Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths
Why not cut out some fashion models from a magazine, draw on some wings, and then use hatpins to place them amongst the flowers, after all what could be more wonderful than fairies at the bottom of the garden? This is what Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9) did in 1917, and then, using a quarter plate camera belonging to Elsie’s father, took two pictures of their project that were so realistic as to be hailed as conclusive evidence for the existence of magical creatures!
By 1920 a further three pictures had been created and the set had become public. Reception was mixed: Elsie’s father was never convinced by the pictures, and an Australian newspaper wrote that ‘For the true explanation of these fairy photographs what is wanted is not a knowledge of occult phenomena but a knowledge of children’. Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, believed on the other hand that the photographs were ‘visible evidence of psychic phenomena’, even publishing this view in The Strand.
The cousins confessed in the 1980s that the photographs were fake, or at least the first four (they couldn’t agree on the fifth one). They also explained that until then they had been too embarrassed to admit to their hoax after its effects had snowballed. The Cottingley Fairies had become an international sensation, when really they were just the mischievous result of the imaginations of two rather creative girls. I don’t know about you, but I can almost hear those girls giggling as they position their fairies for the best shot :)
- Sarah