybody believed it," he said.
"But they couldn't explain how it had been done either."
Then in 1919, Elsie's mother took prints of the photographs to a talk about fairies by the Theosophical Society in Bradford.
The pictures then came to the attention of the society's president Edward Gardner, who gave a series of lectures on the photos in London in 1920.
Their word passed to Conan Doyle, who at the time was researching an article about fairy life as he looked to prove the case for his long-standing interest in spiritualism.
Dr. Burrow, Head of English and Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield, said the author was initially suspicious the pictures might be a hoax and feared he was being set up by those keen to prove him "gullible" and to debunk his beliefs.
He said from Conan Doyle's point of view, however, "if these photos proved the existence of fairies, and that you could photograph the supernatural, then they were a staging post in the argument for spiritualism".
He said Conan Doyle had several experts look over the photographs before publishing them in The Strand magazine in December 1920.
Conan Doyle said the images if proven to be real, would "mark an epoch in human thought" and argued that "after carefully going into every possible source of error, a strong prima facie case has been built up" for their veracity.
He wrote: "The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.
"Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which have already been so convincingly put before it."
Following its publication in Britain the article went on to be published in Australia and the US and the images achieved worldwide notoriety and debate.
Dr. Burrow said despite attracting "widespread skepticism" Conan Doyle bought cameras for the two girls and asked them to take further photos.
He said Conan Doyle's support for the images left the girls feeling "painted into a corner" and unable to say no and, in 1921, a second set of images was published.
"I think he believed it," said Dr. Burrow, "but he was also being strategic.
"I do not think he was that interested in fairies per se but he was enormously invested in the idea that there was more to the world than what we consider normal reality."
The author went on to write a book about the Cottingley Fairies and even discussed with Gardner a film on the subject.
He died in 1930 but the debate about the photos he had brought to the attention of the world continued for decades until in 1983 Frances and Elsie confessed the photographs had been faked using nothing but cardboard cutouts traced from the book Princess Mary's Gift Book", London, 1914 and long hatpins.
Dr. Burrow said he viewed the story of how the photos came to prominence as an "accidental conspiracy" but that without Conan Doyle's involvement, there would have been no story.
Frances with the leaping fairy.
"When the girls took the photos there were a few prints made at the time by the family but that would have been it," he said.
"[Without him] I imagine they would have been lost in a drawer somewhere, just a quirky family story."
Speaking to the BBC in 1983, Frances Griffiths said: "I never even thought of it being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun.
"I can't understand to this day why people were taken in. They wanted to be taken in.
"People often say to me 'Don't you feel ashamed that you have made all these poor people look like fools? They believed in you.' But I do not, because they wanted to believe."
The first photo The case was finally solved in 1982 with evidence from the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University. It holds what is supposed to be the original negatives and prints. Geoffrey Crawley editor of the British Journal of Photography soon realized that the Midge camera the girls used and the simple lens could not have produced such a sharp negative. The original print was much softer in appearance. Crawley believed that the photograph was retouched by an expert. On the negative plate, he found evidence that the face had been subdued probably by using Brasso. He believes the man behind this was Edward Gardner, a believer in fairies and a friend of Conan Doyle. When Crawley published his findings, the girls confessed that the photographs were fakes.
Frances's daughter, Christine Lynch, appeared in an episode of the television program Antiques Roadshow in Belfast, broadcast on BBC One in January 2009, with the photographs and one of the cameras given to the girls by Doyle. Christine told the expert, that she believed, as her mother had done, that the fairies in the fifth photograph were genuine. The expert estimated the value of the items at between £25,000 and £30,000. The first edition of Frances's memoirs was published a few months later, under the title
"I hated those photographs from the age of 16 when Mr. Gardner presented me with a bunch of flowers and wanted me to sit on the platform [at a Theosophical Society meeting] with him. I realized what I was in for if I did not keep myself hidden." The 1997 films Fairytale a True Story and Photographing Fairies by the events surrounding the Cottingley Fairies were inspired.
"The Beck" today where the first fairy photograph was taken.
The Wright home is now owned by the graphic novel artist Luke Horsman who was unaware of the house’s history of fantasy and pictorial artifice when he bought it.
The only access to the beck is in the back gardens of houses of Main St and of the new housing estate nearby, making it hard for anyone wanting to re-enact the Great Fairy Photo Hoax. The only public glimpse of the watercourse is from a bridge (pic) on Lysander Way, in that new estate.
Sources
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/375/the-cottingley-fairies-a-study-in-deception
http://yorkshireridings.blogspot.com/2019/10/cottingley-fairy-story.html
Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers
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