Criminal - A Glamour and a Mystery

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

In the summer of 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright took a photograph of her 9-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths. It was the first photograph she’d ever taken — and it became the source of a mystery that lasted for most of the 20th century. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, and members-only merch. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com.

That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. You have all these special materials here to keep things safe. Yeah. Yeah, I did a quick risk assessment. In March, we visited the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds in England. They have the very first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays and medieval manuscripts from the 12th century. But we were there to see something else.

We were told it was going to be very cold and we wouldn't be able to wear our coats inside. They're so delicate and precious. The conservation officer was setting up the room so we could see some negatives of old photographs. And I'm just merely putting these down to stop this light sheet moving around anywhere because it's a little bit light. So I don't want anything to suddenly slide away.

I'll go and get the negatives now. Thank you. Oh, yeah. Well, if you don't want anything ruined, put it in a library's archive. The negatives the conservation officer came back with were made of glass, and a little bigger than playing cards. They're more than 100 years old, and they were the source of a mystery that lasted for most of the 20th century.

I think one of the things that really struck me about these the first time I saw them was, which sounds like a silly thing, but the fact that they've got their own little kind of cardboard box specially made for them. Professor Merrick Burrow. So which one is this? Yeah, so this one is Francis and the Fairies. Francis Griffiths was nine years old when that photo was taken. It was 1917, and she had just moved to a very small village in England called Cottingley.

Francis had grown up in South Africa, where her father had been stationed with the English army, but he had been called to join the campaign on the Western Front during World War I, and so Frances and her mother went to live with Frances' aunt and uncle and 16-year-old cousin, Elsie, in England. It was a very small space for two families who, the sisters, that's to say,

Frances and Elsie's mothers obviously knew each other from childhood, but in other respects, the families were to some extent strangers because they'd lived so far apart. So I think it was quite a pressured environment, not an awful lot of space to get away

and be on your own, and very, very different from what Frances had experienced growing up in South Africa, where they lived in a quite big house with servants and so forth. So it was a very, very alienating, disorienting kind of experience for her. Frances was shy and spoke with a South African accent. When she first got to England, she didn't even know what snow was. And they arrived in April in the middle of snow and things like that, so she was completely thrown by the whole thing.

Plus there was sort of tension in the house, I think to some extent. Her mother's hair all fell out, so she was stressed. I mean, her father went off to the war, so there's a lot going on, obviously, but there was clearly a lot of tension going on in the house, and Frances spent a lot of time down on her own by a beck or stream at the bottom of the garden and was often getting in trouble for getting her shoes wet, which is how, really, the whole thing started. So the story goes that she came back with her shoes wet again

and her mother was exasperated for having scolded her about it many times and asked her what it was that she was doing down the beck all the time and she said that, I go to see the fairies. And obviously that was met with incredulity. But for whatever reason, her cousin Elsie decided that she was going to back up her story and say that she'd seen fairies too. Merrick Burroughs says that Elsie, who was seven years older than Frances, had started to take her cousin under her wing.

Even when the adults in the house started teasing Frances about saying she'd seen fairies, both of the cousins stuck to their story. This went on for a few weeks, and then Elsie said she would prove that Francis's fairies were real. Elsie's father had just bought a camera, and he'd set up a small dark room in the house. So Elsie asked him if she could borrow the camera and some slides and go down to the stream with Francis to get a picture of the fairies.

The camera was quite a big deal for them, I think. But he reluctantly agreed to give them one slide. I think at the cajoling of the two mums, who said, well, go on, let's see what they can do. It was the first photograph Elsie ever took. When the cousins came back from the stream, they asked Elsie's father to develop the negative right away. Elsie went into the darkroom with him. Here's an interview with Elsie and Francis, almost 70 years later, describing that moment.

Elsie is first. Dad says, I'll tell you what it's coming up like, that picture you've taken. He says, it's very untidy. He says, you've been eating sandwiches, the sandwich paper's all sticking up. And then he says, oh, what's these little leg things down here? And Elsie shouted out, they've come, they've come, they've come out. The original image is quite, you know, underexposed and a little bit kind of messy. But at the centre of the image is Frances Griffiths looking at the camera, resting her arms on the bank of the stream.

And in front of her are arranged a group of dancing fairies with wings. How did Elsie's father and the family react to this photograph? I think they would be amused. I don't think they took it seriously. Clearly they didn't believe that this was really a photograph of fairies but they couldn't explain it he was baffled and perplexed and you know demanded to know how they'd done it and the girls absolutely stuck rigidly to their story that they'd been down they saw fairies and they'd taken this photograph of them and that's what it was so what what happened next well i think they thought that this would you know quiet their parents down for mocking them.

But actually, it seems to have egged them on. They got more joking at their expense, more mocking about it. They kept asking, I think, questions about how they'd done it. And they stuck to their story that they had seen fairies. And so a few weeks later, they then asked, could they borrow the camera again? And they take another photograph to prove the point. Elsie's father let them take the camera and another slide, and Elsie and Francis went back down to the stream.

This time, Francis took the photograph, which showed Elsie sitting in some grass, reaching towards what appeared to be a little man with a hat and wings. A couple of years later, in 1919, Elsie and Francis' mothers went to a lecture at a nearby chapter of an organization called the Theosophical Society. So the Theosophical Institute, I guess, was tapping into an interest in the occult and the paranormal and that kind of thing that had been really developing in the late 19th century. And it was a combination of occultism, the sort of thing that people were interested in, spiritualism with seances and that kind of thing, but there was

also a lot of mystical Eastern philosophy, pantheism, those sorts of strands, a kind of new agey thing in many respects. Towards the end of the meeting, Elsie's mother mentioned that her daughter and her niece had taken a couple of photographs that appeared to have fairies in them. And suddenly people's ears pricked up and they were very interested because these were people who did believe in fairies. And when the mothers brought it up at the meeting,

were they kind of saying, well, our daughters did something like this and not thinking that this would be taken so seriously? I don't think anybody was expecting what happened to happen. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The local Theosophical Society started making copies of the fairy photographs and circulating them to other Theosophical Societies in England. And they came to the attention of the president of the London branch, a 50-year-old man named Edward Gardner. And so he got in touch with the family

and asked if he could have copies of them in order to use them in lectures that he was giving about fairies and about theosophy. And they proved to be a big hit, and that's then how it came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was most famous for writing Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, was also one of the most famous advocates for spiritualism, the belief in and practice of communicating with the dead.

He started attending seances and writing articles about seances and spiritualism and communication with the dead around about the same time that he started writing the Sherlock Holmes stories so people often think that you know he had this rational phase and then this kind of wacky phase at the end when he was getting interested in spiritualism but actually the two things ran in parallel but from around 1917 his interest in spiritualism deepened for a variety of reasons. But clearly the loss of his son after the First World War during the flu pandemic and the loss of his brother and his brother-in-law forms part of that picture.

And at that point, he really devoted most of his energies to the promotion of the spiritualist cause. And so he was writing lots of articles for Strand magazine where he published the Sherlock Holmes stories. And he'd been planning a series of stories called The Uncharted Coast about the paranormal, about poltergeists and ghosts and fairies was one of the things that he was writing an article about. So he was in the middle of researching this article about fairies when he got contacted by the editor of light magazine which is a big spiritualist magazine saying have you heard about these photographs that edward gardener is showing at the theosophical institute you might be interested in finding out about them for your article so he wrote to gardener um like a lot of the correspondence is evidence of water damage that looks like there's been a paperclip that's rusted on this one.

Dear sir, I'm very greatly interested in the fairy photographs, which really should be epoch-making, if we can entirely clear up the circumstances. Conan Doyle goes on to say that he needs more information about Francis and Elsie. He asks if they are psychic in any other ways, and how old they are. It would really help me in my description. We are all indebted to you as a channel by which this has come to the world. Yours sincerely, Arthur Conan Doyle. So that's his first letter to Gardner, Edward Gardner.

Hmm. I think to begin with, his plan was just to get some material for this article that he was writing. But when he saw the photographs, they were, I guess, much more impressive than he was expecting. And increasingly his plan was to use this as an opportunity to strike a blow in his ongoing arguments with anti-spiritualists, people who were decrying himself and people who were interested in spiritualism as kind of cranks and so forth. He thought, we've got the absolute proof here to prove them wrong.

If fairies were real, everything else could be, too. So that was his plan, I think, increasingly, was to use the fairies as a kind of chess piece in this sort of battle he was having with the anti-spiritualists. Just three months before, Arthur Conan Doyle had represented spiritualism in a public debate in London. In his closing argument, Conan Doyle said that his opponent would not have talked lightly of this matter if he had known, as I know, the consolation it has brought to thousands and thousands of people. So there was a lot of quite active hostility towards the things that he believed were genuine,

which he believed there was a lot of comfort for people to take in the aftermath of the First World War and saw the skepticism as quite destructive. So he was willing to sacrifice his own reputation, if you like. He said, I deeply feel the absolute importance of trying to remove all those barriers which stand between suffering humanity He said, He knew what he was getting himself into when he was, you know, sticking his neck out with the stuff and he was prepared to run the risks. We'll be right back. To be continued... I recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.

One of the first things that the theosophist Edward Gardner did when he saw the fairy photographs was send the negatives to an expert for analysis, a man named Harold Snelling. We asked Snelling to look at these photographs and evaluate whether they'd been, you know, faked up in a studio, whether they'd been done through some kind of special superimposition or something like that. And he looked at them and examined them and said, no, these have been taken in a camera, you know, outside, single exposure. So they've not been faked up like that. He didn't express an opinion about whether what they'd photographed was a fairy or whether it was anything else. But Harold Snelling reportedly said that whatever it was,

wasn't made of paper or of fabric. He said it wasn't painted on, and quote, what gets me most is that all these figures have moved during exposure. Later, Harold Snelling said he would stake his reputation on the images being unfaked. Edward Gardner asked Harold Snelling to create new, better-developed copies that would show more detail. And Harold Snelling, you know, he was a technology-leading expert in photographic special effects and that kind of thing. So, yeah, what came out of it at the end of it were these really quite remarkable images. Arthur Conan Doyle wanted more testing. Conan Doyle took the negatives to Kodak

and asked them for an opinion, and they said something very similar, that there was no evidence that they'd been tampered with or there was single exposure and all the rest of it. They wouldn't... Kodak said that they wouldn't say that they were genuine photocopier fairies, because how could they?

It was outside of their expertise, but all they could confirm was that they were single exposures. So Konador took that as being sufficient expert testimony to say that these hadn't been, you know, kind of mocked up in a studio or something. He showed them to other people as well who's opinionally trusted. He showed them to a prominent physicist, who was also a spiritualist. But the man refused to believe the photographs were real. He outlined an elaborate method by which they could have been faked. But Conan Doyle reminded him that the photos were taken by children. Quote, such photographic sent Edward Gardner to Cottingley to meet the family.

Elsie showed him where the photographs had been taken. One of the controversial things about the first photo was that Frances was looking at the camera, not at the four fairies. People thought this didn't make sense. Elsie said that she and Frances saw the fairies all the time, but being able to use the camera was new. Edward Gardner wrote,

This answer of Elsie's is typical of the simplicity I met with throughout the investigation. Indeed, that which impressed me most was the utter unconcernedness of Elsie at the affair being anything special. During that visit, Edward Gardner asked Elsie's parents if Arthur Conan Doyle could go public with the photographs. I think to begin with,

the family didn't really want anything to do with it. They were a bit embarrassed about it. They thought this was all kind of silly. Maybe they regretted having mentioned it at all at this Theosophical Institute. But Conan Doyle's celebrity, you know, clearly sort of changed things a bit and they've become much keener.

So the girls are increasingly kind of coming under pressure to comply and you know do what Gardner and Conan Doyle are asking them to do. Did their parents make any money off of this do we know? Not really there was talk of money Gardner said and he said this to the family as well that he didn't want to bring money into it because it might muddy their waters as it were and what they're interested in was getting to the truth but Conan Doyle sent presents he did say that he was going to provide a dowry for Elsie who by the time he got involved in it she was engaged to be married so there was some suggested money there but mostly where the money would have come

from and should have come from would have been from copyright to the photographs. But mostly where the money would have come from and should have come from would have been from copyrights of the photographs. But Edward Gardner took the copyright out in his own name. Everyone agreed to this for the girl's privacy. Then after a while, they say, can we get you to take some more photographs? This time, Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner supplied the cameras. They set everything up so that no one could accuse them of doctoring anything

and sent 24 glass slides that had been specially marked. Elsie and Francis agreed to try and sent back three slides. They said they couldn't do any more because the weather wasn't good. One is of Francis looking at a flying fairy. One is of a fairy offering flowers to Elsie. And then the final one, that's sometimes called the fairy bower, is this one that looks like a double exposure. It's one where there's some fairy figures that are semi-translucent

in a kind of ball of grass or vegetation or something. And that one's disputed about who took that. Frances claims that she just took that one as a photograph of the earth and the fairies appeared. Elsie says that she'd taken that one one day when Frances wasn't there. Now there were five photographs. The original two were published that winter in the Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand magazine. The headline was

Fairies Photographed, an epic making event described by Arthur Conan Doyle. Which page is it on? Past all the advertisements there we go so here's the original article so this is the original article so i mean one of the things that's interesting about this i suppose and helps maybe to explain why people believed it is that they're quite grainy photographs aren't they when they appear in the magazine so they're not very very high resolution so some of the features which perhaps are more obvious when you look at them in high resolution pictures are not so clear here and then you've got Conan Doyle setting the scene You've got Edward Gardner giving his testimony, as it were,

sort of signed and his address at the bottom. So it's all kind of given like sworn testimony almost. There's an element in which he's drawing on the kind of Sherlock Holmesian persona to build his credibility. At the end, he writes, 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. These little folk who appear to be our neighbours, with only some small differences 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 there is a glamour and a mystery to life. We'll be right back. Thank you. used to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally

rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me. How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you

have those specific cravings, and it can help you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. After Arthur Conan Doyle's article was published in The Strand, one reader complained that for a few weeks, no one talked of anything but fairies. So there's just a lot of interest in that kind of thing about, but it's also harking back to a world

that's very different from the kind of mechanized warfare that everybody's just been through and that sense of loss so there's lots of elements in it that appeal you know the kind of harking back to a kind of romantic idyll of a natural world of fairies as these peaceful sprites and the innocence of childhood as well you know i mean there's lots of things in it that are that are kind interesting. And then when you add the fact that the photographs are as remarkable as they are, and Conan Doyle is advocating it, I mean, it's a winning mixture, really. But not everyone was convinced. Some people said right away that Elsie and Francis had pulled one over on a lot of experts.

One person wrote, Knowing children and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that they have pulled one of them. There was a famous cartoon in Punch magazine which depicted Conan Doyle sitting on a chair with his head in the clouds and manacled to him at the ankle was Sherlock Holmes looking very annoyed and there's a poem that went underneath it about how Conan

Doyle had turned his back on science and you know Sherlock Holmes was clearly sort of saddled with this this guy with his head in the clouds so there was a lot of skepticism and a lot of a sense that Conan Doyle had really lost the plot a bit. By this point, Arthur Conan Doyle had already published his four Sherlock Holmes novels and four Sherlock Holmes story collections. A few months after he published the first article, he published a second one, with two of the remaining three photographs. And in 1922, Conan Doyle published a book about the whole investigation that he called The Coming of the Fairies.

Eventually, the story died down. And then, in the 1970s, an author named Fred Gettings was doing some research for a book he was writing about 19th century illustrations. He came across a drawing that looked familiar. It was in an old children's book called Princess Mary's Gift Book. It was of three dancing fairies, and it looked almost exactly like a photograph he'd seen before. The first photograph, Elsie, had taken of the fairies.

Princess Mary's gift book was published in 1914, three years before Elsie took her first photograph. When a reporter asked Elsie about the similarities in 1978, she said, The positions are much the same, but then positions are always much the same when people are dancing. Around the same time, the magician James Randi, also known as the Amazing Randi,

was researching the photographs for a book he was writing to debunk supernatural claims. He had the photographs analyzed with an image enhancer that had been used to detect fake UFO photographs. James Randi built on the discovery that the fairies looked a lot like the illustrations in Princess Mary's gift book, and he identified what he thought was a very important giveaway. And here we are by the famous waterfall at the back of the Wright's home in Cottingley, where photograph number one, the most important of all five, was taken by Elsie of Francis behind the cutout. I'm taking the place of Francis. For you see,

it was the waterfall that was the clue to the whole thing that should have tripped everybody off to the secret of the hope. The waterfall in the original picture is heavily blurred because it took at least a 10-second exposure to make that photograph, while the wings of the fairy are perfectly sharp and clear, and those wings should have been fluttering very rapidly. An obvious clue, but no one spotted it. In his 1982 book, he wrote, Little girls are not always truthful, experts are not always right, and authorities do not always see with unclouded vision. He called it one of the most famous and enduring hoaxes ever perpetrated upon our species.

That same year, the editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Photography, a man named Geoffrey Crawley, began publishing a ten-part series outlining exactly how Elsie and Francis could have taken the photographs. He wrote that he believed that the photographic world had a duty for its own self-respect to clear things up. By this point, Francis was in her 70s and Elsie was in her 80s. Elsie and Francis had begun meeting with a professor who was interested in folklore named Joe Cooper to talk about their lives. So he was helping Francis in particular to write a book. I think she decided she wanted to, you know, tell the truth as it were, but wanted to do it on her own terms.

So he was helping her write this book. He came and stayed with her on various occasions and they had conversations about it. And then, unbeknownst to her, he wrote some articles exposing what had happened based on what he'd found out from talking to her and looking through various documents and things like that when he'd been at her house and published these stories exposing the truth. So he got the jump on her in terms of um the scoop in terms of um getting the story out did did she admit to him that that it had all been a hoax um well there's some sort of difference of opinion about exactly what was

said to whom because they fell out over this as as you can imagine. But, yeah, I mean, she told him, you know, what had happened. So, yes, the confession, if you like, was all there. She also told him that she really had seen fairies, and that even though the first four photographs were fake, she believed that the last photograph was real. She maintained this for the rest of her life. You know, but she was expecting it to be published on her own terms, under her own name, but Joe Cooper published it and these articles ahead instead. Here's how they did it.

Elsa said one night, we were getting ready for bed, and she said, I've been thinking, kid, she was at the real cinema ago with Elsa, she says, what about if I draw some fairies and cut them out in cardboard and we'll stick them up in the grass and see if Uncle and Dad will let the camera and we'll take a photograph. She said, if they see them, they'll have to believe it,

they'll stop all this joking. Frances had a copy of Princess Mary's gift book. And it contained poems, stories and illustrations of leading writers and artists of the day. Interestingly, there's a story in there by Arthur Conan Doyle that he contributed to this, but there is a poem by Alfred Noyes called A Spell for a Fairy with illustrations by Claude A. Sheperson.

And if we open this up and go towards the end, you'll see three dancing fairy figures. And it was these figures that Elsie based the fairies for the first photo she took with Francis on. So if you compare these, you'll see that she's added wings. She's taken away some of the kind of drapery from them and they've spaced the figures out. But the poses and particularly the fashionable Parisian hairstyles

are more or less the same. Really the same? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, if you compare them, they're more or less identical apart from, as I said, the addition of wings and a few changes to the dresses. The girls attach the cut-out fairy drawings to hat pins to make them stand up in the grass.

Here's Elsie. We, with the long hat pin, we put it down the back like that and stuck the tape at the back like that and then gradually wormed that down. They were longer than that though

they were although about that then 18 inches at least and then worm that down into there and They said that they said the thing was that they could see them that the fairies were moving when the photograph was taken But that's because they did it in the breeze and were moving when the photograph was taken, but that was because they did it in the breeze. And then Frances, you know, stood behind, posing, and Elsie took the photograph. That took a lot of work to just prove your parents wrong. Yeah, so I mean, that I guess adds to the question about why anybody believed it,

because part of it is, the same way all conjuring tricks by sort of people going to far more trouble than you'd think anybody would bother doing to deceive you that's also what's going on here you know the amount of effort that's gone into planning this the meticulous detail of the drawings i mean yeah they they do look like drawings but having said that they're really really good drawings a lot of time's been spent on on doing those cutting them out shading and dusting them and so forth and attaching them to pins and arranging them. I mean, it's a beautifully arranged picture.

When you think that's the first photograph that she ever took, you know, the composition on it is incredible. It's a really, really lovely thing. Years after Francis and Elsie confessed, the photography expert Geoffrey Crawley wrote, At least Elsie gave us a myth which has never harmed anyone. How many professed photographers can claim to have equaled her achievement with the first photograph they ever took.

Neither Elsie nor Frances ever received any royalties from the photographs. When it all came out that this was a hoax, what did they say? Their reactions are slightly different. I think Frances was quite defensive and a little bit prickly about it. I think she was offended at the idea that she was being called a liar and from her point of view that that's not really what they'd done so she said that it wasn't meant ever even meant to be a hoax it was to stop the parents having a having a go at her for you know for saying she'd seen fairies and that people believed what they wanted to believe it didn't really matter what they said

people saw these things and when there were things like um an outline around them or um there was one thing on one of the fairies somebody noticed that there was what looked like the head of a pin sticking through um the the stomach of one of them and uh conan door said oh look that that shows that they've got belly buttons they've got navel navels, therefore there's a process of birth in the fairy world, isn't this a fantastic discovery? And she pointed to that as an example of people would just explain away anything, so they believe what they wanted to believe. Elsie was much more amused by it, I think. So when she's interviewed on film, she talks about how they did it,

and she's sort of laughing, really, while she's explaining. So I think she was not really sort of ashamed of it, just kind of amused that people had believed it for so long. And she said that the only reason that they kept it quiet for so long was because they didn't want to humiliate Edward Gardner and Conan Doyle, so they'd said that they wouldn't admit to what had been done until after Conan Doyle and they'd said that they wouldn't you know admit to what had been done until after Conan Doyle and Gardner died well Conan Doyle died in 1930 but Gardner life lived until 1969

you know so by that point I suppose you then kind of go well we've been maintaining this you know since 1917 it's now 1969 do we suddenly now say that um actually we made it up so it took them uh you know, a little while longer before they came around to the idea that they would confess. It was very embarrassing because, I mean, two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle. We could only just keep quiet. Here's Frances in a 1985 interview,

a couple of years after everything came out. I'd never even thought of it being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. And I can't understand it to this day. People were taken in. They wanted to be taken in. People often say to me, don't you feel ashamed that you've made all these poor people look fools?

They believed in you. But I don't because they wanted to believe. Look at this photograph. That fairy's all out of drawing. That leg doesn't belong to that fairy. And somebody pointed it out in the newspaper. And one of our dear believers said, well fairies aren't like humans, they haven't got bodies like we have of the skeleton and the arms and legs, they sort of put it together with thought and sometimes it doesn't come out

right. We didn't have to tell a lie about it at all, because always somebody came out to justify it. Elsie once said, the joke was to last two hours, and it's lasted 70 years. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Sam Kim, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Thank you. Thanks to Merrick Burrow and the special collection staff at the Brotherton Library. And if you're a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's books, you might enjoy Phoebe Reads a Mystery. It's a podcast where I read classic novels to you, including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I took a break, but we're coming back. On Monday, July 31st, I'll start Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you want to hear Phoebe Reed's mystery or any of the shows we make with no ads, check out Criminal Plus. Learn more at thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast.

Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300.

See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. So you've arrived. You head to the Brasserie, then the Terrace. Cocktail? Don't mind if I do. You raise your glass to another guest because you both know the holiday's just beginning. And you're only in Terminal 3. Welcome to Virgin Atlantic's unique upper-class clubhouse experience,

where you'll feel like you've arrived before you've taken off. Virgin Atlantic. See the world differently.