In the summer of 1917, two cousins took a camera into a garden in Cottingley, a village near Bradford in West Yorkshire, and came back with photographs of fairies.
Elsie Wright was sixteen. Frances Griffiths was nine. They lived near a stream called Cottingley Beck, and Frances, who had recently arrived from South Africa, said the fairies lived at the bottom of the garden and that the other children refused to go down there. The photographs, once developed, appeared to show Frances surrounded by small winged figures dancing at the end of a bank of grass. A second image showed Elsie with a gnome.
The pictures might have stayed a family curiosity. Three years later they reached Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was by then deeply committed to spiritualism. He had lost family members in the First World War, and he had spent years arguing publicly that the dead could be contacted. In 1920 he was preparing an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine, and the Cottingley photographs were exactly what his case needed. He published them, and he treated them as genuine.
The effect was immediate and large. The images were reproduced around the world. The Strand's readership took them to be evidence. Photographic fakery was far less familiar to a general audience than it is now, and the plates were examined by a photographic expert who pronounced them unmanipulated, which was true in a narrow technical sense that missed the point.
It is worth being clear about the moment the photographs landed in. The First World War had ended two years earlier, and Britain was full of households that had lost someone. Spiritualism, which had been a minority interest before 1914, had grown sharply during the war and afterwards, and the question of whether the dead survived was not a fringe curiosity but a live argument conducted in newspapers and public lectures. Conan Doyle was one of its most prominent advocates, and his advocacy had already cost him standing among scientists who had once admired him. The fairy photographs arrived into that argument with a great deal of force behind them.
What the girls had done was simple. The figures were cut out of paper or cardboard, drawn by Elsie, and held up in the garden with hat pins or propped on twigs. The camera was set so that the cut-outs occupied the right amount of the frame and the focus softened them. Nothing was done to the negative. The trick was in front of the lens, not behind it.
More photographs followed in 1920, five in total across the two phases. The later images were taken with a different camera, a quarter-plate Cameo, which is now held by the Science Museum Group in London along with the plates and prints. In 2024, researchers analysing the equipment published a study of the cameras and the long exposures involved, showing how the shutter speeds and the construction of the cut-outs combined to produce figures that appear to float in the air.
The confession arrived sixty-three years late. In 1983, speaking on the BBC programme Nationwide, Elsie admitted the fairies had been faked, and explained the cut-outs and the pins. She was by then in her eighties.
Frances never fully agreed. She maintained for the rest of her life that the fairies were real. Accounts differ on how far she went: some say she accepted that several of the photographs were staged but insisted that the fifth and last image, the one showing fairies in the grass with no human figure present, was genuine. She repeated that position until she died.
Conan Doyle did not live to see any of it. He died in 1930, believing.
The case is usually filed as one of the most successful hoaxes of its era, and in a narrow sense it is. Two children produced photographs that convinced one of the most famous writers in the world and, through him, a substantial part of the reading public. Nobody was harmed, and nobody was defrauded of anything except certainty.
But the more interesting reading is about what people wanted. Conan Doyle did not want to be fooled. He wanted his son back. He wanted the universe to contain more than the visible. The photographs did not create that need; they answered it. The girls, for their part, never set out to build a hoax of any consequence. They made something for a mother and a cousin, and it grew a life of its own.
The final image is the one nobody can dispose of cleanly. Four photographs can be explained by cut-outs and pins. Frances, who had no reason left to lie, said the fifth was different.
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