In my fourth and final post on fairy mythology written to celebrate the publication of my novel The Good Neighbours, I want to take a look at one of the most famous fairy stories of the twentieth century. In the way it combines two of my greatest literary loves – the detective story and the mythological landscape of the British Isles – this tale has a feeling of strangeness about it that feels uncannily similar to that of The Good Neighbours itself, which makes it seem all the more fitting to have it round out this series of essays.
In 1917, ten-year-old Frances Griffiths returned to England from South Africa, and went with her mother to stay with the family of her sixteen-year-old cousin, Elsie Wright, who lived in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford in Yorkshire. The two girls formed a close friendship, playing together for hours in the woodlands adjoining their home. When their mothers expressed displeasure at the grubby state of their clothing after such escapades, the girls insisted they had only been tracking the fairies that liked to frolic and dance on the banks of the quiet stream that flowed beneath the trees.
To offer proof of their story, Elsie and Frances borrowed a camera belonging to Elsie’s father Arthur – who was interested enough in photography to have constructed his own darkroom – and promised to return with evidence of what they had seen. They produced two photographs– one of Frances gazing enraptured at a group of dancing fairies, the other of Elsie seemingly in conversation with a diminutive winged figure in the grass in front of her. Arthur Wright dismissed the photographs as a childish prank, though Elsie’s mother Polly was less quick to jump to conclusions. In 1919, she took the photographs along to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in nearby Bradford. The speaker was so captivated by the images he asked and received Polly’s permission to display them at the Society’s annual conference in Harrogate, which is where the famous Cottingley Fairies first came to public attention.
In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a longstanding interest in spiritualism and occult phenomena, heard about the photographs from the editor of the spiritualist journal Light, and decided to make them the subject of an article he was writing on the fairy world for Strand Magazine. Doyle contacted Edward Gardner, one of the leading voices in the theosophist movement, to find out more about the background to the images and to gain an introduction to the Wright family. He arranged a meeting with Elsie and Frances, at which he questioned them in detail about their experiences. He also gave each of them a camera, in the hope that they would capture further images. They soon came back with three more photographs. Doyle saw the appearance of this new evidence as groundbreaking, proof of another world, existing just a hair’s breadth from our own.
As the photographs gained wider attention, the girls began to feel uncomfortable with their fame. Anyone who has ever been in the unfortunate position of having started a rumour that blows up into something vastly grander and more far-reaching than ever intended can well imagine their feelings of helplessness and embarrassment as eminent men of science and philosophy did battle over the authenticity – or otherwise – of the plates and what they depicted. It was many decades before Frances and Elsie felt able to give an honest account of how the photographs had been created. Much as Elsie’s father Arthur had suspected all along, the figures had been traced from images of dancing girls in a popular children’s book. Elsie, a gifted artist, had added the wings. The way in which the two girls captured the images – using pins as props to hold the fairies in place – was a skilful and ingenious contrivance in its own right. The more time went on, the more impossible it seemed for them to come clean. ‘Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle,’ Elsie says in a TV interview towards the end of her life. ‘Well, we could only keep quiet.’
Conan Doyle’s obsession with the Cottingley Fairies would seem to be the ultimate contradiction, the ultimate face-off between fact and fiction: a man of science, not to mention the creator of the world’s most famous detective, bewitched by a couple of children and some cardboard cut-outs? In fact, Doyle was more sceptic than proselytiser, and for me his interest in the photographs is indicative of his intellectual curiosity in general, the product of a lively mind that never stopped asking questions about the world, nor presumed to have all the answers.
In his investigation of paranormal phenomena, Doyle takes nothing on trust. His approach might even be called scientific, a weighing up of evidence; he does not believe something to be true so much as conclude that it must be. In The Coming of the Fairies, the book he wrote about the story of his involvement with the Cottingley case, Doyle posits the possibility – not so different from the ideas expressed in many subsequent science fiction or ghost stories – that there might be different ‘wavelengths’ of reality, with our own human existence occurring on a relatively limited plane. Seeing ghosts, fairies or even making contact with the spirits of the dead would not be a matter of faith, but of ‘switching up’, training one’s mind and body to apprehend sound, motion and corporeal manifestation occurring on hitherto invisible planes adjacent to our own.
‘If the objects are indeed there, and the inventive power of the human brain is turned upon the problem, it is likely that some kind of psychic spectacles, inconceivable to us at the moment, will be invented, and that we will all be able to adapt ourselves to the new conditions,’ Doyle writes, imagining a world in which anyone armed with the right technical equipment would be able to apprehend psychic phenomena with the ease of a biologist looking down a microscope at a single-celled amoeba.
It is so easy for us now to look at the Cottingley photographs and wonder how anyone could have entertained the idea that they were real. To a modern eye, the contrast between the three-dimensional reality of the girls and the two-dimensional cardboard cutouts appears laughably obvious. There is also the fact that the ‘fairies’ as pictured conform so exactly to picturebook stereotypes: lithe, winsome figures in scanty clothing with transparent wings, they are precisely the kind of delicately beautiful fairy folk any imaginative child might long to see. But fast-forward a hundred years, and are we not precisely as open to being deceived?
When any simple online search will reveal dozens of constructed images or fake video clips that purport to be the truth but are anything but, we have a duty to ask questions about our continuing appetite for the unbelievable. We live in a media landscape where image fakery has become so sophisticated it is possibly only a matter of time before someone perpetrates an updated version of the Cottingley hoax, an act of digital subterfuge that would doubtless garner more attention and followers than Frances’s and Elsie’s five sweet photographs ever did. It is important to remember that the Cottingley Fairies were not a fraud or a hoax in the accepted sense of the word; Elsie and Frances never intended to hurt or make fools of anyone, indeed they never expected their images to be seen outside their own family. They were simply creating art, a harmless piece of trompe l’oeil. The same could not be said of the multitudinous acts of online larceny taking place in our digital underground, even as we speak.
As a postscript to the Cottingley story, in a 2009 episode of the long-running BBC series Antiques Roadshow filmed in Bridlington, Paul Atterbury can be seen interviewing Frances’s daughter, Christine Lynch, who has brought along her original prints of the Cottingley photographs, together with the box camera given to Frances by Conan Doyle. Atterbury talks about the intellectual climate of the 1920s, when spiritualism was experiencing a revival, largely due to the massive loss of life in World War One. As the case of Conan Doyle himself demonstrates, there were many, up to and including the most highly educated and erudite individuals, who remained stalwart believers in spiritual and other occult phenomena. Atterbury reminds us that the camera then was seen as a scientific instrument, incapable of lying. Photographs were still viewed as objects of wonderment and contemplation, and to imagine them being anything other than a factual representation of whatever was before the lens as the shutter descended was beyond imagining.
What I find especially magical about the Cottingley affair even today is the fact that right up to the end of her life, Frances insisted the fifth and final photograph was genuine, that it showed real fairies. When Atterbury asks Christine Lynch if she stands by her mother’s pronouncement, Christine hesitates for just a second before replying: ‘I do, yes’. It is a beautiful moment, an expression of faith and hope that lives on down the ages, revealing, as do the photographs themselves, the enduring power of stories and the myths that give life and richness to our time in the world.
FURTHER DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE:
The Coming of the Fairies by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A full account from Conan Doyle of his investigation into the Cottingley photographs and his own conclusions. The wealth of contemporary detail makes this book indispensible. A detective story in its own right, it’s as compelling as any episode in the life of Doyle’s most famous creation and all the more so for being real.
Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies by Frances Mary Griffiths. Frances’s own memoir about her lifelong association with the story. This book is ridiculously scarce at present, and thus ridiculously expensive. I for one am hoping that a new edition will appear at some point to bring it within the reach of ordinary mortals.
Fairy Tale: a true story. 1997 film by Charles Sturridge that loosely retells the story of the Cottingley Fairies starring Bill Nighy, Harvey Keitel and Peter O’Toole. This is a delightful family film that hints at the truth behind the photographs without ever entirely spoiling the story for a younger audience. The facts are bent a little, especially with respect to the girls’ family circumstances, but so long as you go in prepared to enjoy yourself you almost certainly will.
Photographing Fairies. Also out in 1997 (make of that what you will) is this excellent movie starring Toby Stephens, Edward Hardwicke and Frances Barber. The film’s director Nick Willing is the son of artists Paula Rego and Victor Willing, and those expecting something special from this, his first full-length feature, will find all those hopes fulfilled. Adapted from a 1992 novel of the same name by Steve Szilagyi the film strays further from the true events of the story but offers much more in the way of ambiguity, darkness and adult sexuality. I first saw the movie not long after it came out and it instantly became a favourite. Criminally, it is currently unavailable on DVD, but there are second-hand copies floating about. If you are at all interested in out-of-the-way movies of the British weird this is well worth hunting down.