The Cottingley Fairies

I was very interested in your recent article about the Cottingley Fairies [ FT410:14-15].

In May 1975 I was working as a researcher on the ITV children’s programme Magpie.

While looking for items that might interest our young audience, I came across an article in Penthouse magazine about the Cottingley Fairies written by the journalist and TV presenter Nicolas Witchell. He was kind enough to give me a contact for Elsie Wright, the elder of the two girls, living at the time in Bunny in Nottinghamshire, so I wrote requesting an interview. She replied:

I would like to say that, apart from children and Mr Gardner who helped Conan Doyle with his research into fairy-lore, everyone else I have met I am quite sure have never believed our photographs. All who have come into contact with the Cottingley Fairies story apart from children have enjoyed and got an enormous kick out of two kids telling a fairy story about a fairy story and attempting to be more convincing by producing photographs, though experts say that the photographs were taken with one single exposure, all taken on dull days and that the figures were luminous and moving at the time they were taken. Lyon Lewes of the BBC told me that only now in modern times this can be done with very expensive equipment and definitely not with the old second-hand box camera lent to Frances and myself by my father.

[Since] the first two pictures were taken and hit the headlines, 60 years have passed. My father, along with the village of Cottingley and I’m quite sure the whole of Yorkshire (not including children), were unanimous in looking upon Frances and myself as two solemn-faced Yorkshire comediennes, and my father was angry that we should not benefit in any way from our big illustrated fib.

He did believe it for half a day when Mr Gardner explained to him all the tests that had been put on those first two plates by experts (Ilford and Kodak), but after Mr Gardner had gone and my dad woke up next morning he said “No I don’t believe it. You have done it some way.” However from then on my dad stopped asking me. I wish I had a penny for everyone who has said “Tell me how you did it.”

About this interview as children have always believed in us I think we should oblige. However, I think they would find it more interesting if you were to interview my cousin Frances as she was only 8 years old when the first two photographs were taken and I was 15.

I contacted Frances and arranged to meet her in Thanet where she lived. I was looking forward to meeting her. She had been described by psychic investigator Edward Gardner as being mediumistic with “loosely knit ectoplasmic material in her body”, implying that the fairies took their substance from her own body. Over a fish and chip lunch, she told me that she had been born and raised in South Africa and only came to Cottingley in 1917, where she had seen many new and surprising things like snow on the ground and water, a precious commodity in Africa, running to waste down the gutters. When she saw the fairies, she assumed they were commonplace. Frances also told me that at the time Elsie, who was a talented artist, had been working as a negative retoucher in a local photographic studio.

The Magpie item about the Cottingley Fairies was transmitted on Friday, 11 July 1975. It came to no conclusion about the authenticity of the story, but simply presented the facts as they were known at the time and let the young viewers make up their own mind. My own feeling was Frances sincerely believed in the fairies. She said she had gone into the Cottingley woods expecting nothing and when she got there the fairies were waiting. Elsie on the other hand had fabricated the fairies as a joke to please her cousin only to find herself in the middle of a front-page controversy that she couldn’t back out of.

In 1981 Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were fakes, inspired by drawings cut out of Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1915). Frances said: “Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle, well, we could only keep quiet. I never even thought of it as a fraud – it was just Elsie and me having a bit of fun and I cannot understand to this day why they were taken in… unless they wanted to be taken in”.

Perhaps the nicest, kindest comment about the entire Cottingley Fairy mystery came from photographic scientist Geoffrey Crawley, who finally uncovered the hoax in 1980 [see “Cottingley Unmasked”, FT43:48-53, Spring 1985]. He said “Of course there are fairies, just as there is Father Christmas” – and he’s right. We may not believe in fairies or Father Christmas ourselves, but can we deny others that conviction, particularly the young? As JM Barrie once said: “Children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says ‘I don’t believe in fairies’ there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead!”

Martyn Day

London

In 1981 Elsie and Frances admitted that the photos were fakes