Photographs in one of century’s greatest hoaxes to fetch £2,000
PHOTOGRAPHS OF what is considered to be one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century are expected to fetch over £2,000 when they are sold at auction.
The two pictures of the Cottingley Fairies were taken in July and September 1917 by 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, in the village of Cottingley, near Bingley in Yorkshire.
The two girls, like so many children then and now, believed in fairies and set out to prove their existence, little knowing that their practical joke would stir such controversy and fool such eminent figures as Sherlock
Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Borrowing Elsie’s father’s Midg quarter-plate camera, and with the use of coloured paper cut-outs and hat pins they staged their scenes near the stream at the end of Elsie’s garden.
They first showed Frances with four dancing fairies and two months later photographed Elsie seated with a one-foot tall dancing gnome.
While Elsie’s father, a keen amateur photographer who developed the prints, never doubted they were fakes, his wife Polly was a believer and in 1919 she took prints of the two photographs to show members of the Theosophical Society in Bradford where they were giving a lecture on fairy life.
From there things spiralled out of control. The story has rumbled on intermittently ever since, and is considered one of the most bizarre and successful photographic hoaxes of the last century. The photographs will go under the hammer at Dominic Winter Auctioneers in Cirencester on October 4.
Auctioneer and photography specialist Chris Albury said: “These photographs are surprisingly rare and much sought after.”