Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Although matters were moving forward, Conan Doyle remained on guard against fraud. He showed the photographs to some of his spiritualist friends and received a decidedly mixed response. Oliver Lodge, in particular, smelled a rat and said so in no uncertain terms. Others expressed wonder that the woodland sprites appeared so fashion-conscious—their hairstyles and clothing seemed to reflect the very latest Parisian trends. Hoping to get answers, Gardner arranged to have the images tested by a photography expert named Harold Snelling, who had thirty years’ worth of experience at a photographic studio in Illingworth. “What Snelling doesn’t know about faked photography,” Gardner was told, “isn’t worth knowing.”

  In hindsight, it is clear that this confidence was misplaced, but Snelling’s ringing endorsement offered much reassurance to Gardner and Conan Doyle: “These two negatives are entirely genuine and unfaked photographs of single exposure, open air work, show movement in all fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. In my opinion they are both straight, untouched figures.”

  To his credit, Conan Doyle sought confirmation. He borrowed the glass plate negatives and took them to the offices of Kodak in London. A pair of experts examined the plates and could find no evidence of a double exposure or other camera tricks. The Kodak experts went on to say, however, that they could undoubtedly produce a similar effect themselves and therefore could not endorse the images as genuine. “This, of course, was quite reasonable if the pictures are judged only as technical productions,” Conan Doyle allowed, “but it rather savours of the old discredited anti-spiritualistic argument that because a trained conjurer can produce certain effects under his own conditions, therefore some woman or child who gets similar effects must get them by conjuring.”

  Any caution Conan Doyle might have shown over the Kodak verdict was soon eroded by Harold Snelling, the expert Gardner had consulted. Snelling refuted the Kodak experts’ claim that such images might have been faked without darkroom tricks. If so, he claimed, he would have been able to spot it immediately. In other words, Snelling was not only prepared to swear that the photographic plate was clean, but also that the girls themselves had not staged any sort of fakery in front of the lens. The apparent movement of the tiny figures at the time of the exposure convinced him of this.

  Conan Doyle needed no reassurance on this point. He refused to entertain any possibility of deception on the part of the two young girls, as the very idea offended his notions of chivalry. This attitude was typical of him, as his son Adrian once learned to his sorrow. Asked by his brother Denis if he found a certain woman attractive, Adrian replied, “No, she’s ugly.” The statement drew a slap across the face from his father, who informed him that “no woman is ugly.” One hesitates to offer criticism of such a gallant sentiment, but it could be argued, in the age of the suffragette movement, that Conan Doyle’s views were naive, if agreeably courtly. Where women were concerned, he was blind to the possibility of deception, or indeed any base motive. It was not a problem shared by Sherlock Holmes, who once declared that “the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money.” A writer for The Spectator appeared to side with Holmes in the matter of the Cottingley photographs: “One must freely admit that the children who could produce such fakes would be very remarkable children, but the world, in point of fact, is full not only of very, but of very, very remarkable children.”

  While Conan Doyle carried on with his lecturing, Edward Gardner went to Yorkshire and found himself greatly impressed by the open and honest manner of the Wright family. At the end of his visit, he left a camera behind in the hope that Elsie might try to produce some more photographs. Three years had passed since the original pair were produced, so he held out no great hope of success.

  In September, Conan Doyle received a jubilant letter. “[T]he wonderful thing has happened!” Gardner exulted. Elsie and Frances, it emerged, had produced three more photographs, along with an apology that bad weather had prevented them from taking more. Gardner once again submitted the negatives to Harold Snelling, who pronounced the new images entirely genuine.

  In Melbourne, Conan Doyle responded with unrestrained enthusiasm. “Any doubts which had remained in my mind as to honesty were completely overcome,” he later wrote, “for it was clear that these pictures … were altogether beyond the possibility of fake.” He sent a grateful letter to Gardner, for it seemed to him that once the existence of fairies was established, skeptics would open their minds to other forms of psychic phenomena. “Good-bye, my dear Gardner,” he concluded, “I am proud to have been associated with you in this epoch-making event.”

  Conan Doyle notified the world of this epoch in the December Strand, which presented the original pair of Cottingley photographs. In a letter to Oliver Lodge, he spelled out a strategy for convincing the doubters by holding the second series of images in reserve: “We will draw their fire with the first two, and then produce the other three, one of which is a fairy bower, showing them asleep in cocoons! It should mark an era.” Enthusiastic photo captions were designed to assist in easing the readers over their initial incredulity. “The fairy is leaping up from leaves below and hovering for a moment,” ran one, “it had done so three or four times.” In March 1922 Conan Doyle published a book entitled The Coming of the Fairies, surely one of the most remarkable volumes ever written, which brought together all five photographs and other supporting evidence.

  “It is hard for the mind to grasp,” Conan Doyle wrote in The Coming of the Fairies, “what the ultimate results may be if we have actually proved the existence upon the surface of this planet of a population which may be as numerous as the human race, which pursues its own strange life in its own strange way, and which is only separated from ourselves by some difference of vibrations. We see objects within the limits which make up our colour spectrum, with infinite vibrations, unused by us, on either side of them. If we could conceive a race of beings which were constructed in material which threw out shorter or longer vibrations, they would be invisible unless we could tune ourselves up or tone them down.” He went on to speculate as to the possibility of devising “psychic spectacles,” which would enable everyone to see the fairies for themselves.

  The public, to put it kindly, was bemused. One newspaper printed a doctored photograph showing Conan Doyle with fairies dancing in the foreground. Phrases such as “easily duped” and “sad spectacle” began to crop up. “What can he possibly be thinking?” asked one critic. Not all of the reviews were hostile. “An extremely interesting book,” noted the New York Times, “and one, it is to be presumed, which will cause a great deal of argument pro and con. One does not necessarily have to believe in fairies to enjoy it.”

  This was a minority opinion. Before long, articles appeared that pointed out a suspicious similarity between the Cottingley fairies and the images in an advertisement for a brand of night light. A popular wisecrack suggested that at the crisis of the play Peter Pan, when Peter exhorts the audience to revive the dying Tinkerbell, the loudest shouts of “I do believe in fairies!” would be Conan Doyle’s.

  All but a few of his spiritualist allies deserted him. Conan Doyle had hoped that the episode would invite belief in spiritualism, but if anything it seemed to have the opposite result. By the time The Coming of the Fairies appeared, Conan Doyle felt obliged to shield the spiritualist movement from any further ridicule. “I would add that this whole subject of the objective existence of a subhuman form of life has nothing to do with the larger and far more vital question of spiritualism,” he wrote in the book’s preface. “I should be sorry if my arguments in favour of the latter should be in any way weakened by my exposition of this very strange episode, which has really no bearing upon the continued existence of the individual.” Privately, he continued his efforts to rally support from other S.P.R. leaders. “The fairies still engage my attention,” he told Oliver Lodge in 1
922. “In August we get the girls together again and provide them with stereoscopic and also cinema cameras. No criticism which has come along as yet touches them in the slightest degree, tho’ attempts at a press ‘exposure’ have been energetic.”

  In part, the energies of the press had been directed at ferreting out the identities of Frances and Elsie. In the initial Strand publications, Conan Doyle attempted to shield the girls from unwanted attention by writing of them as Alice and Iris Carpenter of Dalesby, West Riding. “I don’t want you all to be worried by curiosity hunters,” Conan Doyle wrote to Arthur Wright. As the piece was accompanied by photographs of the present-day Frances and Elsie posed by the stream in Cottingley, it did not take long for the press to penetrate this deception. Hounded by journalists, the Wright family came to regret the day that the photographs were made public.

  In time, the flood of scorn would subside, but Conan Doyle never lost hope that his faith in the two girls would one day be borne out. In a second edition of The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1928, he reaffirmed his conviction: “The discovery by Columbus of a new terrestrial continent is a lesser achievement than the demonstration of a completely new order of life inhabiting the same planet as ourselves.” In an addendum to his autobiography, written shortly before his death, he expressed a hope that the incident would “be recognized some day as opening a new vista of knowledge for the human race.”

  Needless to say, that new vista has yet to open, and the fairy episode has done more than any other to annihilate whatever reputation Conan Doyle might have had as a sober-minded investigator into the unknown. To the modern eye, these photographs are so palpably fake—like a young model gazing fondly at the Morton Salt girl—that any suggestion of truth seems preposterous. Conan Doyle’s defenders are quick to point out that photography was a relatively new science in 1920. In those days photographs did not lie, and few people understood what deceptions might be wrought with simple props. Even in these terms, Conan Doyle’s credulity cannot be entirely explained away. He knew more than most men of his time about camera techniques, having been interested in photography since his student days. A camera and developing equipment were fixtures of his life in Southsea, and he contributed many essays to the British Journal of Photography. Any remaining doubts about the boundaries of photographic trickery would have been dispelled by the end of 1925, when the movie version of The Lost World appeared. The special effects designed by Willis O’Brien, who later brought his talents to King Kong, showed how dinosaurs could be brought to life on-screen. The fairies, by contrast, seemed a fairly modest achievement. Conan Doyle could easily have seen through them had he wished to do so.

  One must ask, then, why a grown man should wish to believe in fairies. His faith in the innocence of Frances and Elise accounts for much of his gullibility, but Conan Doyle’s actions in the Cottingley affair point to more than a gentleman’s instincts. He had not even met the girls when he published his account in The Strand. For Conan Doyle, clearly, the Cottingley photographs came to represent far more than “an added charm to the silence of the woods.”

  There are two possible explanations. First, Conan Doyle had become deeply interested in the practice of spirit photography, a form of mediumship he defined as the “remarkable power of producing extra faces, figures or objects upon photographic plates.” The process was simple: a subject would pose for a photograph taken by a so-called psychic sensitive. When developed, these images were likely to display some unexpected extra element—such as a ghostly form or a disembodied head—which was said to be the work of spirit forces. Often these blurry, half-formed manifestations resembled a departed relative or a prominent figure from history. Abraham Lincoln turned up regularly. Like the Cottingley photographs, the bulk of these images appear crude and unconvincing to modern eyes. Nonetheless, one can only imagine the reaction of a bereaved widow or heartsick mother as the face of a dead loved one loomed up in the shadows.

  Conan Doyle displayed many such photographs in his spirit lectures. One in particular showed a crowd of mourners at the London Cenotaph on Armistice Day. The image, taken during two minutes of silent prayer, showed a great fog of spirit beings hovering above the crowd—the solemn and purposeful faces of fallen war heroes. The image invariably brought audience members to tears when it flashed on the overheard screen. Unfortunately, some of the faces were later identified as those of living football players.

  Conan Doyle also placed great faith in the work of a spirit photographer named William Hope, a member of a group called the “Crewe Circle.” He was horrified when Hope ran afoul of the investigator Harry Price, whose flamboyant style and high profile won him renown as the “Barnum of Psychic Research.” In February 1922, Price laid a trap for Hope by introducing a set of glass negatives that had been secretly marked. When the resulting spirit photographs showed no sign of the markings, Price published an exposé and denounced Hope as a fraud. Conan Doyle rushed to the defense. He wrote to Price claiming that his own examination of the plates had turned up one of Price’s markings—so faintly that it might easily have been missed. In light of this, he begged Price to reconsider his position. “At present,” Conan Doyle insisted, “it makes an open sore in the movement.” When Price refused to alter his views, Conan Doyle published his side of the affair in a short book called The Case for Spirit Photography, in which he presented Hope as an honest man who had suffered willful persecution.

  Conan Doyle never gave up trying to bring Price around to a more receptive frame of mind, advising him to “concentrate upon positive things, rather than negative.” Price respected Conan Doyle’s great integrity, but thought him something of a fool in psychic matters. “Setting aside for the moment his extraordinary and most lovable personal qualities,” Price wrote, “the chief qualification that he possessed for the role of investigator was his crusading zeal. Among all the notable persons attracted to Spiritualism, he was perhaps the most uncritical. His extreme credulity, indeed, was the despair of his colleagues, all of whom, however, held him in the highest respect for his complete honesty. Poor, dear, lovable, credulous Doyle! He was a giant in stature with the heart of a child.”

  The clash with Price may well have made Conan Doyle even more defensive over the Cottingley photographs. As his other examples of spirit photography were called into doubt, Conan Doyle would not have wanted to concede to any further charges of fakery. Price, for his part, regarded the fairy episode as a travesty and believed that Conan Doyle had made a mockery of serious psychic research.

  A second, far more personal motivation may also have guided Conan Doyle’s actions. His own childhood had been especially rich in fairy lore. Conan Doyle’s Celtic heritage was rife with tales of fairy midwives, leprechauns, brownies, and other sprites. Though Chaucer spoke of their sad disappearance from the landscape, there were many in Conan Doyle’s day for whom “the little people” remained an established fact—and no doubt many who continue to believe so today.

  Conan Doyle’s own family took a keen interest in fairies. His uncle Richard had been famous as an illustrator of children’s books, many of which featured playful renderings of fairies. Conan Doyle’s unhappy father also drew fairies, and there is ample reason to suppose that Charles Doyle continued to occupy his son’s thoughts in the latter stages of his career. In “His Last Bow,” the Sherlock Holmes tale that found the detective outwitting the German spy-master von Bork, Holmes posed as an Irish-American agent named Altamont—Charles Doyle’s middle name. “It is one of my unfulfilled schemes,” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography, “to have a Charles Doyle exhibition in London, for the critics would be surprised to find what a great and original artist he was—far the greatest, in my opinion, of the family.” The scheme did not remain unfulfilled for long. In February 1924, Conan Doyle mounted just such an exhibition at London’s Brook Galleries.

  In a review of the exhibition, the critic William Bolitho remarked at length on Charles Doyle’s fascination with fairies. “Charles Doy
le reveled in this miniature world,” Bolitho wrote, “his elves and fairies are Dresden figurines come to life and able ceaselessly to amuse themselves.” This subject matter, he noted, opened a suggestive field for speculation: “Sir Arthur’s own fairies, one realizes with a start, which have puzzled the world, and convinced part of it, are of the same race as these his father has drawn; identical in fancy, dress, psychology. One feels that the acute Sherlock, examining the evidence for fairies from his creator’s own book, would have noticed this striking resemblance between the father’s playful and the son’s serious revelations.”

  Charles Doyle’s sketchbook offers additional evidence of his fascination with such creatures. Its pages are filled with fairies, goblins, and elves who crouch under toadstools, play upon pipes, and whisper into the ears of innocent children. “This fairy knows a heep [sic] more than you do,” one caption notes. Elsewhere, the artist refers to them by familiar names, and shows them sharing confidences with ducks and rescuing butterflies from hungry birds. On another page, Charles Doyle has scrawled: “I have known such a creature.”

  We are left to conclude that Charles Doyle, a man widely held to be insane, may well have believed in fairies. In some small measure, then, it is possible that his famous son regarded the Cottingley crusade as an act of redemption. If the existence of fairies could be proven, Charles Doyle could be seen as something of a visionary, rather than a broken-down drunkard. Perhaps he might then become—in memory at least—what his son had always wished him to be: “a man of sensitive genius, ill-suited to the harsh realities of our world.”

  For the rest of his life, Conan Doyle regarded the ability to see fairies as a rare and wonderful gift. Years later, Frances Way, née Griffiths, would tell a reporter of Conan Doyle’s strong desire to produce such a photograph himself. There is no evidence that he ever tried, but the notion conjures a heartbreaking image of the burly writer, then in his sixties, peering into sylvan glades with a camera in hand, hoping to see fairies.