Mrs. West herself used to see elves and fairies in the house and garden when she was younger. She said they were about six inches high, some with wings and some without. She had had beautiful visions of angels, too.
Her friend, Mrs. Syvia [sic] Woods, saw the fairy folk regularly when she was a child and lived in London. As soon as she was alone in her bedroom at night, they would come and play with her in the bed, and she had such wonderful times with them. She was always impatient for her mother to kiss her goodnight. “Hurry up and leave me, Mummy,” she would say. “The fairies won’t come till you’ve gone.”
Mrs. Isobel Grant Whittle was “negatively clairvoyant and clairaudient” when, at the age of three, she lived in Liverpool. Being an only child, she played “alone” with two fairy companions named Puck and Parry. She was not sure whether they were pixies, elves, or gnomes, but they were dressed in green and reached almost to the height of her shoulder. She gathered they came from Cornwall, and they told her much about it. She talked with them “time on end” in a language that her mother could not follow. Her parents knew nothing of Cornwall and had never mentioned that part of the country to her. She was therefore delighted when, at the age of twenty-five, she visited Cornwall for the first time and found it was exactly as the fairies had described it. “How much of this memory is subjective and how much objective I cannot say,” she concluded, “but at that time they (the fairies) were as real as any physical person I met.”
Fairy Photographs
Unfortunately, photographs of fairies are not sufficient evidence in themselves, as we know only too well after the disclosure of the hoax over the ones taken at Cottingley by the then girls Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, and I must apologize to the many contributors and other correspondents for assuring them, through all the years I have been doing this fairy work, that the photographs were genuine.
I had been “taken in” not only by Mr. Geoffrey Hodson’s faith in the girls’ integrity, but also by a statement I had received in 1950 from a Mr. Granville Kendall, a commercial photographer in Blackpool, who said he had asked one of the girls to take some photographs in his presence, with slides which he had loaded in his own darkroom, and when he developed them he was surprised to see on them “the dainty figures of fairy folk.”
Unfortunately, his friend at Bristol, through whom he had sent the statement, had enclosed with it a note saying: “I have now received from my friend Mr. Kendall his account of the taking of the photographs in E. L. Gardner’s book Fairies.” I had no reason to doubt the writer’s words, and assumed the photos were among those that were already published, so as I was very busy at the time I did not see any reason to investigate the matter further. After all, how was I to know that there would be such doubt and controversy over the Cottingley photos in the future? I had even been told that both Elsie and Frances had died abroad!
I must also apologize to the kind lady in Birmingham, who in 1955 wrote to tell me that in her schooldays a special friend of hers had unfolded to her the hoax behind the Cottingley photographs, and said that Elsie Wright had shown her how it was done. I regret that in reply I assured her that the photos were genuine, and I told her about the statement made by Mr. Kendall and said that Mr. Geoffrey Hodson also was convinced of the bona fides of Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths. Perhaps I should also have listened to my sister Dorothy, who never believed the photographs were genuine.
Later, when I discovered that no mention was made of Mr. Kendall in Mr. Gardner’s book, and that the years did not tally, I wrote to Mr. Kendall for further particulars, thinking the photos must have been additional ones, but my letter was returned “Gone Away,” and I was unable to trace him. I had heard by then that Elsie and Frances were still living, and that Elsie had become Mrs. Hill and resided in a Nottinghamshire village. I spoke to her over the telephone, but she said she knew nothing about Mr. Kendall, and when I asked her for her cousin Frances’ address she refused to give it to me.
I remember that another of Mr. Kendall’s friends (now deceased) had told me Kendall had been involved in an altercation with Mr. E.L. Gardner, who wanted any fairy photographs taken at Cottingley to be kept within the confines of the Theosophical Society. If that were so, why didn’t Mr. Kendall tell me about it in his statement? I would have believed it, because Mr. E. L. Gardner had told me in a letter that he was not too keen on anyone other than himself showing the lantern slides of the Cottingley photographs.
On hearing that Mr. Kendall had died, I wrote to his son Leslie, but he, too, had passed away, and my letter was answered by his granddaughter, who said that apart from the ones that were published in the book there were no other Cottingley photographs in existence, and Mr. Kendall’s name did not appear in any of the records. Unfortunately that did not prove anything, because if the story of the dispute were true, Mr. Kendall’s name would for obvious reasons have been kept out.
By then, the friend who had sent me Mr. Kendall’s statement had died, so I wrote to the editor of the British Journal of Photography, asking if he knew anything about Mr. Kendall and his fairy photographs. I received the following reply from the editor, who had been looking through the documents, which he had amassed from his series of articles on the Cottingley affair: “…There is no substance whatsoever to his claims. It was all sorted out at the time…”
A further problem arose when in 1983 I received a telephone message from Mrs. Elsie Hill via a man from Cheshire who had been interviewing at her home in Bunny. He said she wanted me to know that she had never seen any fairies and never believed in them, and that Mr. Geoffrey Hodson was a liar because he had only tested them for three days, and she and Frances had only pretended to see the fairies and had made up the descriptions.
First of all, Geoffrey Hodson was certainly not a liar. He had a worldwide reputation for being trustworthy and meticulous in all his clairvoyant investigations, so surely he would have been equally meticulous at Cottingley. It is unfortunate that right from the beginning Elsie seemed to take a dislike to him and had perhaps chosen that way of “paying him out.” In Joe Cooper’s book The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (Robert Hale, London, 1990), the author assumed that Mr. Hodson was a “medium,” and he said that often such folk, when genuine psychic phenomena do not come along when expected, will slip into prevarication or lies, through he did add that he found it very difficult to believe that Mr. Hodson was the faker that Elsie and Frances declared him to be when they were on the Yorkshire TV programme.
I must stress here that Geoffrey Hodson was not a medium. And he said in one of his books that the methods of training taught by Theosophy have nothing in common with those of mediumship and trance. In his obituary in the Theosophical Journal of May/June, 1983, Vol. 24 No. 3, it said that “his aim was to lift the faculty of clairvoyance out of the atmosphere of charlatanry, mediumship, and fortune-telling which has surrounded it and made it repellent to the scientific mind, and secondly to show that it has a place in the evolution of human consciousness, and is of value as an instrument of scientific research.”
It also stated in the Journal that right from childhood Mr. Hodson had had psychic experiences, chiefly consisting of visions of nature spirits, ghosts, and also symbolic dreams. He was not only a Theosophist but also a co-Mason, a priest of the Liberal Catholic Church (founded in Holland), and a keen worker for societies against cruelty to animals. He was also a prolific writer, one of his works being The Hidden Wisdom of the Holy Bible in four volumes.
He had trained himself through meditation, prayer, etc., to tune in at will to other states of consciousness, without lessening ordinary consciousness, and after the First World War his clairvoyant powers had enabled him to work with medical and scientific men in London and on the continent of Europe, and his powers had been accepted and tested by them. He went on lecture tours in most countries of the world, and gave his last public lecture in May 1982, only eight months before his “death” on 23 January 1983, at the age of 96.
His contact with the angels produced an intensification of awareness and he was able to see their glorious colour-language and also to receive their teachings, which he published in his books The Coming of the Angels, The Brotherhood of Angels and of Men, The Angelic Hosts, etc.
According to Elsie’s message to me, Mr. Hodson had stayed at Cottingley only three days. This was not true, for the published notes showed that Mr. Hodson arrived with his wife, Jane, on 6 August 1921 and they were in the glen, field, wood, or at the beck with the girls on the 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 18 August. (Mrs. Hodson predeceased Mr. Hodson, long before these accusations were made.) In his book The Fairies at Work and at Play, and also in a letter to me, he said he had spent some weeks there, and during his travels he must have had to keep an engagements diary, so surely he would know!
Mr. E. L. Gardner had said that Mr. Hodson pointed out the various fairies and asked the girls to describe them, but when Mr. Hodson was interviewed in New Zealand by Frank Wilson he told him that he would see fairies and gnomes coming near them but would remain silent, and quite often soon afterwards one or other of the girls would say she could see a fairy and would point to and correctly describe it.
We shall never know what actually happened, but if the girls had only pretended to see, yet “correctly described” the fairies, then the explanation seems often to be similar to what I have written at the beginning of this chapter about the transmitting of psychic power, and Mr. Hodson’s greater degree of clairvoyance may have stimulated the girls’ own limited vision, so that they weren’t, as they thought, imagining or making up the descriptions but were really seeing what Mr. Hodson saw.
They were obviously doing their best to foil his attempts to test them, and it may be that they took advantage of him when his attention was turned to something in another direction, and as some fairy visions are only momentary ones they could say they had just seen such-and-such a nature spirit and he would not in that case be able to contradict them. However, he would certainly have known when they were exaggerating or giving silly descriptions, and perhaps then, instead of rebuking them, he would prefer to ignore them, and they might have taken his silence for confirmation of their descriptions, which would give them the excuse to call him a “phoney.” He was certainly not that, as he would know only too well what the karmic consequences would be if he misused his powers of seership.
It was unkind of them to try to trick him, for the task set him by Mr. E. L. Gardner was an unenviable one. It must be very difficult to judge others’ clairvoyant powers, for in any description the personal element is strong, and psychic people have their own modes of seeing, according to their “make-up.” If some of the girls’ descriptions seemed inadequate, Mr. Hodson would have to make allowances for the fact that their clairvoyance was more limited than his own, and in one of the notes he had used his higher astral vision to complete a description.
Some readers might think that if he possessed such powers he should have known the truth about the Cottingley photographs, but I do not think he can be blamed for believing in the girls’ integrity, for he said in one of his early letters to me that when he questioned them they had assured him many times that they had taken the photographs. Of course, they could say that without feeling guilty, for they had “taken the photographs,” but not of real fairies!
Mr. Hodson would never dream that they would need to use cut-out figures since both of them had simple clairvoyant faculties (Elsie had seen ghosts if not fairies), and Frances had told him that she had often seen and played with the fairies at the beck.
He had also heard from Mr. E. L. Gardener that an “expert” on faked photography had examined the quarter-plate negatives of the first two photographs and had declared that the dancing figures were not made of paper or of any fabric, and were not painted on a photographic background. Indeed, he said that the figures had moved during exposure!
Furthermore, Mr. Hodson told me that Cottingley Glen was swarming with elves, gnomes, fairies, etc, and that while he and his wife Jane were there they lived in a veritable Fairyland.
Could Elsie see, or could she not see fairies? In her message to me, she said she had never seen any, yet she said in an interview for the Woman magazine that she had seen fairies but only when Frances was with her, in which case her close proximity to Frances may have enabled her to see them—but she made so many conflicting statements that it is difficult to know the truth.
Frances became Mrs. Way, and her daughter said that to her mother’s dying day she insisted that she had seen and played with real fairies at Cottingley, and that the “Fairies and their Sunbath” photograph was genuine.
When I wrote to Mr. Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography, about Mr. Kendall, he said in his letter: “The question of fairy and spirit photography is a red herring, and if one is acquainted with how the image is formed in a photographic material, then even if there are spirits and fairies, they would not be recorded. The fact that a photograph purports to show them is proof that it is a fake.”
I do not agree, as I have seen several photographs of real fairies, but the ectoplasmic figures have not been clear enough for reproduction.
The following accounts are about fairy photographs, which were shown to me, or taken by some of my contributors, whose sincerity I can really vouch for.
Miss Helen Fraser Morrison, of Rome, wrote to me of an unusual photograph taken in Tuscany between the two world wars: “At the time of the vintage, I was among the vines with the peasants who were gathering the grapes. I was not working, but only looking on, and occasionally picking a few grapes to eat. Under my arm I carried my little black Pekinese. An Italian friend who was with me had a Kodak camera and was taking many photos, one of which was of myself and my dog. When this was developed and printed, it revealed a figure standing close to me among the vines, as clear as the photo of myself and my little dog. The creature’s face resembled my own, but was younger. Her skirt was of vine leaves, from under which two very human-like legs appeared! Under one arm she carried a little white dog that stretched out towards the black dog in my own arms, and my dog appeared to be reaching out towards the white one, so it was evident they could see each other. The female figure was not looking at me. In the photo she was full face, while I was slightly turned to one side. My friend, who had developed and printed the photo himself, had not noticed this important detail, clear as it was, and that I saw at first glance. Then he saw it too, and so did everyone else to whom it was shown. It was therefore not merely a shadowy effect; it was a clear and unmistakable photo of a separate being from another realm, though invisible to the human eye.
“We had the photo enlarged, and the figure was clearer than ever. We thought to send it to some society interested in such subjects, but unfortunately never did, though I sent prints of it to many friends. Then the Second World War broke out, and I had to go into exile hurriedly, leaving all my possessions behind. In the interval my beautiful home in Florence was blown up, and I lost all my treasures, including that precious photo, of which I had no copy with me. I have tried to remember to whom I sent prints but have not been able to trace anybody who possesses one; and my friend, the young Italian artist who took the photograph, was killed in the war.”
Mrs. Doris Seccombe, of Cornwall, saw two small grey figures about a foot tall, with round heads, come out of an old stone of Cornish granite. After playing around for a while, they went back into it. On another occasion she saw in a friend’s garden a little gnome, clad in a red jacket and green trousers. He smiled at her and then vanished. She told me that on moonlit nights she could see hundreds of fairy lights flickering in her own garden; and that a friend (now deceased) was walking in the vicinity when she heard a strange bussing sound in a gorse bush and, on going to investigate, saw that it was full of fairies. She went quietly to pick up her camera, which she had left on the ground, whereupon the fairies disappeared with the exception of two, which she managed to photograph
very clearly while they were in the act of flying away from the bush. Although Mrs. Seccombe had been given a print, her son Mr. Ronald Seccombe could not find it after her death, but later he managed to trace an old “re-print” of the photograph, and I am grateful for his help and also for the kindness of the owner, Mrs. Violet M. Gresswell, for allowing me to see it with a view to having a copy made for reproduction in this book. The tiny winged figures seemed quite plain to me because I knew what they were, but when I took the print round to the chief photographic centres in Nottingham, none of them wanted to copy it. I was told that another negative would have to be made from it, and that in the finished picture the figures would appear merely as two indistinguishable whitish blobs.
A sample of a poor reproduction was contained in a book of reminiscences, My Times and Other Times (Donegal Democrat Ltd) by Capt. John S. Hamilton J.P., D.L., of Brownhall, Ballintra, County Donegal, of Ireland. The photograph was of one of his trees, which he told me was “full of fairies,” but although I thought I could see a semblance of a tiny face here and there, it was impossible to distinguish any definite figures owing to the blurred background.
In a letter dated 25 January 1953, Mrs. Pamela M. Gott, of Hampshire, wrote: “Lady Rawlinson told me of a snapshot taken on the moors of Scotland that, when developed, showed a little gnome gazing up at the tall human beside him, as though saying: What on earth are you doing here?”
When Miss Clara Dodd, formerly General Secretary of the Theosophical Society in Australia and Southern Africa, came to lecture in Nottingham many years ago, she told me she had seen in New Zealand a friend’s photograph of a little gnome at the foot of a tree.
Another contributor, Mrs. Iris Ratsey, said in 1984: “Nora and Anita Bruce (both now deceased), who used to live in Ireland and were great believers in fairy life, once showed me a photograph taken in a large garden in Ireland just before (or after) a luncheon party. Everyone was in position for the picture taking except the small daughter of the house. When called, she said she must wait because the fairies weren’t ready. The family became impatient because they thought she was playing, but when, eventually, the picture was taken, there around the kneeling figure of the girl were the fairies! It was quite distinct.
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