Cottingley Fairies: The remarkable story of how faked pictures taken in a Bradford village fooled the world
It was one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century.
Nowadays it has become second nature to question the veracity of the information and pictures that are put before us. But over 100 years ago, before the advent of AI, mass communication and the term “fake news”, it was possible for two teenage girls to fool the world.
And it wasn’t just anyone who got roped in. The famous Cottingley Fairies pictures were brought to international attention by the creator of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, after he published them alongside an article in Strand magazine.
The series of five images, which people thought proved the existence of fairies and supernatural beings, and the subsequent spectacle and debate around them has been a source of inspiration in the decades following and has been referenced in one of the most recent exhibitions to pop up as part of Bradford 2025 City of Culture.
What happened?
The story began in in July 1917 when nine-year-old Frances Griffiths came back to the house that she shared with her 16-year-old cousin Elsie Wright and their two families in Cottingley.
After her mother demanded to know why her feet were soaking wet, she said she had been playing in the beck at the bottom of the garden before adding that she had gone “to see the fairies”.
Elsie, who had also played at the beck and backed her cousin’s claim, then convinced her father to lend her his camera and returned home 30 minutes later “triumphant”.
Elsie’s father Arthur, a keen amateur photographer, developed the photo of Frances leaning behind a bush with four fairies in the foreground. Owing to his daughter’s artistic talent, he dismissed it as a hoax and figured that the fairies were cardboard cut-outs.
Two months later the girls borrowed his camera again and captured a picture of Elsie holding her hand out to a one-foot-tall gnome. Dismissing the pictures as “nothing but a prank”, Arthur refused to let the girls use his camera again. However, his wife Pollie believed that they were real.
Fascination takes flight
In 1919 Elsie’s mother took the pictures to a talk about fairies in Bradford and subsequently shared them with Edward Gardner, a leading figure of the Theosophical Society, which was a popular religious movement of the time.
The pictures gathered further traction around the country before coming to the attention of Conan Doyle, who was working on an article for The Strand Magazine about fairies which he hoped would build a case for his long-standing belief in spiritualism.
Several experts examined the photos and while some said that they were “entirely genuine” and “showed no signs of being faked”, it was also found that this “could not be taken as conclusive evidence” that fairies existed.
To add further proof to the claims, Gardner travelled to Cottingley in 1920 and provided the two girls with cameras so that they could capture further images of the fairies.
When there was no one else in the house, they were able to take three more photos that were then sent to Gardner and Conan Doyle.
International attention
Conan Doyle published his article in December 1920 with the first two images, writing that, if proven to be genuine, they would "mark an epoch in human thought”.
He added that "after carefully going into every possible source of error, a strong prima facie case has been built up" to justify their veracity.
He wrote: "The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.
"Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been so convincingly put before it."
The pictures were subsequently published in Australia and the United States, which brought them world-wide attention and sparked fierce debate, with many dismissing them and sceptical of their authenticity.
Conan Doyle published a book about the fairies and used the second set of photos in a subsequent article in The Strand.
Confession
Conan Doyle died in 1930 and debate around the photos continued for a number of decades. The two girls were questioned throughout their adult lives about the images and continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s to deny that they had fabricated the photographs.
Finally, in 1983, Frances and Elsie confessed that they had been faked, with Elsie admitting that she had copied illustrations of three dancing fairies from a book and then cut out the cardboard figures and supported them in place with hatpins for the pictures. However, Frances insisted that the fifth and final picture of three fairies in a bush was genuine.
In a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Conan Doyle, saying: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet."
In the same interview Frances said: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in."
Continued fascination
After Frances died in 1986, and Elsie in 1988, the prints were sold at auction and some of the material was placed on display, where it remains, at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.
The story has caught the imagination of many, with films made and books written about it over the years.
It has also inspired a number of exhibitions in Leeds and Bradford, and most recently it was cited as a source of influence for artist Monira Al Qadiri’s piece at Wild Upland. The piece, titled ‘The Children of Smokeless Fire’, is one of of four new public art installations in Penistone Hill Country Park in Haworth that are featured as part of the Bradford 2025 City of Culture.
Al Qadiri has said she wanted to create sculptures of creatures that reflect the interplay between fact and fiction, a key component of the ever-engrossing story of The Cottingley Fairies.
For more information about what’s on at Bradford 2025 visit the website.