Of the silly Fortean beliefs held by people of the late 19th and early 20th century, some are more understandable than others. When an idea infects the populace, it can spread as quickly as a scientifically engineered super-virus, and when those ideas are backed by the likes of intellectual giants such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it’s easy to forgive the people for buying into it.
I characterize Doyle as an intellectual giant, and he rightly was, but to be honest, he got behind some fairly weird ideas during his heyday. Doyle was a huge proponent of the séance; he held an immense fascination with tipping tables and the medium’s trumpet and ectoplasm, but his attention wasn’t only focused on the ghostly and the spiritual. In fact, his interest and passion for cryptozoological topics resulted in his being taken in by a few well-executed hoaxes over the years.
One such example was the Cottingley Fairies.
As the story goes, in July of 1917, two young girls, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths of West Yorkshire, England, visited Cottingley Beck, a small stream running near their village. There the girls apparently witnessed groups of fairies frolicking about near the river’s edge. Elsie and Frances, being children at the time, claimed to not only interact with the fairies but, incredibly, to have captured photographs of the creatures over a period of time. The first two photos were produced in July and September of 1917, while the remaining three were taken in August of 1920.
Showing several small (approximately six inches tall), apparently female fairy-like creatures, the photos became public in 1920 through the Theosophical Society of Bradford, England, via one of the Society’s leading members, Mr. Edward Gardner. Gardner subjected the photos to analysis, such as it was at the time, and with the help of photography expert Harold Snelling, determined that the photos were not faked. At least as far as saying that the photos showed what had been presented to the camera at the time of exposure and were not manipulated photographically.
Elsie’s father, a professional photographer himself, with a darkroom set up in his home and whose camera the girls had borrowed to take the photos, had dismissed the photos as a hoax, believing the fairies to be cardboard cut-outs, but Frances’s mother was taken by the photos and was the one to bring them forward to Gardner.
Public opinion was split over the authenticity of the photos, and the girls enjoyed some short-lived celebrity over the incident. They eventually became disenchanted with the idea of fairies, and the attention of investigators and psychics interested in exploiting the situation soon became a burden to the girls and their families.
Doyle became aware of the photos through the editor of the spiritualist publication Light. Having been commissioned to write an article on fairies for the 1920 Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine, Doyle used the photos as the basis for his article, interpreting them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomenon.
Further analysis took place via the photography companies Kodak and Ilford, and while the Ilford technicians found evidence that the photos had been faked, the Kodak analysis agreed with Snelling’s initial assessment.
Unfortunately, I can find no trace of the Ilford technical report, so we don’t know precisely what they found or why it indicated fakery. However, in Doyle’s 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies, he remarked about an unnamed photographic company whose examiners concluded that background elements in the photographs were theatrical props. Doyle dismissed those findings, in favour of Gardner’s impression following his own visitation to the area, wherein the background of the pictures was confirmed to be real.
As with most paranormal incidents, fervour and public interest in the photos eventually died down, and Elsie and Frances went on with their lives.
Interest in the photographs resurfaced in 1966, when Elsie suggested to a Daily Express reporter that the fairies might have been figments of her imagination, somehow captured on film. In 1971, the BBC’s Nationwide programme revisited the controversy, but Elsie remained evasive, declining to say outright whether the photographs had been faked. Over the years, Elsie and Frances participated in interviews for other programmes and news stories, and they consistently maintained their story.
In 1978, James Randi, in cooperation with a team from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, reported findings from computer analysis undertaken by Robert Sheaffer and William Spaulding suggesting that the fairy figures were flat rather than three-dimensional. The analysis also revealed what appeared to be a string suspending one of the figures in the fourth photograph, though Randi himself questioned that interpretation. These findings were reported in New Scientist on August 10, 1978. Randi subsequently offered another argument against the photographs’ authenticity, observing that the fairies’ wings appeared perfectly sharp, despite the motion blur visible in the waterfall behind them. If the wings had actually been fluttering, he reasoned, they should have exhibited similar blurring.
In December 1982, Frances admitted to the hoax in an account published by Joe Cooper in The Unexplained, although she maintained that the fifth photograph was genuine. In 1983, Elsie provided a detailed written confession to photographic researcher Geoffrey Crawley, insisting that all five photographs had been fabricated. Elsie admitted that the fairies were cardboard cutouts from a children’s book (Princess Mary’s Gift Book – 1914), and that they had been suspended in front of the camera using hat pins.
The women, now deceased, were responsible for pulling the wool over the eyes of many a learned and experienced investigator, not the least of which was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and their accounts of the events surrounding the photos never wavered, up until their admission of the hoax. It’s a near certainty that some people still believe the fairies are real, despite the confession, and bearing that in mind, can one forgive the great genius of Doyle for being duped by a couple of adolescent girls with vivid imaginations and the creative expertise to affect some of the most convincing fairy photos in history?
This wasn’t the first time Doyle was taken in by a story of incredible proportions, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but in my mind, his passion for the subject and the reach of his own imagination outweigh his ultimate gullibility.
We must consider his credulity in the context of his time. Doyle lived through the expansion of the spiritualist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when fascination with the supernatural permeated broader society, including the intellectual circles of some of the era’s greatest thinkers.
And though a great intellect doesn’t automatically confer immunity to credulity, one could perhaps forgive a man whose enthusiasm for the extraordinary occasionally overcame his better judgement.
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