The Cottingley Fairies: The Hoax that Shocked the World
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00:21This product may not be suitable for everyone.See in store or on the TimSappin site for details,available in Canada, excluding Quebec for a limited time only.Tonight's story is almost too fantastical to be believed, just like its subject matter.It's the tale of Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley.One summer afternoon in 1917, they took a series of photographs that gripped the imagination of Edwardian England.The pictures appeared to show a group of tiny ethereal fairiesdancing over the grassy banks of a stream.
01:11But what was the true story of this mysterious encounter?How did it inspire an international debate about the spirit world?And what has been the legacy of these controversial photographs?We'll discover why they create.created such a sensation and more tonight.So just relax and let your mind driftas we explore the sleepy history of the Cottingly Fairies.Before we begin our story in earnest,
01:57let's take a moment to understand the special place fairies heldin British culture at the time the photographs were takenat the turn of the 20th century.Folk and fairy tales, reaching back centuries, had always told of fairies, gnomes, brownies,imps, and little folk.But interest and belief in fairies had waned over time, until over the 19th century the trend reversed.All of a sudden, there was a renewed interest in fairies.Where did this fascination spring from?
02:42Some scholars have suggested that it was a reaction to industrialization,to the loss of nature and folk beliefs connected with nature.As Britain transformed into a modern nation,filled with crowded, smoky cities,many people found themselves drawn to stories of magic and wonderthat stemmed from simpler times.Novels, paintings and poems about fairies were incredibly popular.Writers, such as Walter Scott and James Hogg, drew on folklore to create updated fairy stories.
03:27Books of fairy tales, some collected from Germany and France, became enormously popular in British households.Postcards and greeting cards featuring fairy imagery were cheap and widely distributed.They showed ethereal creatures in idyllic pastoral settings, flitting over meadows and dancing through glades.In well-to-do Victorian households, fairies were whimsical, gentle creatures,but in the countryside, the old beliefs still lingered.People still told stories of the good folk, and some claimed to have seen them, or at least to know someone who had.These traditional fairies retained a more ambiguous character. They could be helpful or harmful,beautiful or frightening. Folklorists like Scotland's Andrew Lang traveled to these farms and villages where people
04:42still believed in fairies. Their stories were recorded and printed in anthologies of folk andfairy tales. In Lang's case, the popular, colourful fairy collections like the Red Fairy Book, the GreenFairy Book, and more. The era's most famous fairy was undoubtedly Tinkerbell. In 1904, J.M. Barry's play,Peter Pan, premiered at the Duke of York's Theatre in London. Audiences were introduced to themagical world of Neverland, a place inhabited by fairies, mermaids and pirates. Tinkerbell was representedon stage as a darting point of light, accompanied by a tinkle of bells. That theatrical choicebecame a blueprint for the way Edwardians conceived of the fairy,magical without being threatening,
05:53an elusive, glowing spark at the edge of consciousness.Whether they were thought of as belonging to folklore or fantasy,as the objects of serious study, or the stuff of children's entertainment,fairies held a central place in the Edwardian imagination.And in the summer of 1917, with World War I raging in the background,Francis and Elsie's photographs would seemingly prove something.So many people were desperate to believe that fairies and all the magic, wonder, and enchantment they connoted were real.So now, our story can really begin.
06:47And perhaps we should begin it, as some of the story.if it were a fairy tale, because in some senses that is exactly what it is. Once upon a time,a nine-year-old English girl named Francis took a long voyage with her mother, from her home inSouth Africa to cold, rainy England. War had broken out across Europe. Francis's fatherhad been sent to France to fight.Francis and her mother went to stay with familyin the peaceful countryside of Yorkshire in the north of England.They stayed with Francis's Aunt Polly and her family
07:34in the village of Cottingley.Cottingly was a world away from South Africa.A neat little village set among the rolling green hills of Yorkshire,it must have seemed to Francis like something out of a storybook.Its most enchanting feature was the beck which cut a deep, narrow, rocky channel through the village,flowing northward to join the river air.This was no gentle stream.It cascaded over rocky outcrops, creating small waterfalls and tumbling through a wooded glen.
08:18The Glen seemed to belong to another time, a pocket of enchanted wildness.It was the kind of place where, if fairies were to exist anywhere, they might choose to dwell.Francis's Aunt Polly had a daughter of her own, 16-year-old Elsie.Elsie and Francis became firm friends, and cautious.back quickly became their favorite place to play. They could easily spend whole afternoons there.Much to their mother's annoyance, the two girls would often lose track of time when they were playing there.They would return late after dusk had already fallen. Their feet would often be wet and their clothes muddy,but the girls had an explanation for their lateness and their dampness.
09:21clothes and shoes, they said that they lingered so long by the back because they saw fairies there.We have already established that stories about fairies were widely popular in England at the time,and that some people really did believe in fairies, while many others wanted to believe.Elsie and Francis' parents were not these sort of people.In particular, Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, was completely unconvinced by the girl's magical excuse.Arthur was a practical, modern man.He had no patience with magic, whimsy or superstition.He worked as an electrical engineer.
10:20In his spare time, he dabbled in a most modern, scientific pastime.Arthur Wright was an amateur photographer.In 1917, photography was still at the very cutting edge of technology.In 1839, Louis Dagger had created the Daggera type, the first permanent photograph.Before this time, various images.Inventors had experimented with capturing images using light-sensitive materials,but no one had found a way to make the images permanent.They would fade and expose to light.
11:09Now, for the first time, images could be fixed and captured forever.To create a daguerre type, however, the subject would need to stay perfectly stillfor up to 15 minutes.And the silver plates required to print daguerretypes were unwieldy and costly.Throughout the Victorian era, ever more refined processes replaced the daguerreotype.With each refinement, the art of photography became simpler and more accessible.Soon, interested amateurs like Arthur Wright were experimented.with this new and exciting technology.
11:59By 1917, cameras had become smaller and more portablethan those early Degera-type cameras.Arthur Wright owned a midge quarterplate camera,manufactured by W. Butcher & Sons.This camera used glass photographic platesrather than the flexible film that would become constant.later. The plates had to be loaded into the camera carefully, exposed to light when a photographwas taken, and then developed in a dark room using special chemicals. Arthur Wright had set up
12:44his own dark room at home, a dedicated space where he could develop his photographs in carefullycontrolled conditions. The room had to be kept completely dark, except,for a special red light under which the photographic plates could be handled safely.Various chemical baths were required to transform the exposed plate into a visible image.Then, that negative image had to be printed onto paper to create the final photograph.While photography was now accessible for enthusiastic hobbyists like Arthur Wright,it was still not widely practiced or understood by the general public.Photographs were regarded with a certain awe.
13:42The technology which enabled a fleeting image to stay preserved on a photographic platemust have seemed to some audience just as magical and mysterious as the existence of fairies.A photograph captured a moment of truth, a slice of reality preserved forever, or so people believed.Now Arthur was not the only member of his family, interested in photography.Elsie had been a keen observer in her father's dark room since she was a young girl.She had learned the fundamentals of photographic technique.She had also spent time working.Here, she had gained experience in retouching photographs
14:37and other techniques used to improve and adjust images.One July afternoon in 1917, Elsie and Francis went down to the beck, as was their custom.But two things about this particular excursion were decidedlynot customary. First, they took Arthur's camera along with them. Second, rather than returninghome late and muddied, they came back swiftly. They spent only half an hour or so in the glen beforethey returned wearing triumphant smiles. They asked Arthur to develop the photograph they had taken.As Arthur worked in the dark room, watching the image darken and sharpen on photographic paper submerged in a chemical bath, he must have grown steadily more surprised.The photograph showed Francis sitting in the garden, partly hidden by a bush.
15:52In front of her were four small winged figures dressed in gossamer-light gowns.They appeared to dance in the air.They were, so the girls said, fairies.Arthur was skeptical.He was familiar with photography, and familiar too with his daughter's artistic talents.He concluded the fairies must be cardboard cutouts.What he could not comprehend was how the girls had managed to photograph them in such a convincing.manner. Two months later, in September, the girls borrowed Arthur's camera again. This time, they produced
16:45another enchanting image. It showed Elsie, sitting on the lawn, her hand extended toward a smallwinged figure about one foot tall. It looked rather like a gnome from out of a storybook.Arthur Wright was perplexed.He was quite certain the two girls were playing a prank,but once again he couldn't understand how they had managed to produce such a convincing photograph.He surmised they had tampered with his camera and refused to lend it to them again.Not every adult in the family was as skeptical as Arthur was, though.Elsie's mother Polly wondered if the photograph.
17:35might be genuine after all. In the middle of 1919, Polly attended a lecture at the Bradfordbranch of the Theosophical Society. This organization had been founded by the occultistHelena Blavatsky and was devoted to investigating mystical and supernatural subjects.The lecture happened to be about fairy life. A few months later,Later, Polly showed two of her daughter's photographs at the Society's annual conference in Harrogate.Here, Edward Gardner, a leading member of the Theosophical Society, first saw the picture.Gardner was fascinated by fairies, and he was immediately interested in the photographs.He sent the original glass plate negatives to Harold Snelling, an expert in photography.
18:46Snelling examined them carefully and gave his professional opinion.He declared that the negatives were entirely genuine and unfaked,showing no trace of studio work involving card or paper models.However, Snelling was careful not to claim that the creatures shown in the photographs were in fact real fairies.Gardner tasked Snelling, with producing new prints for use in the illustrated lectures Gardner gave around Britain.More prints were made available to buy at each of these lectures.In this way, the enchanting images of the Cottingly fairies began to be.and to spread around the country.
19:43Soon, they caught the attention of one of the era'smost well-known writers,the creator of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries,Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.Holmes was known for his fastidious logic.Unlike his most famous literary creation, however,Doyle was a devout believer in supernatural phenomena,from ghosts to fairies.
20:13Why did the supernatural and paranormal appeal to Doyle?The author had a lifelong fascination with mystical subjectsand an especially keen interest in spiritualism.He frequently attended seances.His children's nanny, Lily Loda Simmons, claimed to have clairvoyant abilities,and Doyle believed her claims.Many Edwardians, like Doyle, believed that clairvoyance could communicate with the spirits of the dead.And death was all around.
20:56Since World War I broke out in 1914, many young men had died in service, leaving mourning families behind them.Doyle's own son, Kingsley, died in the trenches in 1918.No wonder he and so many other Edwardians clung to the belief that unproven phenomenalike the ability to speak with the dead or the existence of fairies were real.Doyle needed to believe in something beyond the material world.In 1920, Doyle contacted Gardner, wanting to learn more about the photographs.He then wrote to Elsie and Arthur Wright, requesting permission to use the images in an article he was writing about fairies for the Strand magazine.Arthur Wright gave his permission, but refused payment.
22:02If the images were indeed genuine, he wrote, they should be provided for free.Doyle was a believer, but he wasn't credulous.He and Edward Gardner took the photographs to the Kodak Company and had several technicians examine the prints.Like Snelling before them, the experts at Kodak concluded there were no signs the photographs had been faked.But they were unwilling to confirm that the fairies were authentic.Another photographic company, Ilford, was less convinced.Their technicians reported that there was some evidence the images had been faked.Undaunted, the pair were determined to gather more evidence to support their case
23:01that the photographs were authentic.In July 1920, Gardner visited the Wright family at Cottingley.Francis and her parents had since moved to the nearby seaside town of Scarborough.but she was staying with the rights over the summer.Gardner brought with him two folding plate cameras and 24 photographic plates.The plates had secretly been marked to detect any tampering.He gave each girl a camera and explained how to use it.Then he asked them to take some more photographs of the fairies.
23:52Francis and Elsie agreed, though they insisted the fairies would not show themselves if anyone else was watching.For several weeks, the weather was unsuitable for photography.But August 19th was a fine, clear day.The girls took their cameras to the back and returned with two photographs.The first showed a fairy hovering by Francis's nose.The second, a fairy tiptoeing across a branch to offer Elsie a posy of hairbells.Two days later, the girls took one final photograph, showing a group of fairies sunbathing in the grass.In December 1920, Doyle published his article about fairies in the Strand magazine, along with two of Francis and Elsie's photographs.
25:01The issue sold out within days.Doyle was certain that the photographs would convince the general publicthat fairies really existed.And he was hopeful that if they accepted that fairies were real,they might also be more likely to acceptthat other psychic and supernatural phenomena were real too.The reaction was more mixed than Doyle might have hoped.But while the photographs caused a sensation, many publications responded with skepticism.
25:42In particular, they noted that the fairies looked suspiciously like traditional fairies from nursery tales,and that they had very fashionable hairstyles, more in keeping with the latest styles from Paristhan might be expected for residents of Fairyland.Still, many readers were captivated by the idea that Francis and Elsie had proven the existence of fairies.Doyle was not to be deterred.In 1921, he wrote another article in the Strand, detailing accounts of fairy sightings he had collected from across the country.The article was illustrated with more of Francis and Elsie's photographs.and in 1922, Doyle published a book titled The Coming of the Fairies.
26:44All the girls' photographs were reproduced, along with, in Doyle's words, all the evidence in connectionwith them. Gardner, too, was determined to prove that the Cottingley fairies were real.In August 1921, he made a final visit to the Wright's home.This time he didn't just bring cameras.He brought a guest, Geoffrey Hodson, a prominent occultist.On this visit, both Francis and Elsie claimed that they had had no further sighting of the fairies.Neither girl took any more photographs, but Hodson was still persuaded.He claimed to see fairies everywhere and took pages and pages of notes, detailing these sightings.
27:47Francis and Elsie played along with Hodson, though they would later admit that they did so as a joke.Both girls thought he was a fraud and a fake.Years afterward, Francis and Elsie would remember how tired they were by the time of this last visit.In fact, looking at the last photographs they took with the fairies, Francis remarked how fed up they both looked with the whole business of the Cottingly Fairies.In the absence of any truly convincing evidence to prove their existence, the public also grew tired of the Cottingley Fairies.After a flurry of interest between 1918 and 1921, the fairy photographs faded out of Britain's imagination.And Francis and Elsie grew up, both moved away from Yorkshire, leaving the Beck at Cottingleyand the fairies who lived there far behind them.
29:02Francis joined her soldier-husband Sidney Way on foreign postings, including several years.in Egypt. The couple then settled with their children in England's peaceful Midlands. Elsie, meanwhile,emigrated to America, where she met her husband, Engineer Frank Hill. Frank and Elsie movedtogether to India, where they lived for many years, before they too returned to England withtheir son. The mystery of the photographs remained unsolved. And it seemedthat everyone, skeptics and believers alike, was happy to leave it that way.Then, in 1966, more than four decades after the photographs were taken,a reporter from the Daily Express revived the story.
30:10Elsie had returned to England, and the reporter tracked her down,in her comfortable suburban home, for an interview.When questioned, Elsie offered an expert.for the photographs that was something between a confession and a riddle. The fairies, she said,might have been figments of her imagination. Perhaps she had managed to capture her own imaginingson film. It was a curious thing to say, and certainly the closest either girl had ever cometo admitting that the photographs were anything less than completely.authentic. She neither admitted the hoax nor maintained the old story, which both she and Francis
31:08had stuck to so faithfully for so many years. The media picked up on this tantalizing hint,and suddenly the Cottingly fairies were the subject of public speculation once more.BBC's nationwide program was next to investigate.Once more, Elsie hinted that the photographs were not quite what they seemed to be,but again, she could not be persuaded to admit that they were a fabrication.She held to her ambiguous stance.The photographs showed the figments of her imagination, she said.She would not say more than that.
32:05In 1976, ten years after the daily,Express reporter first tracked Elsie Down, Austin Mitchell, a journalist for Yorkshire television,sat down with both Francis and Elsie for a televised interview. They were old women now,far removed from the young girls playing with fairies in their famous photographs.Francis was 69 years old, Elsie was 75.Mitchell asked the women, as their previous interviewers had done, whether the photographs were real.In the end, both women admitted that sensible people did not see fairies.And yet, neither would admit to having fate the photographs.
33:02By this time, the photographs were nearly 60 years old.Public belief and interest in the existence of fairies had one.And yet, Francis and Elsie clung to their original assertion.The photographs showed something real, or at least something real to them.Decades on from the time the photographs were first taken, photographic technology had advanced significantly.Two further investigators were keen to see what modern technology might reveal about thisthis old mystery.The first was the famous Canadian stage magician James Randy, who had a reputation as a skeptic.
33:59He had made a hobby out of debunking pseudoscientific claims.Randy teamed up with investigators from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claimsof the Paranormal.They used computer enhancement techniques to examine the photographs in new detail.The verdict, the images were fake.In fact, Randy claimed that thanks to enhancement,it was possible to see strings holding up the fairy figures.The second investigator was Jeffrey Crawley,
34:43then editor of the British Journal of Photography.In 1982, Crawley launched what he called a major scientific investigation into the photographs.Like Randy, Crawley used up-to-the-minute photographic technology to examine not just the photographs themselves,but everything surrounding them, like the cameras and the plates.He also analyzed the testimony of all involved.It was the most thorough investigation of the photographs that anyone had undertaken.Crawley's conclusion matched Randys.The pictures were fakes.
35:36At last, more than 60 years after they first took the photographs, Francis and Elsie admittedthe truth.In an article published in a magazine called The Unexplained, they confessed that they hadfaked the photographs. How had they done it? It all began with a book which contained storiesby authors, including J.M. Barry. You might remember that Barry was one of the prominentEdwardians who popularized fairies in the art and culture of their day. The book was calledPrincess Mary's Gift Book. It was illustrated with charming pictures of dancing fairies,by the artist Claude Shepperson. Francis had brought the book with her on her voyage from South Africa
36:40to Yorkshire. In Cottingly, Elsie had copied the illustrations, added wings to each figure,then cut them out of cardboard and propped them in place with hatpins to take the photographs.After the images had been captured, the girls dropped all the evidence of their fakery,into the Beck.The cardboard fairies, paper wings and hatpinshad all been washed away.But even though they confessed to faking the photographs,both Francis and Elsie were adamant
37:26that they had seen fairies dancingon the banks of Cottingley Beck.Even more intriguingly,there was one point on which they disagreed,the fifth and final photograph.Elsie maintained it was fake, just like all the others.But up until her death, Francis insisted that this last photograph was genuine.It was taken, she said, on a wet Saturday afternoon.
38:04She and Francis had been wandering around the back with their cameras.They had no props with them and hadn't been planned.planning on staging any photographs that day.When Elsie saw fairies, real fairies, flitting through the grass,she aimed her camera and took this last photograph.Another question lingered.Why had the two girls insisted that all the photographs were real for so long?In a 1985 television interview, Elsie did her best to explain.
38:47It started as a simple joke.They never expected anyone to be taken in by their photographs for very long, but to theiramazement, people believed their fanciful story of capturing fairies on film, and not justpeople in their family, or cottingly, but some of the most celebrated figures of their age.Once they had fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, and the story had become front-page news across the nation,they felt they could only keep quiet.Neither of them felt particularly guilty about their deceit.They didn't think of the photos as fraud.
39:40They were harmless fun.People had believed in them because they wanted to think that fairies were real.Francis and Elsie's photographs had helped.helped them to do that.Francis died in 1986, and Elsie passed away a couple of years later.In 1998, the prints of their photographs were sold at auction in London.They ended up in the collection of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.Here, not far from Cottingly, the photographs are on display, along with two of the cameras
40:32used by the girls, watercolours of fairies painted by Elsie, and a letter from Elsie,admitting to the hoax. Today, Cottingly Beck still flows through the village of Cottingley.The water still tumbles over rocky outcrops, still winds its way through the wooded valley.Trees shade the banks where two young girls once sat with cameras and covered.cardboard cutouts, creating images that would puzzle the world for more than 60 years.Though Francis and Elsie admitted to faking their photographs, they insisted until the end oftheir lives that they really had seen fairies on their excursions to the back.Perhaps this too was a lie.
41:35Or maybe the two girls had been so caught up in a world of their imagination that theyconvinced themselves the fairies of their daydreams were real. Or perhaps, they did see fairiesafter all. No one, apart from Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths themselves, can ever knowwhat truly happened when those photographs were taken. The mystery remains, and the photographscontinue to fascinate those who wonder if magic really does exist.As well as those who know that on certain lazy summer afternoons,when the sunlight makes dancing rainbows on the water and daydreams are indistinguishablefrom reality, magic is quite real indeed.
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