After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Fairy Hoax That Fooled the World

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

In 1920 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a story more explosive than any adventure of Sherlock Holmes. He claimed that photographic evidence had emerged that proved the existence of fairies.The photos were taken by two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, in Cottingley, North Yorkshire. How did their charming art project end up fooling the creator of the greatest detective that ever lived?Maddy tells Anthony the story.Special thanks to James Carter as the voice of Conan Doyle.Written by Maddy Pelling. Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. There are fairies at the bottom of our garden. It's not so very, very far away. You pass the gardener's shed and you just keep straight ahead.

I do so hope they've really come to stay. There's a little wood with moss in it and beetles and a little stream that runs quietly through. You wouldn't think they'd dare to come merrymaking there. Well, they do. Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought. One or two consequences are obvious. The experiences of children will be taken more seriously.

Cameras will be forthcoming. Other well-authenticated cases will come along. Other well-authenticated cases will come along. These little folk, who appear to be our neighbours, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar. The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk.

The recognition of their existence will jolt the material 20th century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud and will make it admit that there is a glamour and the Paranormal. I'm Dr Maddy Pelling. And I'm Dr Anthony Delaney. And today we're in 1917 in Cottingley, North Yorkshire, for something a little bit different. What do two little girls from the north of England, the magical realm of the fairy folk, and Britain's best known detective fiction writer have in common?

Anthony, do you know? This episode. Correct. This is going to be a story that listeners might already know something about. You may have even seen the photographs themselves. You might have watched the 1997 Hollywood film that depicts the events that we're going to explore. In this episode, we're going to delve into the facts of a truly fascinating and altogether extraordinary case to put them into a context of global war, of spiritualism, and the experiences of young women, and to consider the role of new technology

in an emerging 20th century world. This is the story of the Cottingley Fairies and the two girls who discovered them. So, Anthony, do you know anything about this case? I have seen the images intermittently at different points for no real reason. I don't know why I would have seen them. And I think I have heard Arthur Conan Doyle speak about this case, maybe in an interview, some black and white footage is coming to mind. But other than that, I don't really know the ins and outs. So this is a case that takes place in Yorkshire in a place called Cottingley in 1917. And it

revolves around a set of photographs. So the first ones are taken in 1917. And then there are some later photos that are added in, I think, 1920. At the beginning of the episode, we've heard the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle talking about the photographs. We're going to talk a little bit about how Arthur Conan Doyle, famous, of course, for being the author, the creator of the famous detective. Sherlock Holmes. Leave that in. Famous, but Maddie doesn't know who he is.

Sherlock who? I've never heard of him. I could see your face go, he's famous and he's a detective. I just don't know who he is. I was like, she's talking an awful lot about Sherlock Holmes. All she has to say is Sherlock Holmes. Okay. So to recap, we know that Arthur Conan Doyle becomes involved in this story and we'll get into his involvement in a little bit, but I want to put the photographs front and center in this story because they really are extraordinary. Not necessarily because they provide evidence of fairies, but I think they are extraordinary works of art and we're going to get into how they're created, who they're created by, and all the different people who project different layers of meaning

onto this. So I've included at the top of our show notes, two of the photographs for you to have a look at, Anthony. Can you describe them to us? Because they're not really like anything else in this period. Right. I'm looking at two pictures that Maddy has provided. The first one is of a girl, probably, I don't know her age, she looks like she might be a teenager. She has long wavy hair and she's surrounded by greenery. It looks like she might be in a little forest. It looks like there's ivy around her, leaves around her. And she's looking quizzically at a figure of what appears to be a fairy on the right hand side of this black and white photo. The fairy is dressed in almost flapper-esque type clothing. It's a female fairy. She has two wings, as you might expect, and she seems to be facing towards the teenage girl. She

also seems to be perched on a leaf, as if the leaf is kind of holding her up. So that's the teenage girl. She also seems to be perched on a leaf as if the leaf is kind of holding her up. So that's the first one. The second one then is a much younger girl at the centre of the image and in the foreground is a little mossy bank kind of where other fairies are arranged. This younger girl is looking at us,

directly at us. Again, this is a black and white picture. She seems to be surrounded by a waterfall in the left-hand side of the picture there's moss there's greenery again mountains but again these fairies are kind of dancing underneath her face and they're looking towards one another some of them actually seem to be taking flight potentially in this image and she just looks very at ease with what's going on around her. So those are the two images that did become world famous, Maddy, right? Absolutely. Beautifully described by you, by the way. Thanks very much.

So before we discuss who the two little girls are in these photographs and how the photographs themselves were made, I think we need a bit of context for this period. So the first photographs, as I said, were made in 1917. And of course, if it's one thing we know about this time period, the First World War is going on. So there's conflict across the globe. We mentioned at the beginning there that Arthur Conan Doyle is involved in this story and Conan Doyle's son, Kingsley, is actually going to die in the war. He's injured at the Battle of the Somme, and he dies of illness related to his injuries a short while after. It's also an era in which we're getting spiritualism coming through. So seances are taking place, a belief in an afterlife. It's tied into Christianity, but it's very much bringing its own practices. And of course,

as huge numbers of young men die in the First World War, people are becoming increasingly interested in contacting those that have moved on. And there's a sort of context here of great loss, an unusual loss of very young people as well. The other thing to say about spiritualism and seances in particular, and this speaks to the sort of central theme of this episode, is that these events, so they're usually taking place in domestic spaces, in houses, there will be the guests themselves who come and sit around a table in a dimly lit room. You can imagine the scenario. And there may be an older woman who's in charge of the seance. And quite often there'll be a young girl who will either leave the room and

come back in or sometimes just appear in the room and she will be dressed as a kind of spirit. What is interesting and quite uncomfortable here is that often the people attending the seance would be older middle-class men and the girls themselves would be potentially from a lower class working class background. And it was understood that they were the depiction or sometimes the manifestation of the spirits that were being. So they knew they were human children. Is that am I right in thinking that? Well, they would touch the girls to establish this. And I think there's something very interesting and obviously very problematic for us to think of these scenarios where there's men reaching out and grabbing the girls. And one of the things that is kind of talked about is the fact that these women, when they appeared in these ghostly shrouds and maybe with a veil,

they were in a state of undress that wasn't usual for the time. And they most often wouldn't be wearing corsets. And that was justification for touching them and they most often wouldn't be wearing corsets and that was justification for touching them and justification for describing them or understanding them as being something other than human so there's a sort of a performance going on there's a strange interaction taking place here but this collision of worlds this collision of middle class, educated older men who have authority in society and especially are holding positions of power whilst the young men are away fighting. That collision with the world of young women is central to this story. I think it's very, very interesting. The other thing that we have in this time is a particular interest in fairies. Fairies become really popular. So a decade earlier, we get J.M. Barry's

Peter Pan. And there's the famous line in that, of course, where Tinkerbell the fairy shouts to the audience, do you believe in fairies? And everyone's meant to shout back, yes. There's a great scene in one of my all-time favorite films, The Railway Children, where the family at the beginning go to see Peter Pan and everyone shoutsouts you know do you believe in fairies yes we do and the dad's had a little bit too much to drink and just a second after everyone else has finished shouting he says yes i most certainly do and the mom has to sort of lower his brandy glass away from him um so i love that so there's a kind of a buying into fairies you could buy popular books so we heard at the beginning a poem,

which was from a collection of poems by a poet called Rose Fileman. And she wrote these, you know, kind of popular little fairy books. There was something called Princess Mary's Gift Book, which came out in 1914. And this was a sort of illustrated world of fairies. And there are lots and lots of drawings of what fairies might look like in there.

It's interesting to me when you describe the pictures Anthony that you said one of the figures in the image looks a little bit like a flapper because a lot of these fairies are being depicted wearing quite fashionable clothes towards the end of the 1910s into the 1920s one of the fairies in the Cottingley photographs actually has a sort of very 1920s Bob, which I think is interesting. So there's a sense of, I suppose, fairies being relevant to that moment in time. I guess they offer something other than the horror of war as a bit of sort of fantasizing going on, maybe a sexualizing of women's bodies, but also a time when there's discussions around liberation of women's bodies, what they're wearing. We have the suffragettes very active in this period during and after the

First World War. So there's lots to play with here. And the final important piece of this puzzle, this context, is of course, photography itself. I mean, photography has been around at this point for several decades. It's not an unusual part of Victorian culture in Britain but I think it's fair to say that photographs are starting to be used in different ways so we have obviously photographs for portraiture and portraiture increasingly of people of all different ranks of society that you can go for a relatively low cost compared to the early days of photography and go and have your photo taken in a photographer's studio. We're seeing photographs used in newspapers to illustrate news stories. We're seeing it in war reporting. And I think that's really important that

photography is capturing the horrors of war, some of the violence and the realities of that. And also cameras themselves are coming into middle-class homes. They're increasingly affordable and people have access to them like never before. You're setting up this world, which is in many ways contradictory, I feel, in that we're talking about seances and spiritualism, and we're talking about the emergence of photography that's more science-based or potentially more science-based, but we'll get into that when we talk about these pictures a little bit more. When we talk about these topics, it's always occurred to me that we go, okay, well, that particular moment in time, and actually there was this belief. I think it's also useful for us sometimes to counter that and

say, sure, there would have been some belief and some idea around the existence of fairies. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but my impression is it's not necessarily that in 1917, a lot of people were believing in fairies. It's more the idea of a fairy, what the fairy represents to these children. So you're talking about escapism, you're talking about distraction from the horrors of war, you're talking about figures of women and how the figure of womanhood is changing and adapting at this particular time. And the fairy seems to encapsulate some of that. And it's like, often fairies are quite impish in many ways. I will say this, I will say this, that these Cottingley fairies are very different from the Irish fairy that we would grow up with in Ireland. So that's interesting as well. But, but yeah. Because they're a lot, they're a lot darker, aren't they? The fairies in Ireland.

Yeah, they are. They're far more mischievous. Exactly. That's exactly what I was getting at there. And it's just worth pointing out that it's, yes, it's 1917. Yes, it's over 100 years ago. But it's not that everybody wandering around the streets was going, yes, it's 1917. Yes, it's over 100 years ago. But it's not that everybody wandering around the streets was going, well, you know what I believe in? I definitely believe in a fairy, right? I completely agree. And I think, as you say, it's a world of contradictions. And when faced with all this horror of global conflict, global fighting and loss on an unimaginable scale, plus political upheaval at home, women trying to renegotiate their position in society, whether it's through the vote or after the war, the fact

that there are no young men to marry because so many of them have died. And there's a sort of actual surplus of women who have no husbands to find whether they like it or not. And they are described as surplus women. So there's all this going on. There's all this difficulty and turmoil and upheaval. And I think the fairy becomes a youthful, imaginative, blank canvas on which to project ideas of hope or innocence or a bit of fun, because people want to be entertained and they want to have fun in this period. Let's meet our main characters so we can get into the actual story we've got two little girls and we also have arthur conan doyle and it is going to become

clear how they're linked so just to start with arthur conan doyle because we heard from him at the beginning there so he's really taken in by this these photographs of the fairies well this is interesting because we're talking about people not believing in them. But Arthur Conan Doyle, he does believe in the fairies. Absolutely. The creator of one of the world's most logical, fact-based, evidence-based detectives, someone who can walk into a room, look at the actual material evidence and read the scene, and is very much interested in the reality of the world as it is. and is very much interested in the reality of the world as it is, the creator of him, of that character, becomes a spiritualist.

He becomes embroiled in this world of spiritualism and seances. And he buys into the idea. Despite his scientific background. Yes, which is so interesting. And do you know, I didn't know this about Arthur Conan Doyle. And I've been watching the brilliant Lucy Worsley documentary that's just come out. I think it's on the BBC called Killing Sherlock or something like that.

And I had no idea that Arthur Conan Doyle actually trained as a medical doctor. He served, I think, as a ship surgeon. And he had this incredible life where he did all of these things. So he was a doctor, he was a surgeon. He, of course, was a writer. He was a spiritualist.

An incredibly varied life. And as someone who really adapted to the changing times and adapted his own stance on how he saw the world absolutely fascinating person but also someone who again thanks to dame lucy's tv show which is really really good if you haven't seen it do check it out on the iplayer but he's someone who seems to occupy space on the periphery of a lot of his contemporaries. He's desperate to be lauded for his writing and be taken seriously. But that was one of the things I discovered from that TV show is he was often kind of marginalised or thought a little bit less of. So it's interesting that he is positioning himself so strongly with this belief in fairies.

And it's this story of the Cottingley fairies that's going to really push him to the edge of that sort of respectable realm of male authority, I think. So on the one hand, we have this world of writing and authorship and grown-ups and grown-up men. On the other hand, we have these two little girls. So let me introduce you to Francis Griffiths and Elsie Wright. And I should say that when Conan Doyle writes about them, he does give them aliases,

which is really great foresight on his part because the story blows up. And are these the aliases? No, so these are their real names. Oh, okay. In 1917, Francis Griffiths is nine years old and she's been living with her mother out in South Africa. War obviously has been raging at this point

and I'm assuming for that reason, it's no longer a viable option for them to live there. So they returned to the UK. So Frances Griffiths comes to Yorkshire, to Cottingley, to stay with her aunt. And her aunt is called Polly. Her husband is called Arthur. And they have a 16 year old daughter called Elsie. So Francis and Elsie, Francis is nine, Elsie is 16 at this point in 1917. They become friends. They're living together. It's an amazing story

that it gives so much insight into the minds of little girls and childhood in this period, because we know so much about what the girls did together in their spare time. And we often talk about what's missing from the archive. And it's quite difficult. I know there are historians who work on this, but it's quite difficult to uncover childhood experiences. And I think this story absolutely gives us an insight into that so the pair are living together in cottingley now cottingley is eight miles from hawas where of course the bronte family live and yeah anthony is i can confirm obsessed it's a quite a bleak landscape there beautifully bleak though beautiful stunning and i think quite magical it's you know

it's certainly well known as being the inspiration for a lot of the bronte's writing 20 miles from cottingley we have todmorden which in the late 20th century becomes famous for its multiple ufo sightings this is very much a landscape that is rich in folklore for a large portion of the 19th 20th century it's also important to say that cottingley is close to Bradford. It's just on the edge of Bradford. And in 1917, this would have been a heavily industrialized area. And indeed, if you drive around that part of Yorkshire today,

and I've spent time doing that, you can see so much of the 19th century landscape still in place there and so many of the factory workers' cottages and the mills. So there's that kind of background. And Arthur Wright, so the father of Elsie in the household in Cottingley, is involved in some way in the factories. He's quite respectable and middle class. So I'm thinking he's maybe a factory foreman or a factory owner. Maybe he sits on a factory board. It's never really specified, but there is that connection to industrialization.

And I think, again, thinking about the appeal of fairies is quite important. So the two little girls, they set off to entertain themselves while they're living there to the beck at the bottom of their garden. And this is an area that is part of Cottingley Wood. So Cottingley Wood is this kind of green, isolated oasis, I suppose, and amongst all of this industrialization. And what I think is interesting and worth noting here is that it's well known now for having many sort of rock formations in there. And some of them have Bronze Age cup and ring marks on. Now, these are sort of strangely gouged circular shapes and sort of scooped holes and rings the meanings are i believe

quite sort of hotly debated amongst archaeologists today there's a sense that they might be maybe maps of the ancient landscape that kind of thing but i think that these wouldn't have been unfamiliar to the two little girls going into the space and playing in this space and i think it probably added to the mystery a sense of sort of magical history there that they were encountering so the pair spend a lot of time down by the beck there's a beautiful little waterfall they're in the forest they're edwardian children they're constantly being told off over the course of one summer for going down there getting all their nice clothes and their nice leather boots dirty it's all very idyllic isn't it the setup is pretty idyllic it totally is and you can imagine them you

know sort of wallowing in the water in the mud and paddling and having a nice little time and they're playing, they're playing together. And they've formed this really close bond. Now, Elsie's father, Arthur, who I've already mentioned in relation to the Mills, he's also an amateur photographer. And he has, I think I'm pronouncing this correctly, a mid-quarter plate camera. So this was a sort of standard, relatively affordable camera at the time. And he actually has a dark room in the house. So there's already a sort of culture of photograph taking, photograph making in the house. And the girls, getting bored with

the Beck, looking for a bit of fun, decide to take the camera down to the area that they've been playing in. And one day when they returned to the house, they claim that they have some pretty amazing photographs to develop. And they've actually included a picture of the camera so you can see it because it gives a sense of the sort of material process, I think, of this. And you can really picture two little girls holding this. It looks quite...

It looks like a suitcase. It does look like a suitcase. You could carry it to any site. It's portable. Yeah, it's portable. I mean mean i find it difficult from this image to get a sense of the size of it but to me yeah it looks kind of like a suitcase but i'm guessing it's a bit smaller maddie do you know i think it is a little bit smaller it has a handle on top and different lenses at the front it does look like a suitcase and it's covered in what i assume is black leather now the one we're looking at is actually the Cottingley

photograph. This is the Wright family camera that is now in the Science Museum collection in London. It's not what we're used to today. And I think as well, you know, we're so used to being able to pull a phone out of our pockets and quickly snap something that's happening in front of us that we think is worth documenting in some way whether that's something amazing happening or just your breakfast whatever and i think there's something about the process of photograph making that really appeals to me in this story and that the girls they're looking for something to do it's a hot summer there's not a lot going on the rest of the world is on fire literally they're in their own little imaginative worlds. And there's something about taking the camera down to the beck,

doing whatever they do to create these photographs, and we'll get into it, taking them home, developing them in the darkroom. It's so exciting. I would have loved this when I was little. There is something quite project-led about this that is quite appealing. I'm going to say something.

Don't answer me yet, because I know we're going back into the next bit of the story and we'll talk about this afterwards, but I'm just going to plant the seed now before we hear the next bit. These two girls take this camera that looks relatively complex to me. I mean, maybe it's not. Looking at the image, I don't know how to work that just by looking at it. They take it down and they take these photographs and what they capture obviously becomes famous. I'm struggling to believe that a parent or an adult is not involved, even at that level. I'm not going to answer that entirely. What I will say is that we are dealing very much here with, as we've said, this juxtaposition between a child's world and an adult's world.

And the adults in the story are going to play a crucial part. adults in the story are going to play a crucial part. When in that hot summer of 1917, Elsie and Francis raced back up the hill from the brook behind their house, no doubt giggling and joking as they went, each eager to develop the film they had just shot with, neither of them could have known the impact their afternoon's entertainment would have. Certainly the reaction of their earliest audience, Elsie's father Arthur, seemed unpromising. Arthur, it would later be reported, held a position of trust in connection with a local factory, and was, by all accounts, a rational man. His was a worldview forged in industrial iron and technological advancement. He could not bring himself to believe in the images,

which featured his daughter and niece by the water, each accompanied by a minute dancing being, were real. In fact, he was so convinced that they had been faked that he searched the girl's bedrooms, looking for clues that might tell him how they did it. But he could find nothing incriminating, and so, for a little while at least, these uncanny, beautifully crafted, and altogether delightful images would simply be absorbed into the natural detritus of family archives, stored away with old broken toys, sketches and other memorabilia any doting parent might keep. But this would not be the end of their story. Two years later, in 1919, Elsie's mother Polly attended a lecture in nearby Bradford. The event was hosted by a branch of the Theosophical Society, the formal

institution for a movement begun across the Atlantic in New York City in 1875, and which encouraged, among other tenants, the investigation of the unexplained in nature. The subject of the talk was the question of fairies, and at the end of the presentation, Elsie's mother stood up and showed the photographs to those present. Excited murmurs rippled through the room and greedy hands fumbled to see the apparently miraculous evidence they had been waiting for. Here they extrapolated was science come to light light in the shadowy edgelands of modern knowledge. Through technology, their suspicions of something other had been proved correct. Soon, the photographs were on display in Halifax. Experts were invited to scrutinise them closely.

It would not be long until the creator of Britain's premier, albeit fictional, detective would be called upon to examine them. What he would see in these images was, apparently, indisputable truth about the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Catherine of Aragon.

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I have questions. I have a lot of questions the first question that comes to mind is how do we know for sure that there was a two-year lapse between the pictures being taken in 1917 supposedly and then them being presented in public in 1919 or do we know because it feels very convenient to me that suddenly there's a fairy symposium, let's say, in Halifax, not too far from where the family are living, and they can turn up with supposed evidence that's going to cause a stir. And you know the way we often speak about sometimes things are too good to be true and elements to stories are too good to be true. The element of the story that the father was doubting initially, but then that the mother takes the pictures as evidence, that's a little bit too good to be true in a way. I kind

of feel that, well, we had a man, bear in mind, going, no, this couldn't be true. This isn't right. But it's the women and it's the girls who are going, look at these fairy folk things. Yeah, suspicious. I'm suspicious, Maddy. You're suspicious. What a surprise. No, I agree. I think as far as I'm aware, there's not a way to date these photographs. Yeah, I can't imagine there would be.

Whether they're made in 1917 or in 1919, specifically for this fairy symposium, as you call it, I love that. It's hard to know. I do think that the family dynamic is very interesting. And of course, we have this information about the family because of Arthur Conan Doyle's account of it. So he uses Arthur Wright, the father, as a way of building believability into the story. Arthur is an an upstanding man he's a member of the community

he's respected he's part of the industrial north you know he's part of this contribution to the country in this effort to move the country forward especially a time of war when industry has been you know never so important new weaponry everything getting made constantly and factories creating munitions and all of that stuff so there's arthur on the one hand who i think you're right is is set up as being this believable figure and then you have polly the mother who is the one who's interested in the theosophical society and their ideas and conan doyle specifically talks in his account about the fact that she has been sort of increasingly enthusiastic reader of that society's literature that she has been sort of increasingly enthusiastic reader of that society's literature, that she owns a lot of the sort of texts that the society is putting

out. And it's a movement in America and in Britain, across Britain at this point, but it seems to have this, at least a sort of strong footing in Yorkshire. What makes her decide at that moment to take the photographs along? and if she does take them along as proof that fairies exist does she always feel that way about the photos has she become sort of indoctrinated somehow whilst reading more by the theosophical society it's quite difficult to say theosophical that's hard to say yeah you know is she is her mind changing? Is her perspective on the world and the reality of fairies changing over this period? Is it that she helped to create the photographs? That she wants some fame for her family? Is she looking for some attention herself? Does she genuinely believe that these are real?

And she's moved to share them with people. There's a lot of questions unanswered. What I will say is that I think for us today, it is very clear that these photographs are not real and that they've been staged. And I think it says a lot about the rapid increase in technology around cameras today, certainly in our lifetimes, that there is, we have a literacy,

a level of literacy when it comes to images now, where we're able to tell probably less so now with the invention of AI, but we're able to tell the reality of a photograph. And if something's been doctored, if you put the last sort of five years aside or something, I think it would be reasonable to say that we would have a very good sense of what is real and what's not in a photograph image. What I think is fascinating about these photographs is that people are still debating their veracity into the 1980s. It's wild because Maddy, I looked at these images as I was instructed to do. I'm scrolling back up to them right now. It's clearly the most fakest thing, great English there, I have ever seen in my entire life. And that is one of the things that

is bewildering slightly. But it's really, this is really important to believe that people at the time would not have been able to discern as clearly as we can. And that, you know, I talked earlier about, oh, well, not everybody believed in fairies in 1917. We have to remember that. But actually, these images would have been considerably more convincing than they are to us now. I mean, it would have taken some deciphering and some conversation convincing than they are to us now. I mean, it would have taken some deciphering and some conversation as opposed to what it does now. So the reason that we know that they did fake them and that the girls are responsible for the pictures is because in the 1980s, Elsie, who was then a very old lady, actually came out and said, we did fake them. This is how we did it. so what they did was they obviously took the camera down

to the back and for the fairies they sketched the fairies onto paper some of them have very very very close similarities to fairies in advertising at the time or fairies we mentioned earlier the princess mary's fairy book which was you know a common picture book of fairies. We mentioned earlier the Princess Mary's fairy book, which was a common picture book of fairies. Some of these fairies, and you can see online, people have put them side by side, the original works and the Cottingley fairies. They're almost identical. There are tiny little details that have been changed, but the poses of them, the way that they're dancing, you said earlier that some of them look like they're taking flight. These are all widely available, popular images of fairies at the time. So they've stenciled over them, sketched them, they cut them out, colour them in, do all of that. And then they prop them up. And I

love this detail. They prop them up for the pictures using hat pins. I just think this is the most lovely insight into the material culture of young and teenage girls in the Edwardian era. And it makes me think of the sort of material culture of your own teenage girls in the Edwardian era. And it makes me think of the sort of material culture of your own teenage bedroom, the sort of detritus of childhood when you might have toys out still, and you probably got a million bubbles and little pins for your hair and stuff that would always get lost and reappear in weird places. And there's just sort of mess everywhere. And if you were an imaginative child you might you know use those everyday items to craft something you know i just love that i think it gives so much

insight into the girls have wanted to do something creative they're a bit bored they've taken the objects from their bedrooms that are available to them and they're making something new and exciting but here's the thing if you look at those pictures, that cutting out and that pinning is meticulous. And okay, one of the girls is 16. And fair enough, she would be able to maybe achieve that. But the younger girl, I know a few six and seven and eight year olds, the attention to detail is just not there for them to achieve something like this. So it makes me suspicious yet again, that there isn't a more deliberate adult hand involved in some of this. And also look at the framing of those pictures, even a 16 year old, particularly thinking about the picture of the 16 year old, which meant that

the younger girl would have had to take that picture. Her face is perfectly placed in the image. It's catching certain bits of light light and then the fairy is it's framed meticulously and i just i'm not buying it i agree i agree and i've never thought about that and now you're saying that a lot i am thinking they are so artistically informed they remind me of the photographs at the end of the 19th century by julia margaret cameron the famous pre-raphaelite photographer who photographed a lot of the pre-Raphaelite circle. And in this image where we see 16-year-old Elsie, she's got this very, almost Pre-Raphaelite,

very romantic hair. And there's something about the sort of soft focus of that and the framing. It does feel, yes, artistically realised. I think that's, you're gradually making me more and more suspicious of Polly, the mum's involvement, actually. See, I'm suspicious of they the mom's involvement actually i'm

suspicious of the dad because he's the one with the photographic he has the dark room set up in the house and it's probably collaborative across the whole family but i just find it really interesting that elsie didn't mention the parents as far as i'm aware so far she didn't mention the parents in setting up this she just said it was the girls she just says it's her and francis which is interesting yeah it's very interesting so So whatever Polly and Arthur's involvement is in making the photographs, they certainly have involvement later on. So as we know, Polly takes the photos to the Theosophical Society, and they think this is so weird and seems counterproductive, is that the photographs are sent to an expert who is an expert in photography and editing photos, in particular, called Harold Snelling, who's a professional, he's a technician who lives in Harrow. I assume he's chosen not for his geographical location, but because of his skill and fame.

So the original negatives of the photographs are sent to him on the one hand to validate them and he says yes yes yes they're genuine on the other hand he is invited essentially to airbrush them and so he adds in details he softens the wings of the fairies to make them who invites him so it's the theosophical society at this point oh who invites them to do this so they want the fairies to look slightly more appealing i think in the images and slightly more fairy like based on what they think a fairy should look like yeah they also over paint the eyes and if we look at the photo i showed you at the beginning with little francis you can actually see her eyes have been i think it's over painting where

they've literally been made darker or scratched out. It adds more depth to the image. And I think as well, what it does maybe is changes where she is looking in the picture, because it's almost like she's not looking at the fairies. And I wonder if that was a mistake in the original photograph where she didn't look like she was engaging with real things in front of her and so they've made some attempt to make it look more like she's watching the fairies dancing than she actually is what's happening here is we're already seeing these literal layers of over painting being added to the pictures but these metaphorical layers as well that people are adding their own meanings, their own motives onto the paintings. And this just continues to happen.

Yeah, this calls into question the credibility of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. It calls into question why they felt the need to do this. What was not fairy-like enough about them? I mean, surely if they were convinced that these were real fairies, that would have been enough. It helps, I think, for the girls at the centre of this then to know that there's this team, essentially, of adults around them

that are supporting this story and that to a certain extent, everyone knows it's fake. And so therefore, they don't really need to own up to having been involved in this creation to whatever extent that they were involved in it the other thing to think here is the extent to which elsie and francis were prepared for this to become a famous story i don't think they go to their

parents saying look we've come up with proof that fairies exist i think the little girls been entertaining themselves they've had a creative afternoon making some fairies exist i think the little girls been entertaining themselves they've had a creative afternoon making some fairies they've taken the pictures and you know it's very much as well thinking about the fact that these are self-portraits or portraits of each other at least maybe well yes that's true but if they are they're an expression of how these girls see themselves not unlike taking some selfies in your bedroom today if you're a teenager this is a way of these girls understanding their place in the world how they appear how they want to present themselves and fairies being a part of their sort of childhood identity their female identity

did they go to their parents saying these are real fairies or did they go saying look we made some cool art what do you think mom and dad not expecting the parents to go oh my god this is amazing this is world changing we have to do something with these are they panicking at this point no no they're not because i think i wish what you had just said happened because i think that's really important but actually what i think happened is based on arthur's interest in photography the fact that he had the kit the fact that he had the dark, the fact that he had the darkroom, the fact that it's the mother that takes the pictures to the Theosophical Society. I think the girls are made to pose in these places by the adults, which might then hark back to that Pre-Raphaelite idea that you were talking about, which is probably far more contemporary to Arthur Elsie's father's frame of reference than it is to Elsie's being a 16 year old. And he is replicating and producing what these girls ought to look like because Elsie looks like

a different type of teenager. You know, you're so right on that pre-Raphaelite thing, which has its own connotations in terms of desire and sexuality. So I think they're being sold to us as different versions of young girlhood and then teenage girlhood, particularly from Arthur, which adds a kind of a strange element to them, I suppose. After Harold Snelling finished his careful, though not unobtrusive, editing of the photographs, Edward Gardner, a member of the Executive Committee for the Theosophical Society in Britain,

made the decision to send the original photographic negatives to a man he greatly admired and whom he knew had sympathy for his cause. When Arthur Conan Doyle received the photographs from Gardner, he was amazed, not to mention flattered, to be called upon as the definitive authority in the matter. By now he'd already seen copies, but to hold the originals in his hands was, he admitted, a life-altering experience. Wanting to be sure that what he had in his possession was indeed the true article, he called on the help of a medium friend. The man was shown the photographs and immediately denounced them as fake, claiming to have seen a vision of a fair man with hair brushed back in a room filled with all sorts of cameras and other queer machines. Conan Doyle was, however, not deterred. This was a

perfect description, he said, of Snelling, after whose careful doctoring the photographs had been sent to him. They must, he concluded, be real. When his article in The Strand went to print, accompanied by reproductions of the images, and with Elsie and Francis's names changed to the Miss Carpenters, Conan Doyle's reputation was about to go on the line. Many mocked him. One critic wrote that, knowing children and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that the Miss Carpenters have pulled one of them. Months later, in the Star, a candle company called Price and Sons even ran a notice pointing out that the Cottingley fairies looked an awful lot like those that appeared in their long-running advertisements for nightlights. How can it be that the creator of the world's greatest, most astute and intellectually rigorous detective in literary history could himself believe in fairies.

I am scarlet for his ma. That is so embarrassing, Arthur Conan Doyle. I mean, come on, a medium is telling you these are not real. And you are still insistent that this is something that is happening. And also, I love the fact that he takes it to a medium because that's how he's going to decide whether or not this is real, whether or not this is something that he needs to share with the world and potentially affect his reputation. Even the medium says, no, don't pin your hopes on this one. And he still goes ahead and does it. I'm embarrassed. Secondhand embarrassment. I think he really wants to believe it, doesn't he? He's really, he's making an effort

to believe it. And it's interesting, as you say, that he chooses the medium as his sort of gold standard of proof. That's fascinating to me. I'm really interested in Conan Doyle's sort of gold standard of proof. That's fascinating to me. I'm really interested in Conan Doyle's sort of transformation, I guess, throughout his life that he starts off, as we've said, training as a medical doctor. And that's something I never knew about him. So he goes to the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and he graduates in the early 1880s. He actually practices as a doctor for a little while. And he does things like he's a huge champion of compulsory vaccination. And he does things like he's a huge champion of compulsory vaccination, and he actually publishes loads of articles that denounce anti-vaxxers. So he seems to be,

at least in the early part of his life, a sort of scrutinous, scientifically minded man. And it's really difficult to square that away with his spiritualism in later life. As I've said, his son dies in the First World War, but he's already interested in spiritualism in later life. As I've said, his son dies in the First World War, but he's already interested in spiritualism before that point. It's not that that's like a huge triggering moment for him. So at the beginning of the war, before his son has died in 1916,

he actually claims that his children's nanny, who's called Lily Lodder Simmons, he actually claims that she has psychical abilities and he gets really into psychic stuff and he does he conducts loads of experiments he writes about it and people start to become i think increasingly sort of irritated with him from what i know of him that's a good word to use so one of my favorite facts about him is that he was incredibly good friends with harry houdini the famous escape artist but he absolutely refused to believe

that Houdini's tricks were real. And he wanted to see them as magic. And he would go and see Houdini and afterwards they'd talk and Houdini would say, no, no, no, it's a trick. Here's how I did it. And they eventually fell out because Conan Doyle would not accept that Houdini wasn't tapping into some kind of supernatural power in order to perform. I mean, it's actually amazing in many ways, because it leaves you feeling frustrated, like I'm getting frustrated with all of these different pieces of information that are coming out around him, why he wouldn't just, why does he need to believe in this so much, particularly when it's not necessarily bound to religion, it's not necessarily bound to

a faith in that sense, which would be far more understandable and not looked on as an outsider belief in the context of the time or even now. But he absolutely insists on pursuing some of these wilder avenues of thought. And I'm wondering if it's something got to do with fame and profile, potentially. I don't know, I could be wrong. Yeah, I mean, I think when he wrote in 1920, when he writes the first piece in The Strand that publishes some of the images, I think he must have known there was going to be a buzz around it. And he anticipates it, you know, if you can read the article online, it's only like, I don't know, four pages long or something. He talks about how this discovery, as he terms terms it is going to change the

world he's really sure of that and i think he wants to place himself in that narrative he strikes me as someone who was constantly throughout his life looking for something more and that he wants to prove himself first as a doctor then he realizes that's not for him then as a writer and then i think sherlock himself kind of overshadows him. So he dispatches of Sherlock. Of course, he does come back to him later on in life, but he kind of abandons that kind of writing. And then he turns to spiritualism

and he tries to place himself at the forefront of all these experiments and these conversations about the world being more than the evidence that we have before our eyes. And I think when you read his piece in The Strand, you can feel the excitement that he feels. I mean, he presents it in a language that's very scientific. He's writing to convince people that this is real. And he talks about, I suppose, sort of controlled experiment scenario. And he makes it very clear,

he stresses that he's spoken to the family involved that he knows the circumstances in which these photographs were created how they became famous and he gives a lot of backstory in order to make it seem more credible but i think ultimately you're right i think it is about him not necessarily wanting to be famous but to be the person who makes these discoveries whose name name is attached to them. In reality, I think even though he is, to a certain extent, associated with the Cottingley case, I think the afterlife that these photos have, and the fame that Elsie and Francis get, actually endures beyond the connection that Conan Doyle has to the story. I agree. I agree. I hadn't thought about it like that, but it's true. When I think about these

images, I think about the little girls and the cutout fairies. I don't think about Arthur Conan Doyle. So it is interesting and in some ways right, because let's look at them as pieces of art then, which is essentially what we're left with. And that creation comes down to whatever happened in Yorkshire. And that's nothing got to do with Arthur Conan Doyle, really, is it? That's got to do with Arthur, Polly, Elsie and Frances and whatever configuration of creativity that the four of them came up with together, possibly. I think that's it. I think that's the way that I like to look at them, whether or not the parents were involved this is an expression of childhood and of early female experience in okay we're not quite in Edwardian Britain anymore but we're in these two girls are born into that world and a world that is rapidly

changing and that as they grow older they are going to have to renegotiate their place within and I think they're the most charming imaginative works ever, really. I love them. The photographs of the Cottingley fairies and the girls who captured them on film would continue to fascinate long after the buzz of Arthur Conan Doyle's article in The Strand had died down. As the decades of the 20th century unfolded and photography improved and became more accessible, all alongside the advancement of television, these charmingly strange images would be held up again and again to scrutiny and theorising. In the 1980s, Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal for Photography, undertook a major investigation, publishing his findings in the journal and concluding that the

works were indeed fake. This was perhaps the prompt Elsie Wright needed, and in 1983, by then an old woman, she admitted to the hoax. What had started out as harmless fun and an afternoon's entertainment had, she admitted, quickly got out of hand. But can we really lay the charge of fraud and fakery solely at the feet of young Elsie and little Francis? This was a story into which the adults around them were only too happy to step. A world seeded first in the minds of mischievous and bored children, but one augmented, justified, legitimised by those with real authority. And who could blame them? In the wake of a devastating war in which photography had shown all too clearly the horrors human beings were capable of, visions of an alternate, enchanted world just out of reach

must have been desirable. Although the question of their veracity has long been settled, the value of the Cottingley photographs has only continued to grow. In 2018, two of the images were sold at auction in Gloucestershire. The first for £5,000 and the other for £15,000. But for me at least, I don't see their worth as being that easily quantifiable. I don't think we can really put a price on them. And although I don't believe they are evidence of a fairy realm, it's maybe fair to argue that they do hold a kind of magic. These are remarkable

works, created in a private moment shared between two little girls one sunny afternoon in 1917 while all around them the world was burning. They represent a hopeful union between human imagination and technology, a language that any can adopt and adapt as we continue to tell ourselves the oldest of fairy tales. There are fairies at the bottom of our garden. You cannot think how beautiful they are. They all stand up and sing when the fairy queen and king come gently floating down upon their car. The king is very proud and very handsome.

The queen, now you can guess who that could be. She's a little girl all day, but at night she steals away. Well, it's me. steals away, well, it's me. If you've enjoyed learning a little bit more about the Cottingley Fairies, then please check out our other episodes on After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have any other ideas for episodes or any other fairy or fairy folk type stories in your local area that are linked to your family, then please drop us a line on afterdarkathistoryhit.com.

We would love to hear from you. Special thanks to James Carter for being the voice of Conan Doyle this episode. Goodbye and see you next time. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet.

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