Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales) (8:28)
Elsie tried to help little Frances sneak into the house, but Francis's mother saw her and scolded her. Francis protested that she'd fallen because she'd been playing with the fairies. That was the last straw. She was sent to her room. Elsie, comforting her tearful cousin, suggested a plan. The two of them would borrow Elsie's father's camera and take photographs of the fairies at the bottom of the garden to prove the adults wrong. And little Francis Wright. And they did, making the iconic picture of Francis surrounded by dancing sprites. Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, developed the first photograph in his darkroom. He wasn't impressed. It was a nice image of Francis, but what were all the pieces of paper in the foreground? Fairies, said Elsie. Nonsense, said her father. A few weeks later, they took a second photograph, this time of Elsie wearing a hat, sitting on the grass and holding hands with a tiny, prancing gnome. A joke, said Arthur Wright. Why would they not admit it? But they did not. And so the camera was confiscated. The story might have ended then, in 1917, but Elsie's mother, Polly Wright, was less of a sceptic than Arthur. A couple of years later, Polly Wright went to a meeting of a spiritualist society on the subject of fairy life. She mentioned the existence of the photographs. There was some excitement and before long, the images had made their way to the influential mystic Edward Gardner. Gardner wrote back to Polly Wright, saying that the first picture was the best of its kind, I should think anywhere. Edward Gardner took the photographs to his friend Harold Snelling, an expert in photographic processing and retouching. Snelling told Gardner that the pictures looked unprocessed to him. Single exposures taken outside Snelling's testimony was very important to Conan Doyle. If Snelling said they were genuine, they were genuine. But at this point, the plot thickens. Gardner wanted large, sharp, spectacular prints to frame and hang on his wall, to show people when he gave public lectures and to give to the newspapers. So he paid Snelling to make these prints. Snelling made new negatives by painting on the prints that Elsie's mother had sent and then re photographing them. He added sparkle and sharpness, just as today a Photoshop expert might retouch a supermodel for a magazine cover. But that meant that every subsequent expert was looking not at the original prints, but at Snelling's upgrades. No longer were these the unprocessed single exposure photographs that he'd vouched for. Snelling, of course, had no idea quite how much attention would later be devoted to the authenticity of these images. But having been paid about a year's wages by Gardner, he seems not to have uttered another word on the subject thereafter. Edward Gardner then took the photographs to experts at Kodak. They were confused, partly because Snelling's post processing made the lighting on the pictures look strange. The Kodak team believed the pictures might have been taken in a studio, but that wasn't true, and Gardner knew it. Whatever had been done would have required considerable technical skill, which, of course, Snelling had. In any case, they said fairies don't exist, so the pictures must be a fake. Gardner, who was sure that fairies did exist, didn't find this very persuasive. He didn't realise, or didn't care that Snelling's work had confused everyone. As far as he was concerned, Snelling's work was cosmetic. The fairies had been in the original photograph and the experts were mystified. What more proof did anyone want? So he wrote to the most famous advocate of spiritualist beliefs in the British Empire, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle was Intrigued, he wrote to Elsie and to her father, Arthur, who was a huge fan of Conan Doyle and both delighted and bemused by the interest. And Conan Doyle sent Edward Gardiner to Cottingley with a better camera in the hope that he could produce more images of fairies. Foiled by bad weather, he returned to London, leaving the camera with Elsie and Frances, together with dozens of expensive photographic plates, most of which, tellingly, do not survive. Still, soon enough, Gardiner received three stunning new fairy images. One of a fairy in flight, one of a fairy presenting flowers to Elsie, and one strange and ethereal image of fairies sunbathing in their little glade. Edward Gardner was completely convinced, he argued, that the fairies were visible manifestations of the girl's psychic energy. That would explain why, as several commentators noted, they bore such a close resemblance to illustrations from picture books. As for Conan Doyle, he began to write a spectacular account of a case that was stranger than anything Sherlock Holmes had ever tackled. Conan Doyle's account made a huge splash, first in a sellout issue of Strand magazine, then in his book. Many people found the whole thing laughable. Punch magazine published a cartoon showing him with his head in the clouds. Poor Sherlock Holmes sitting nearby, mourning his creator's foolishness. But many backed Conan Doyle. After all, how could two simple rural girls possibly have faked such a thing? One popular novelist urged people to gaze on the innocent faces of the girls themselves in the photographs. There is an extraordinary thing called truth, he wrote. It is God's currency, and the cleverest coiner or forger can't imitate it. The Yorkshire Weekly Post kept its feet on the ground but agreed. When one considers that these are the first photographs these children ever took in their lives, it is impossible to conceive that they are capable of technical manipulation which would deceive experts. It was indeed hard to understand how two little girls on the first photograph they ever took could have faked an image so compelling that expert photographers could not explain it. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's own creation, Sherlock Holmes, could have explained that. This puzzlement was hardly an argument for the existence of fairies. To quote Mr. Holmes, when you have.
