Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious

by Chronicles of the Strange

  Others, assuming that the girls had modelled their fairies upon those in a painting or drawing, searched for the source of their inspiration: an advertisement for Price's nightlights was deemed the most likely candidate. The public, however, was amused, and while Gardner and Conan Doyle toured the world lecturing about the Cottingley fairies, the girls themselves kept silent.

  As the years passed, the story surfaced from time to time. In 1971 Elsie appeared on a BBC news magazine programme, Nationwide. Four years later, she and Frances were interviewed in Woman magazine, and in 1977 they revisited Cottingley for a Yorkshire Television film. Despite persistent questioning from the reporters, they stuck to their story.

  The revival of interest in the case attracted the attention of a new generation of sceptics. In 1973 Professor Stuart Sanderson discussed the Cottingley mystery in his Presidential Address to the Folklore Society. Having begun his speech by declaring his scepticism about the genuineness of the photographs, he went on to raise a list of pertinent questions. Why, for example, had the girls been unable to photograph fairies when a third party was present? He also pointed out that Elsie might, after all, have been able to produce fakes, for not only was she a talented artist, and had been known to paint fairies, but she had also worked in a photographer's studio.

  Four years later, Fred Gettings, a researcher well-versed both in art and the paranormal, came across an important clue. He was leafing through a copy of Princess Mary's Gift Book, a compilation of stories, pictures and poems sold in aid of charity and a bestseller in 1915, two years before the Cottingley fairy photographs were taken. One contribution was a poem by Alfred Noyes called 'A Spell for a Fairy', illustrated by Claude A. Shepperson. The final vignette on page 104 of the Gift Book stopped Gettings in his tracks. He recognized it as:

  without doubt, the original picture from which the fairies of the first Cottingley picture were constructed. The remarkable thing is that the girl who copied this (presumably Elsie, as she was the older and more artistically talented of the two) actually made no significant change to the individual figures of the fairies in the Shepperson drawing - they merely appear in the photograph in a different order. Elsie's drawing is clumsier, and she added butterfly wings to the figures.

  At least one other person might have been expected to have reached the same conclusion more than fifty years earlier, for on page 23 of the Gift Book begins a story called 'Bimbashi Joyce'. Its author? None other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

  In 1980 arch-sceptic James 'the Amazing' Randi devoted a chapter of his book Flim-Flam, to the debunking of the photographs. Randi revealed that the latest 'computer enhancement' techniques, designed to bring out the smallest details of satellite photographs, had 'put a very large nail of doubt in the already well-sealed coffin of the Cottingley Fairies'. The computer had been asked whether the fairy figures were three-dimensional.

  No, they weren't, it replied. The conclusion was obvious: the fairies were cardboard cut-outs. In a second test, the computer searched for threads or supports which could have been used to prop up the figures. It found something suspiciously like a thread in the fourth picture, although Randi was less convinced by this than by the earlier finding. He concluded:

  The Cottingley fairies were simple fakes made by two little girls as a prank, in the beginning. Only when supposedly wiser persons discovered them were they elevated to the status of miracles, and the girls were caught up in an ever-escalating situation that they wanted out of but could not escape.

  For the sceptics, the case of the Cottingley fairies was frustrating. They were certain the pictures were faked, yet they had no absolute proof and, as the years passed, there seemed little prospect of obtaining any. 'Quite how they were faked,' mused Stuart Sanderson in his 1973 address to the Folklore Society, 'we shall probably never know.'

  Yet we now do know, and indeed would have done so a few months before Sanderson's speech if Sotheby's experts had looked with greater understanding at a letter which Elsie had sent with her Cottingley memorabilia for sale in 1972. It contained a detailed explanation by Elsie of how the two girls had hoaxed the world. But because the letter was obviously recently written and the sale was of antique literary documents only, the experts returned it to Elsie; and unwittingly delayed the final solution of the mystery for another decade.

  The Cottingley Mystery solved

  The breakthrough came when two investigators, independently of each other, took a fresh look at the case in the 1980s. One was Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the prestigious British Journal of Photography; the other was Joe Cooper, a sociologist who had long been interested in the paranormal. Crawley's investigation, which began its serialization in the BJP on Christmas Eve 1982, was exhaustive and fascinating but also quite technical - exactly what might be expected of a top photographic expert.

  One of Crawley's first decisions was to examine not only the five pictures but also the cameras used by the girls. Fortunately, the Midg camera that Elsie had borrowed from her father was still in existence: it had been one of the mementoes she had sent for sale at Sotheby's in 1972. Crawley borrowed it, took a few test photographs, and noticed something that all the other investigators had apparently missed.

  The lens of the Midg camera could not possibly have provided a photograph of the depth and clarity of the first published fairy picture. The implication was clear: the picture of Frances and the dancing fairies (Crawley labelled it Photograph A), which had been accepted for more than sixty years as the original, had been heavily retouched and then re-photographed. The same went for Photograph B (Elsie and the gnome).

  Then Crawley had the kind of luck that comes to the diligent researcher. A different version of Photograph A turned up in Cottingley itself. It was far less sharp than the one originally published: Frances's face and hair have a washed-out look, the fairies are little more than white blobs, and the foliage in the foreground is indistinct. It was exactly the type of photograph Crawley would have expected from a novice like Elsie using an unsophisticated camera like a Midg.

  Crawley next turned to Photograph B. Although he was unable to trace an authentic first print of it, a close examination of what had always been held to be the original negative, kept in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, revealed a telling detail. A photograph taken with a Midg camera always showed certain marks, yet there were none on the 'original'.

  The sheath in which each plate was held would also have imprinted its shape on to the image, yet there was no trace of it on Photograph B. Another clue was that the colour of the 'original' prints was wrong. Surviving family photographs show that Arthur Wright, like most amateur photographers of his day, used daylight printing paper.

  He always fixed the negative to the paper and left it out in the sun to develop. The resulting prints were sepia-coloured. But the published fairy pictures were all a rich blue-black which could only have been achieved in a darkroom.

  By looking at the negatives of the improved photographs, Crawley was even able to tell how the pictures had been retouched. But who had been responsible? The most likely candidate was Edward Gardner's friend Mr Snelling, who had guaranteed the authenticity of the photographs in the first place. Snelling was an acknowledged expert in the technique of improving photographs - an art more widely practised in the first two decades of this century than it is today.

  While Crawley's revelations did not prove that the girls had faked the original photographs, they did increase his suspicions about their authenticity, and his examination of the last three pictures reinforced his doubts. He concluded that each of them was a superimposition, difficult to achieve with a Midg but easy with the new Cameo cameras the girls had been given.

  In photographs C and D, Crawley suggested, a cut-out fairy was first photographed indoors; the plate was then re-exposed down in Cottingley Glen. One clue supporting this theory is that in the finished photographs neither of the girls manages to look directly at the fairy. The final picture, Crawley believed, was an
accidental double-exposure. He agreed with another photographic expert, Brian Coe, who suggested that the girls had tried to take two separate photographs of some cut-out figures in the grass, but had managed to mix up the plates so that both images appeared on the same one.

  Meanwhile Joe Cooper had been to see Elsie and Frances. Both were old ladies, and Frances, then seventy-five, finally broke her long silence. She admitted that the first four fairy photographs were fakes, and that she had always felt guilty about the first one, in particular. 'My heart always sinks when I look at it,' she said. 'When I think of how it's gone all round the world - I don't see how people could believe they're real fairies. I could see the backs of them and the hatpins when the photo was being taken.' She confirmed that the fairy figures had indeed been cut-outs. Elsie had drawn them, and the dancing figures in the first photograph had been copied from Princess Mary's Gift Book, as Fred Gettings had deduced. But there had been nothing fake about the fifth photograph, she claimed. It had been of the real fairies that lived in the glen. According to Cooper, 'Elsie, on the other hand, insists that all five photographs are of cut-outs.'

  Elsie then wrote to Geoffrey Crawley, who had sent her some sections of his series in advance. Her letter was, he realized, 'the authentic document confirming that the so-styled "Cottingley fairy photographs" taken in 1917 and 1920 were not of paranormal phenomena'.

  Dear Mr Crawley [the letter began],

  Thank you for your letter revealing so much depth and understanding of the pickle Frances and I got ourselves into on that day back in 1916 [sic] when our practical joke fell flat on its face, when no one would believe we had got pictures of real fairies. Just imagine (if they had) the joke would have ended there and then, when we would have told all, when I was 15 years old, and Frances was 8 [sic] years old.

  Over the months that followed, the cousins gradually owned up to a prank which had started innocently but had soon got out of hand. This is the story that emerged.

  In the summer of 1917, when the two girls used to play by Cottingley beck, Frances would talk of seeing fairies along its leafy banks. All too often the younger girl fell into the water and returned home to the Wrights' house with soaking wet shoes, stockings and knickers. One night, Frances recalled, matters came to a head. Her mother was furious, not simply because Frances had wet clothes but because neither she nor Elsie's mother could understand why the girls were so keen on playing by the beck.

  She said that she and Aunt Polly had been up the beck and they'd found nothing. They couldn't see anything at all. It was just trees and water and ferns and what-have-you. You could have that anywhere. You didn't have to go right up the beck to see that. I don't know why, but I'd had enough, and I blurted out 'I go up to see the fairies'. At that time Uncle Arthur had come in and Elsie had come in, and Aunt Polly was there. They all stood round looking at me and my mother got annoyed and she said 'Well that beats the lot! You've started telling lies on top of being naughty all the time and getting wet and ruining all your good shoes.' And then she stopped and she turned round and said to Elsie, 'Have you seen these fairies?' And Elsie, she stuck up for me, and she said 'Yes.'

  Inevitably, the grown-ups began to tease the girls about their fairy friends. Their gentle sarcasm maddened Elsie, the protective elder cousin. She resolved to do something to stop it. Sixty-seven years later, Frances recalled how Elsie revealed her plan:

  One night, as we were getting ready for bed, she said, 'I've been thinking, kid (she was a real cinema-goer, was Elsie), what about if I draw some fairies and cut them out in cardboard and we'll stick them up in the grass and see if Dad will lend us the camera and we'll take a photograph. If they see them they'll have to believe. It'll stop all this joking.'

  So the girls talked a reluctant Arthur Wright into lending them the Midg camera, after promising not to drop it into the water, and set off up Cottingley Glen.

  Elsie had her fairies down her bosom [Frances remembered]. We went up the beck and wandered round and decided on this little bank beside the beck because I could get behind it and there were toadstools growing there and it was pretty and in the sunlight. She stuck the fairies in artistic places, one on top of a toadstool standing on one toe, which she was very proud of, and took the photograph.

  That first picture, and the second one of the gnome, certainly stopped the teasing, but since the grown-ups did not believe the fairies were real, the girls never had the chance to explain how they faked the photographs. Then Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner pronounced them to be genuine. Why didn't the girls confess the truth?

  It was all very embarrassing [Elsie recalled]. We were two village kids with a brilliant man like Conan Doyle. Well, we could only keep quiet. We'd have hurt him terribly to do a thing like that. It would have been like two kids taking the mickey out of him. And Frances didn't want me to tell because the schoolkids were giving her an awful time at school and, she says, it'll just bring it on worse.

  Frances, in her turn, had promised Elsie never to reveal their secret.

  Elsie had said to me after the first one, 'Now look, you don't tell anybody about this. Promise?' And I promised. And I got this silly idea that a promise was a promise and I couldn't break it. Later on I didn't want to, I just wanted to forget it. I didn't want anybody to know. I thought if I don't say anything it'll die a natural death, but it didn't. It was as simple as that.

  Almost three-quarters of a century after the two young cousins took that first famous photograph, the story was still making headlines. When Frances died in July 1986 she still maintained to the end that although the first four photographs had been fakes, the fifth really had captured the hidden fairy kingdom she had found as a child in Cottingley Glen. When the obituary writers questioned Elsie, she took the opportunity once again to set the record straight about the long-running 'fairy tale'. 'The joke,' she said, 'was to last two hours, and it has lasted seventy years.'

  The Spirit Photographers

  The fashion for spiritualism was less than fifteen years old - the Fox sisters had begun it in 1848 - when a few enterprising photographers announced that, for a suitable fee, they could capture the images of dead people on photographic plates. Grieving parents, widows and widowers queued up to pose and were rewarded by the discovery of a strange, if often blurred figure hovering beside them on the developed picture, which many of them unhesitatingly declared to be a consoling likeness of their departed loved-ones.

  One of the first of the spirit photographers was an American called William Mumler, who set up shop in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1860s. He had been plying his weird trade for only a few months, however, when he was caught out by several of his more sceptical sitters and run out of town. Apparently some of the 'spirits' - or 'extras', as they were known - bore more than a passing likeness to living people.

  Yet he was soon in business again, and a few years later could boast a list of famous clients, including Mrs Lincoln, wife of the assassinated President. Mrs Lincoln is said to have visited Mumler under an assumed name and with her face heavily veiled, but when a figure looking very much like the recently departed Abe appeared on the finished portrait, the First Widow apparently broke down and confessed her true identity. Mumler's career took another dive in 1869 when he was put on trial for fraud. The Mayor of New York, suspecting Mumler of trickery, ordered one of his men, Marshal J.H. Tooker, to investigate. Tooker assumed a false name and went to have his picture taken.

  When a 'spirit' appeared on the processed plate, Mumler assured the marshal that it was the image of his dead father-in-law. Tooker, however, saw no resemblance whatsoever, and promptly arrested Mumler. But the evidence produced at the trial at Tombs Police Court, New York, was flimsy, and although Justice Bowling indicated that he believed 'trick and deception had been practised by the prisoner', he had to conclude that there was no case to answer.

  Other 'spirit photographers' flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, relying for their lucrative pickings upon a combination of public i
gnorance of the new-fangled art of photography and the desperate desire of the bereaved to contact their dead loved-ones. They, too, were frequently caught cheating. For example, Jean Buguet, French high society's favourite 'spirit photographer', was put on trial in 1875, and the court was told that many of the 'extras' in his pictures had been cardboard heads and elegantly draped dummies, spirited on to the plate by double-exposure.

  The sceptics were hard-pressed to keep up with all the techniques used by fraudulent 'spirit photographers' - at least 200 methods have been identified. Most used double-exposures of one kind or another. In the shadows of the studio or the gloom of the darkroom it was easy to switch plates provided by the sitter for a set with ghostly images already imprinted upon them.

  An American investigator, Joseph H. Kraus, discovered some even more elaborate tricks. One medium, Madame Eva, amazed her sitters by apparently producing a bright halo across her chest when she was photographed. According to Kraus, however, she had merely dipped the piece of gauze she wore to conceal her cleavage in luminous paint which glowed under the photographer's lights. Others, using sleight-of-hand, slipped prepared transparencies into the lens or concealed doctored plates in secret compartments in their camera cases - a method Kraus's fellow-sceptic, the conjuror Joseph Dunninger, was fond of demonstrating.