Читать книгу THE ELEMENT ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES: An A-Z of Fairies, Pixies, and other Fantastical Creatures - Lucy Cooper - Страница 200

When two girls in Bradford borrowed a camera to take photos of the fairies at the bottom of their garden, neither of them could have imagined the sensation that was about to follow. When the resulting images attracted the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the eminent writer with a keen interest in the supernatural, the Cottingley Fairies phenomenon had everybody talking. The excitement and speculation have rippled down through the years, sparking the idea for two films released in 1977, Photographing Fairies and Fairy Tale: A True Story, and the story continues to attract interest today.

It all began when cousins Elsie Wright, aged 16, and Frances Griffiths, aged 10, got into trouble for getting wet playing in the stream at the bottom of the garden at the Wrights’ home in Cottingley. The girls loved playing in the stream, not least, they said, because they saw fairies there. When their parents laughed at the notion of fairies at the bottom of the garden, dismissing it as fanciful, or merely an excuse for splashing in the stream, the girls set out to prove the grown-ups wrong. They persuaded Elsie’s father, a hobbyist photographer, to let them borrow his camera and set off for the stream. They returned triumphantly, in great excitement.

When Elsie’s father developed the photographs in his darkroom, he dismissed the initial picture—of Frances watching four fairies dancing on a bush—as the girls fooling around with paper cut-outs. However, a couple of months later the girls went on to produce a second photograph, of Elsie sitting on the lawn with a gnome.

In 1919 Elsie’s mother showed the photographs at a meeting of the Theosophical Society at a lecture on “Fairy Life.” A few months later, the photos were displayed at the Society’s annual conference, where they caught the eye of Edward Gardner, an eminent member. His interest was piqued and he sent the images and the glass-plate negatives to a photography expert, who was of the opinion that the photographs were genuine. Gardner then used enhanced negatives to reproduce the images, which he used to deliver illustrated lectures around the country.

The editor of the Spiritualist magazine Light drew the photos to the attention of renowned author and Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He had been commissioned to write an article on fairies for the Christmas edition of the Strand magazine. He contacted Gardner to find out who had taken the photos and subsequently got in touch with the Wrights to ask for permission to use the two photos to illustrate his article. Impressed that such an eminent figure as Conan Doyle was interested, Elsie’s father agreed that the photos could be used, but refused to accept any money for them, stating that if they were in fact genuine, then they shouldn’t be sullied by the exchange of money.

Conan Doyle was preoccupied preparing for a lecture tour of Australia, so Gardner went to meet with the Wright family. Elsie’s father told him that he been convinced there was some trick involved in the photographs, but when he had searched the girls’ room for evidence—scraps of pictures or cut-outs—he had found nothing incriminating. As further verification of the photographs’ authenticity, Gardner returned to Cottingley with two cameras and some photographic plates, which had secretly been marked to reveal any tampering. Frances was invited to stay to see if the girls could repeat their feat and again take pictures of the fairies.

Insisting that the fairies would not show themselves if other people were watching, the two girls set off alone to the stream, where they took several photos, three of which appeared to show fairies. “Frances and the Leaping Fairy” showed Frances in profile looking at a winged fairy sitting on branch; in “Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie,” a fairy is offering Elsie flowers. The final photo, “Fairies and their Sun Bath,” showed the fairies, without either of the girls, frolicking in the sunshine.

Packed in cotton wool, the plates were sent back to Gardner, who wrote to Conan Doyle in Australia expressing his joy that the experiment seemed to have worked.

The Christmas edition of the Strand in which the original photos were published sold out in two days. Elsie and Frances’ names were changed to protect their privacy and they were referred to as Iris and Alice Carpenter. Conan Doyle concluded his article by writing he hoped that if the photographs helped to convince people of the existence of fairies it would jolt the materialistic twentieth-century mindset out of its rut and into acknowledging the glamor and mystery of life. It was his hope that the images would encourage people to open up to other psychic phenomena too.

Initial reactions to the images were mixed. Skeptics noted that the fairies conformed to the images in traditional nursery tales and sported suspiciously fashionable hairstyles, while others took the girls and their photos at face value, welcoming the images as evidence of the existence of supernatural beings.

Conan Doyle used the second batch of photographs to illustrate another article in the Strand in 1921. This article went on to form the basis of his book, The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922.

In 1921 Gardner made a final visit to Cottingley, this time accompanied by a clairvoyant named Geoffrey Hodson. On this occasion neither Frances or Elsie claimed to see fairies; however, Hodson professed to observe many of the winged creatures. Frances and Elsie later denounced him as a fake.

Public interest in the Cottingley Fairies phenomenon gradually died down after 1921. Elsie and Frances married and lived abroad for many years. It was not until 1966 that the fairies—and Frances and Elsie—found themselves once again in the limelight, when a reporter for the Daily Express tracked down Elsie, now living back in England. In an interview, she admitted that the fairies might have been figments of her imagination, but said that what she saw in her mind had somehow been captured on the photographic plate. The article triggered more media interest and scientific investigations into the photographs, most of which concluded that they were fakes.

In 1983, in an article in the Unexplained magazine, the cousins admitted that the photos had been fabricated. However, they maintained that the fairies were real and they had genuinely seen them. Elsie, a skilled artist from a young age, had copied out illustrations of fairies from Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914), a popular children’s book, which they had then made into cardboard cut-outs, being careful to dispose of all traces of anything that could be used as evidence. However, a question mark remains over the fifth and final photograph, “Fairies and their Sun Bath.” Both girls claimed to have taken it, and Frances always maintained that it was genuine.

In an interview on Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Elsie explained that she and Frances had been too embarrassed to say anything after the highly esteemed Arthur Conan Doyle had championed the pictures as genuine evidence of fairies. What had started out as an attempt to prove their parents wrong had taken an unexpected turn that they could never have predicted. They had never thought of it as fraud, Elsie said, just two cousins having a bit of fun. She couldn’t understand how so many people—and very highly regarded figures at that—were taken in. She believed they had wanted to be taken in.

Prints of the photographs, two of the cameras the girls used, and watercolors of fairies painted by Elsie are displayed at the National Media Museum in Bradford.