A.C.D. and The Cottingley Fairies
A.C.D. and The Cottingley Fairies is an article written by Joe Cooper published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 1) in september 1989.
The article reassesses Arthur Conan Doyle's involvement in the Cottingley Fairies affair, arguing that while he was over-trusting, he approached the photographs with more caution and consultation than later critics admit. It contends that Conan Doyle's actions helped lay groundwork for later paranormal investigation, and that his position was shaped as much by circumstance and incomplete evidence as by credulity.
A.C.D. and The Cottingley Fairies
Of all the episodes in his varied life, it is possible that none brought Conan Doyle more public discredit than his endorsement of the fairy photographs taken by two girls at Cottingley, a suburb of Bradford, in 1917 and 1920. He was almost universally condemned for his judgement, with most sympathetic biographers tactfully omitting any reference to the matter. Others are less kind:
- "... so sure of the truth himself that he would not argue whether a certain photo proved what he said it did; its bare existence was proof enough."
- — Hesketh Pearson, Conan Doyle His Life and Art, p. 181.
It is my view, after a dozen years of research, that there were not only mitigating circumstances but that Doyle, even though impulsive and over-trusting, laid a foundation stone for what may become an interesting sector of paranormal investigation.
One of the first two photographs illustrating this article (Fig 2) will be familiar to many. It shows Frances Griffiths, rising ten, staring at the camera as sixteen year old Elsie Wright snaps her cousin above a ring of cutout figures on a Saturday afternoon in July 1917. It will be noticed that the figures have a sharpness about them lacking in Fig. 1, which was taken from the original glass negative plate. Here there is a blurring consistent with movement, such being in fact caused by the slight breeze which was a constant feature between the high banks of Cottingley Beck where the photograph was taken. The clearer of the two prints is often used in discourses on the Cottingley affair; I came across the other in 1978 — Elsie had given it to her childhood friend Rose in 1918 with the assurance that real fairies had been photographed.
It was the blurred photograph, together with another 'rough print' of Elsie and a gnome which were passed over to Conan Doyle by the Theosophist Edward Gardner in June 1920. The prints and glass negatives had been sent to him by the Bradford Lodge of the Society where Polly Wright had approached a speaker after a lecture on fairies and mentioned the two photographs taken three years earlier by her daughter, photographs claimed by Elsie and her cousin to be of real fairies.
By a Jungian coincidence, Conan Doyle had heard of the prints after being asked to write some Strand articles on nature spirits for the 1920 Christmas edition. Gardner welcomed interest from so eminent a writer for he was hoping for further photographs; however, at that point, the Wright family had resisted Theosophical entreaties, preferring to let the matter rest as some odd mystery.
Conan Doyle was cautiously interested. He sought opinions from others and the following extracts from his letters to Gardner indicate his initial reactions:
- July 3rd, 1920: "I saw Oliver Lodge and showed him the photos. We are both sufficiently on our guard already."
- July 5th, 1920: "I let Kenneth Styles, who is a fairy authority, see the prints. He was suspicious... the coiffeurs of the ladies are much too Parisienne."
- July 18th, 1920: (quoting from Styles): "The more I think of it the less I like it."
By contrast Gardner's expert, one Harold Snelling, examined the prints and reported thus:
- Re: Two Fairy Photographs
- "These two negatives are entirely genuine and unfaked photographs of a single exposure, open a work, and 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."
At this point, Cosmic Joker theorists may take notice. Gardner was not only a sonorous lecturer on matters such as 'The Masters or Raising Consciousness', but was also the slide lantern and photographic expert at the Blavatsky Lodge. Thus he had the prints sharpened to improve presentation and subsequent copies have been in this form.
ELG, as he rather liked to be called, was a neat and impressive figure with his fashionable bow tie and beard, and well suited to win the deference, if not inhibitions, of the artisan Wright family whom he was later to visit in Yorkshire. Like Doyle, he had a total belief in fairies, having talked to many who had seen them. (I have a score or so tapes of first-hand reports which I have collected over the past few years).
By a further quirk of circumstance, Doyle was firmly scheduled to leave in mid-August on an Australian lecture tour and thus could not visit Cottingley himself. He therefore asked Gardner to go north on his behalf, which the latter was delighted to do; there was also the matter of gifts of books, cameras and plates, and talk of modest money sums for the trouble caused.
Gardner gave the matter high priority and was back with his report by the end of July, commenting favourably on the honesty of the Wright family and Elsie's firm assertion that real fairies had been photographed. That she could not retract her story without immense embarrassment all round seems not to have occurred to our earnest researcher. Frances, she said, had been scolded after falling in the beck when stepping across stones the better to see fairies, and the photographs had substantiated her accounts of nature spirits to be seen on the banks of the shimmering stream as it ran down to the Aire some half mile distant.
The neatly typed purple carbon copy of ELG's report to Doyle is to be found in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University Library, together with a mass of other correspondence, cuttings, photographs and articles. These were obtained by Stewart Sanderson, then President of the Folklore Society, from Gardner's son Lesley in 1972. He was then a member of the English Department at the University and we lunched amiably together on occasions.
I am thus obliged to whatever higher mechanisms provided me with the wherewithal for research but a mile from my Headingley home. Sanderson delivered a sharp attack on those pall enough to believe in fairies, drawing on comments e by Elsie in the 1971 Nationwide programme after Gardner's death at 100 in 1970.
But back to our White Knight's fitful involvement. He had two articles in draft form for The Strand, but the acceptance of these hinged upon confirmatory photographs being taken. Doyle left for Australia in August and, towards the end of the month, Gardner was delighted to receive three further prints and negatives from Polly Wright.
The following letter was probably decisive in making up many minds for it not only testifies to Polly's trust in the girls and her own belief in fairies, but also absolves Arthur Wright, Elsie's father, upon whom suspicion had fallen:
(She writes briefly of taking Frances back to Scarborough where she moved after leaving Cottingley in 1919).
- August 22nd, 1920
- Dear Mr. Gardner,
- Elsie stayed home last Thursday but the morning was dull and misty, so they did not take any photos until after dinner when the mist had cleared away and it was sunny. I went to my sisters to tea and left them to it. When I got back they had only managed two with fairies on, I was disappointed. They went up again Saturday afternoon and took several photos but there was only one with anything on and it's a queer one, we can't make it out... Elsie put the plates in this time and Arthur developed them the next day. I will send the plates on to you tomorrow, we all hope you will be able to come and see us again, and we did enjoy your company.
- Yours sincerely, Polly Wright.
- She did not take one flying after all.
"Polly was at the heart of it all", Fred Gettings once remarked to me in a Keighley cafe, shortly after we had published our article exposing the fraud in The Unexplained at the end of 1982. Gettings had tracked down the original Shepperton illustrations from which Elsie had copied figures, and I had elicited confessions after chaperoning the girls on a Yorkshire Television outing in 1976, during which they agreed I should write a book on their adventures. Both belatedly owned up publicly in 1983, with never a mention of either of us.
So A. C. D.'s first article appeared in the Christmas edition of The Strand in December 1920, prominently headlined on the front cover:
- FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED
- An epoch making event described by Conan Doyle
It was illustrated by the first two photographs, both original 'rough prints' having been sharpened by Gardner in best Hollywood tradition. Doyle reproduced Gardner's report and commented thus on the photographs to the delight of his mockers:
- "the two upheld hands of the elves seen under a high power lens do not appear to be human nor does the left foot of the figure capering on the right. The hands seem furred at the edges and the fingers to be in a solid mass... It is notable that one figure which is without wings is the one which is sinking into the herbiage."
In March 1921 the second article appeared, largely consisting of earliers sightings gathered by Doyle but with two of the August photos taken by Elsie and Frances. In the Summer of 1921 Doyle sent the clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson to Cottingley where he verified that fairies were to be seen by himself and the girls then 19 and 13.
Using Hodson and Gardner material extensively, Doyle published The Coming of the Fairies in 1922 and there the matter ended until Gardner's death in 1970 and a revival of the case.
The two principals in The Case of the Cottingley Fairies are now otherwise occupied, Frances having moved on in 1986 and Elsie in 1988. Frances, till the end, firmly stated that there were fairies at Cottingley as Elsie denied such an assertion Frances believed the last photograph (Fig. 3) to be of real fairies, and Elsie maintained that it had been fabricated.
I have been to Cottingley and places nearby where fairy music has been clairvoyantly heard and I have talked to those who have seen nature spirits nearby — but not on the banks of the famous beck. Future observations and thinking will refute or validate fairy life at Cottingley. As ever, much will hinge on personal perceptions of probabilities.
Let the last word come from Conan Doyle and his first Strand article:
- "If I am asked whether I consider the case to be absolutely and finally proved, I should answer that in order to remove the last faint shadow of doubt I should wish to see the result repeated before a disinterested witness."
And so surely, say all of us — critics and champions alike.
(THE CASE OF THE COTTINGLEY FAIRIES by Joe Cooper is to be published by Robert Hale Ltd., in the Spring of 1990).
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
