What happened
In the summer of 1917, in the village of Cottingley near Bradford, two cousins went down to the stream at the bottom of the garden with a borrowed camera. Elsie Wright was sixteen. Frances Griffiths, nine, had recently arrived from South Africa with her mother and was living with the Wrights. Frances kept getting into trouble for coming home wet from the beck, and said she went there to see the fairies. Elsie borrowed her father’s Midg quarter-plate camera to prove it. The plate Arthur Wright developed showed Frances resting her chin on her hand while four winged figures danced on the bank in front of her. A second picture, taken that September, showed Elsie beckoning to a gnome. Mr. Wright, who had seen scraps of paper in his daughter’s bedroom, treated the whole thing as a joke and refused to lend the camera again.
The photographs stayed a family curiosity until 1919, when Elsie’s mother took them to a lecture on fairy life at the Theosophical Society in Bradford. From there they reached Edward Gardner, a leading Theosophist, who had the plates examined by a photographer, Harold Snelling, and was told they were genuine single exposures of an outdoor scene. Gardner showed them to Arthur Conan Doyle, who had already been commissioned to write about fairies for The Strand Magazine. Doyle, by then a committed spiritualist, called the pictures epoch-making and ran them in the Christmas 1920 issue under the title “Fairies Photographed”, with the girls disguised as “Alice” and “Iris” and the village renamed. In August 1920, at Gardner’s and Doyle’s urging and with a new camera, the girls produced three more: Frances with a leaping fairy, Elsie with a fairy offering her a posy of harebells, and a strange composition of fairies in a “sun-bath”. Doyle used all five in his 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies.
The investigation
Reaction split along predictable lines. Spiritualists and Theosophists took the pictures as proof; newspapers pointed out that the fairies wore the latest fashions and had suspiciously modern hairstyles. Nobody, then or for decades afterward, caught the girls in the act, partly because they were careful: the 1920 pictures were taken with no adult present. Interest faded after 1921. Both women married and moved away, and the cameras ended up in a drawer.
The decisive comparison came in 1978, when the magician James Randi and others pointed out that the dancing figures in the first photograph match, pose for pose, an illustration in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, a children’s annual published in 1915 that the Wright household owned. Elsie, a competent artist, had copied them and added wings.
The explanations
In 1981 Elsie told the writer Joe Cooper, who was researching the case for the part-work magazine The Unexplained, that the fairies were paper cut-outs held in place with hatpins. In 1983 she put it in a letter, and in a 1985 television interview both women explained why they had kept quiet for sixty years: two village girls could not embarrass a man like Conan Doyle, who had lost a son in the war and seemed to need the fairies to be real. Elsie said she had drawn the figures from the Gift Book, that Frances had cut them out, and that the pins went into the turf. Frances agreed about the first four pictures but insisted until her death that the fifth, the fairy sun-bath, was genuine, and that she really had seen fairies at the beck as a child.
Where it stands
The Cottingley case is a confessed hoax, and an unusually well documented one. The two cameras, original prints, the girls’ correspondence and Elsie’s watercolors of winged women are held by the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, which had the cameras CT-scanned at the University of Bradford in 2024. The University of Leeds holds the Gardner and Doyle papers in its Brotherton Library. What the archive shows is not two cunning children but a family joke that escaped, picked up by adults who wanted it to be true, and sustained by a reluctance to let them down.