by Colin Wilson
Now working-class Yorkshiremen tend to be phlegmatic and down-to-earth. Arthur Wright did not press his daughter for explanations; he merely grunted, and awaited further developments. They came a month later, when the girls again borrowed his camera. Elsie and Frances scrambled across the deep stream —or ‘beck’—that ran at the bottom of the garden, and went to the old oaks in the dell beyond. And when Arthur Wright later developed the plate, it showed Elsie sitting on the grass, holding her hand out to a gnome who was apparently about to step up on to her dress.
This time, Arthur and his wife Polly looked through the bedroom of the girls, hoping to find cut-out pictures that would explain the photographs. They found nothing. Arthur Wright became mildly exasperated when both girls insisted there had been no trickery—that there really were fairies at the bottom of their garden. He told Elsie she couldn’t use the camera again until she told him the truth.
In November 1917, Frances wrote a letter to a friend in South Africa enclosing one of the photographs, and remarking casually that it ‘is me with some fairies up the beck . . .’
These events took place in the village of Cottingley, in Yorkshire, on the road from Bradford to Bingley. It has long since ceased to be a separate village, and has become a part of the urban sprawl; but the Fairy Dell still exists.
In the summer of 1919, Polly Wright, Elsie’s mother, went to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. She was interested in ‘the occult’, having had experiences of astral projection and memories of past lives. The lecture that evening was on fairies—for it is the position of the Theosophical Society that fairies are simply a type of ‘elemental spirit’—nature spirits—that can manifest themselves to people with second sight or ‘clairvoyance’. Naturally, Mrs Wright could not resist mentioning her daughter’s ‘fairy photographs’ to the person sitting next to her. As a result, Arthur Wright made prints of the two photographs, and they were passed from hand to hand at the Theosophists’ conference at Harrogate a few weeks later, and finally made their way to London, and into the hands of Edward Gardner, who was the president of the London branch of the Theosophical Society. Gardner was familiar with faked photographs of ghosts and spirits, and decided that these looked doubtful. He asked his correspondent if he could let him see the negatives. When these arrived a few days later, Gardner was surprised to find no evidence of double exposure or other cheating. He took the negatives to a photography expert named Snelling, who examined them carefully under a powerful lens, and announced that it was undoubtedly not a double exposure. Nor were the dancing fairies made of paper, or painted on to a sheet of glass. They had moved during the exposure. A week later, after enlarging the photographs, Snelling announced that, in his opinion, they were not faked. They were ordinary open-air shots.
It so happened that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had agreed to write an article on fairies for the Christmas number of the Strand Magazine (in which Holmes first appeared). When he heard about the photographs, he contacted Gardner and asked if he could see them. The two men met, and agreed that the pictures were too good to be true—the waterfall in the background (which looked like a painted backcloth), the highly appropriate toadstools . . . Gardner agreed to go to Cottingley to see the girls, and to find out whether they were hoaxers. Mr and Mrs Wright were startled to hear that the experts thought the photographs genuine. And Gardner was startled when he walked up the glen with Elsie, and saw the scene exactly as she had photographed it, complete with waterfall and toadstools—although without fairies.
Gardner decided to test the girls. Two cameras were bought, and the film-plates were sealed so they could not be tampered with. In due course, the negatives were returned to Gardner, and the factory that had produced them verified that they were still sealed, One showed Frances with a fairy leaping close to her face, another showed a fairy offering a flower to Elsie, while the third showed two fairies in the middle of a bush. In the centre of the picture there is an object that looks rather like a bathing costume hung on a line. Elsie apparently had no idea what this was; but Gardner, with his wider knowledge of fairy lore, identified it as a ‘magnetic bath’ which fairies weave in dull weather. (It had rained continually that August.)
Once more, the experts got to work to try to discover if the photographs had been faked; again, they concluded that they were genuine. That Christmas, Doyle’s article on the fairies appeared in the Strand Magazine and caused a sensation. Inevitably, the majority of people thought it was a hoax; yet no expert on photography was able to say anything conclusive about how it might have been done. A reporter on the Westminster Gazette learned the true identities of the girls (Conan Doyle had used pseudonyms to protect them from publicity) and went to see them. He concluded that everyone seemed honest and genuine, and there was no evidence of trickery. Arthur Wright was baffled by it all, and deeply disappointed that Conan Doyle was naive enough to be taken in, ‘bamboozled by our Elsie, and her at the bottom of her class’. Conan Doyle was himself puzzled and critical; yet he could not discount the possibility that these were real fairies, nature spirits of some kind. He contacted a wellknown clairvoyant named Geoffrey Hodson, and Hodson went to Cottingley, talked to the girls, and went to the dell with them. He also saw fairy forms. We have met Hodson in connection with a ‘bat-like’ elemental.)
By the end of 1921, most people had lost interest in the fairies. Conan Doyle was to write a book about the case, called The Coming of the Fairies, which came out in 1922; but there was no re-investigation.
In 1965, Elsie, then in her 60s, was tracked down in the Midlands by a Daily Express reporter Peter Chambers. His own conviction was that the pictures were faked; and Elsie’s comment that people should be left to make up their own minds on the subject only deepened his scepticism. Elsie made the curious remark:
‘As for the photographs, let’s say they are pictures of figments of our imagination, Frances’ and mine, and leave it at that.’
In 1971, Elsie was asked by the BBC’s Nationwide programme, if her father had had a hand in the taking of the photographs; she replied: ‘I would swear on the Bible that father didn’t know what was going on.’ But when asked if she would swear on a Bible that the photograph were not tricks, she replied after a pause: ‘I’d rather leave that open if you don’t mind . . . but my father had nothing to do with it, I can promise you that.’ Again she seemed to be coming close to admitting that there was some kind of fraud.
On the other hand when Frances was asked by Yorkshire Television if the photographs were fabricated, she replied: ‘Of course not. You tell us how she could do it—remember she was 16 and I was 10. Now then, as a child of 10, can you go through life and keep a secret?’
This, it seemed was the chief argument in favour of the fairy photographs; that it seemed unlikely that Francis and Elsie would and could keep such a secret for so long.
Frances made this comment in 1976; the occasion was a television programme about Frances and Elsie, which had been suggested by the Yorkshire psychical investigator Joe Cooper. Which is why, on September 10, the two women turned up at a house on Main Street, Cottingley, opposite the house where the Wright family had lived half a century earlier. During that time, Elsie had lived in India with her husband Frank Hill, a Scots engineer; Frances had married a soldier, Frank Way, and had spent much time with him abroad.
Joe Cooper describes Frances as ‘a bespectacled woman of middle class and height wearing fashionable denim clothes but with a dash of red and black about the scarf and blouse’. Elsie, when she arrived, looked a good ten years younger than her 75 summers, dressed in fashionable slacks and ‘mod’ gear, with a black billycock hat. During the day Cooper became friendly with the two women, even carrying Elsie over a stile. The camera team interviewed locals—who all expressed extreme scepticism about the photographs—and filmed the women down by the beck. Interviewer Austin Mitchell made no secret of believing that the case of the Cottingley fairies had started as a joke, then
got out of hand. Cooper was inclined to believe them. On camera, Elsie and Frances identified the place where they had seen a gnome, and flatly denied that they had fabricated the photographs. ‘Of course not!’ said Frances. And interviewed by Mitchell, Joe Cooper stated his view that the girls had seen an ‘elemental form of fairy life’—that is to say, nature spirits. After all, W. B. Yeats and thousands of his fellow countrymen were quite certain about the existence of fairies . . .
In 1977, there was an interesting development. A researcher named Fred Gettings, working on 19th century fairy illustrations, came upon Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published during the First World War to make money for the ‘Work for Women’ fund. It contained a poem called ‘A Spell for a Fairy’ by Alfred Noyes, and this was illustrated by Claude Shepperson. And two of the fairies in his illustration were virtually identical with the fairies in the first Cottingley photograph, showing Frances looking over the heads of five prancing fairies. Their positions had merely been reversed.
In August 1978, The New Scientist reported that the magician James Randi (‘The Amazing Randi’) and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) had put the photographs through an image-enhancement process, and found that this revealed strings holding up the fairies. When Joe Cooper told Elsie about the article, she merely laughed and pointed out that there was nowhere in the region of the beck where string could be strung. After a TV play about the fairies had been broadcast in October 1978, Randi expressed indignation that the BBC had failed to state clearly that the photographs had been proved to be fakes.
In 1981, Joe Cooper was writing a book on telepathy, and had some correspondence with Frances—who now lived in Ramsgate—about it. In September 1981, she asked him to go to see her, telling him that there were ‘some things he should know’. When he arrived, she was still not ready to specify what these were. But the following day, she asked him to drive her to Canterbury; once there, she asked him to wait for her while she went into the cathedral. When she returned, they sat in a coffee bar, and she asked him what he thought of the first fairy photograph. He commented that it has been greatly touched up. Then Frances dropped her bombshell:
‘From where I was, I could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I’ve always marvelled that anybody ever took it seriously.’
‘Why are you telling me?’ asked the flabbergasted investigator.
‘Because Elsie has already told Glenn’—(Glenn was Elsie’s son).
‘What about the other four? Are they fakes?’
Her answer was, in its way, as astonishing as the original admission.
‘Three of them. The last one’s genuine.’
Cooper and Frances now discussed writing a book together, and giving Elsie a share of the proceeds; Frances was adamant that Elsie should play no part in writing the book. Cooper went to London to talk to his publisher. Unfortunately, the publisher was not particularly interested in a 60-year-old story about fairies, particularly since it ended so anticlimactically.
The present writer had also got involved. I had met Joe Cooper at a weekend conference on parapsychology (at the Swanwick Conference Centre in Derbyshire) in 1980, and he told me he had written a book on the Cottingley fairies—this, of course, was a year before Frances told him the true story. He sent me the typescript, and I found it fascinating. I had also come across people who claimed to have seen fairies—one of them a hard-headed Scottish TV interviewer—and I was simply not willing to rule out the possibility that ‘Nature spirits’ might exist. Joe’s own researches into the paranormal had convinced him that ‘elementals’ could not simply be ruled out as an absurdity.
In fact, I was on my way to Yorkshire to research the ‘Black Monk of Pontefact’ (see Appendix), an investigation that led me—as I shall describe—to accept the notion that poltergeists are ‘spirits’, and not simply a form of RSPK (recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis). So it was hardly logical for me to deny the existence of ‘Nature spirits’ on the grounds that only a child could believe in them.
But even in its original version, the problem with Joe Cooper’s book was obviously that the story was too slight—it could be told in fifty pages. The rest had to be some kind of ‘padding’. And since, at that point, both Frances and Elsie were still insisting that the photographs were genuine, there was no real conclusion. I tried to find a publisher for the book, but was unsuccessful. And at this point, Joe said he wanted to rewrite it anyway; and there the matter rested.
It was in the following year that Frances finally ‘came clean’. Oddly enough, Joe was excited that the case had finally reached a definite conclusion. When he told me about Frances’s confession, I was less optimistic. If the book ended with Frances’s confession, it would be a damp squib.
Joe Cooper came to the same conclusion. Late in 1982, a partwork called The Unexplained, on which I was a consultant editor, published his article: ‘Cottingley: At Last the Truth’, in which he revealed that the fairies in the first four photographs were cut-outs stuck to the branches with hatpins. Understandably, this upset both Frances and Elsie. When Frances called Joe’s wife on New Year’s Day, 1983, and Joe answered the phone, she called him a traitor and hung up. She died in 1986. Elsie died in 1988, maintaining to the end that she did not believe in fairies.
Which seems to be the end of the story. Or is it? Certainly the sceptics are justified in regarding the case as closed. Possibly they are correct. Yet before we make up our minds, there is a great deal more to be said.
What Frances is asking us to believe is this. She came to England from South Africa in 1917, when she was ten, and went to stay with her 16-year-old cousin Elsie in Cottingley. Elsie had always been fascinated by fairies, and claimed to have had some odd ghostly experiences—she insisted that when she was 4 she was regularly visited in bed by a woman in a tight dress buttoned up to her neck. And when she was 6, she woke up one night and called for a drink. When no one replied, she went downstairs, and found a strange man and woman in the house. She asked where her parents were, and was told they had gone out to play cards with the neighbours. When Elsie said she wanted to go and find them, the man opened the front door for her. Her parents—who were, in fact, playing cards with the neighbours—were greatly alarmed to hear about the man and woman, for they had left the house empty. But when they went to investigate, the house was empty.
Frances had had no ‘psychic’ experiences. But in the spring of 1918, she saw her first gnome. She had gone down to the beck after school when she noticed a phenomenon she had often observed before: a single willow leaf began to shake on the tree by the stream. Then a small man, all dressed in green, was standing on the branch. Frances watched, breathless, terrified of disturbing him. Then the little man looked straight at her, and disappeared. After that, she claimed, she often saw little men wearing coats of greyish green and matching caps by the beck. She gradually reached the conclusion that the little men were engaged in some kind of purposeful activity, perhaps associated with helping plants to grow. Later, she began to see fairies, with and without wings; these were smaller than the elves, with white faces and arms, and often seemed to be holding some kind of meeting. Elsie, she insists, never saw the fairies or little men.
It was after falling in the stream yet again that Frances admitted that she went to the beck to see fairies. And it was the total scepticism of the adults that led Elsie to decide to take some fairy photographs. This was not a simple desire to deceive. Elsie believed Frances when she said she saw fairies; her own psychic experiences made it quite plausible. She wanted to shake the credulity of the grown-ups. So the photographs were taken with cut-outs propped up by hatpins.
When the world suddenly became interested in their fairies, they were in a difficult position. The photographs were fakes, but the fairies really existed. If the whole thing had been a hoax, it would have been easier to confess. But it was not a hoax—not totally, anyway. They were in an embarrassing and anomalous position. If they ad
mitted that the photographs were fakes, they would be implying that the whole affair was nothing but a hoax. And that would be untrue as continuing to maintain the the photographs were genuine. So they kept silent.
When the whole affair blew up again in 1965, the situation was more or less unchanged. Elsie, now a hard-headed woman in her 60s, was no longer so convinced that Frances had seen fairies; yet she was absolutely certain that she had had ‘psychic’ experiences, and was therefore prepared to be open-minded. As to Frances, she had seen fairies and had nothing to retract. In a letter to Leslie Gardner, the son of Edward Gardner, Elsie remarked that after her interview with Peter Chambers (in 1965), in which she had declared that people must judge for themselves, and that the pictures were of ‘figments of our imaginations’, Frances had said indignantly: ‘What did you say that for? You know very well that they were real.’
Frances had always maintained that the fairies were real. In November 1918 she sent the first fairy photograph to a friend in South Africa, and scrawled on the back: ‘Elsie and I are very friendly with the beck Fairies. It’s funny I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there.’
In his original typescript of the Cottingley book, Joe Cooper had included a chapter called ‘Other Sightings’, consisting of accounts of fairies related to him by other people, and it makes clear why he believed Frances. One man, a healer, told how he was sitting with a girl in Gibraltar, eating a sandwich, when it was snatched from him by ‘a little man about eighteen inches high’. An 80-year-old officer of the Theosophical Society insisted that when he was a small boy, he was often visited in bed by a green-clad gnome. Another old man described seeing a green-clad gnome, about two feet high, walking along a path in a cornfield. Some young male students told how, when walking in a wood near Bradford, they saw fairies who were ‘circling and dancing’, but who were invisible to the direct gaze: they could only be seen ‘out of the corner of the eye’. An elderly lady showed Cooper a photograph of a gnome seen through a frosty window; she claimed that she had come down one morning, seen the gnome, and rushed upstairs to get her camera. The photograph also shows diminutive white rabbits.