Away with the fairies

Two photographs of the Cottingley Fairies, one of the great hoaxes of the 20th century that fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sold for £20,000 in Cirencester yesterday, more than 10 times their estimated value. The shots were taken in Yorkshire in 1917 by 16-yearold Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, 9, pictured, using paper cut-outs.

Two photographs of the Cottingley Fairies, expected to fetch £1,000 each, have gone for 10 times as much. Is the reason the same as that behind their wide acceptance in 1917 – that people want to believe in them? Arthur Conan Doyle’s endorsement of the photographs, taken by the cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, fell in with his support for Spiritualism in reaction to deaths in the Second World War and the ensuing flu epidemic. How strange that the champion of Sherlock Holmes’s evidential methods should imagine the camera cannot lie. The Telegraph had an unwitting role in the childish fakery too, for in 1914 it declared: “It would be difficult to find a more admirable Christmas present than Princess Mary’s Gift Book.” Drawings from this book were turned by the children into their virtual fairies.