Photographing Fairies (Classic)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Episode: Photographing Fairies (Classic)
Date: December 26, 2025
Podcast by: Pushkin Industries
Host/Narrator: Tim Harford

Overview of the Episode

“Photographing Fairies” revisits the remarkable true story of the Cottingley Fairy photographs and the extraordinary credulity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. With Harford’s signature insight, the episode explores the psychology of belief, the power of deception (including well-intentioned lies), and the collision of skepticism and hope. It’s a cautionary tale of how playful forgery spun out of control — for over six decades — ensnaring one of Victorian England’s most famous minds in its web.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Birth of the Fairy Photographs (03:32–08:22)

• Cottingley, 1917: Nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her older cousin, 16-year-old Elsie Wright, claim to see fairies near the stream (“beck”) behind their home.
• After being scolded for wet clothes (blaming fairies!), Elsie proposes they photograph the fairies as proof.
• Using Elsie’s father’s camera, they stage and capture two iconic photographs: one featuring Frances with dancing sprites, another of Elsie with a gnome.

Quote:
Frances, for some unaccountable reason, always fell down when we went up the beck.
— Elsie Wright (08:22)

2. The Photographs Spread & Legendary Endorsement (08:22–16:15)

• Elsie’s mother Polly is intrigued by spiritualism and shares the photos at a society meeting, which leads them to Edward Gardner, a famous mystic.
• Gardner seeks expert analysis from Harold Snelling, who confirms (on retouched prints) that the images seem genuine.
• The photos ultimately land with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who is gripped by the prospect that fairies have been captured on film. He publicizes the images in The Strand and his 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies.

Quote:
The original negative is asserted by expert photographers to bear not the slightest trace of combination work...
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (06:04)

Quote:
I have convinced myself that there is overwhelming evidence for the fairies.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (06:25)

• Public reaction is split: some believe, others ridicule, questioning Doyle’s judgment.

Quote:
A newspaper headline of the time put it bluntly: “Has Conan Doyle gone mad?”
— Tim Harford (07:04)

3. Expertise, Skepticism, and the Confounding of Truth (16:15–21:24)

• Critics cite Doyle’s legendary character Sherlock Holmes:
  “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
  — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (16:04)
• Still, belief blinds even experts. Harford draws a parallel to Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren and the “Vermeers.”
• The real methods behind the fairy photos remain unresolved for decades.

4. The Forensic Unravelling (21:24–30:33)

• 1970s/1980s Revival: Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, uses Holmesian logic and the original camera to test the story.
• He discovers the original camera, under typical conditions, could not produce the famously sharp fairy images; later photos use varied tricks (retouching, double exposure, cutouts).
• Key insight: Each photograph achieved its effect via a different method, making them especially hard to debunk as a set.

Quote:
The sequence of Cottingley fairy photographs use the same bewildering strategy… If you look at them and try to find a single trick behind them all, you can't.
— Tim Harford (24:38)

• Further investigation reveals Elsie, far from an innocent child, was an art student and worked in photographic post-processing at a greeting card factory.

Quote:
She was very clever at art, and particularly with drawing fairies and cutting them out.
— Teacher recalling Elsie Wright (26:54)

5. The Confession & Persistence of the Magical Lie (36:17–44:53)

• Elsie’s Confession: Finally, in the 1980s, an elderly Elsie Wright (now Hill) admits the hoax in a letter to Crawley:

  Quote:
  Thank you for your letter revealing so much depth and understanding of the pickle Frances and I got ourselves into on that day, when our practical joke fell flat… Instead, the laugh was on us.
  — Elsie Wright (36:33)

• The intended joke gets away from the girls, turning into a lie maintained for decades largely to protect the feelings and reputations of the men taken in.

• Harford discusses why lies — even playful ones — can endure. Sometimes, he argues, we lie to spare others, to be polite, or because the social cost of truth is too high.

• The social and cultural context: belief in spiritualism was heightened by bereavement and loss post-war and during the 1918 flu pandemic — people wanted to believe in life after death, and thus, in the supernatural.

• Conan Doyle’s own family tragedies (wife, brother, son, and mother all lost within a short period) increased his emotional vulnerability to such hope.

Quote:
At first, Elsie Wright had been trying to comfort Frances. Then she had been showing off her talents as an artist and a photographer. But as the deception continued, she began lying, because it would have been heartless to tell the truth. Edward Gardiner and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had so publicly put their trust in Elsie and Frances and their photographs and been so mocked for it, that for the young women to confess would be to humiliate both men utterly.
— Tim Harford (37:45)

6. A Lasting Legacy and the Irony of Success (44:20–46:00)

• Crawley muses on Elsie’s accidental legacy:

Quote:
If you take as the criterion of success coverage in the national media in column inches and television time... then Elsie is by far the most successful photographer in the craft's history. If it is remembered that that success has been based on the first photograph she ever took, then whether or not you believe in fairies, it has to be admitted that her record will probably remain unsurpassed.
— Geoffrey Crawley, as relayed by Tim Harford (44:20)

• The story, at its heart, is about the enduring power of imagination — and how even the finest minds can be enchanted, or deceived, by it.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the nature of expertise and credulity:
  “If a person wants to believe something passionately enough, expertise is no defence.”
  — Tim Harford (16:15)

• On the persistence of magical thinking:
  “Fairies are famous for casting mischievous spells and I can't help thinking about Elsie and Frances heading down to Cottingley Beck that summer over a century ago... Together they cast a spell that lasted a lifetime.”
  — Tim Harford (44:53)

---

Thematic Insights

• The psychology of deception: Why intelligent people sometimes believe the impossible — and why seemingly harmless lies can snowball into myths held for generations.
• The urge to believe: Deep grief and desperation often foster credulity, especially for ideas that promise hope or connection beyond this world.
• The “magical lie”: Small untruths — like the tale of Rudolph or the Cottingley fairies — often serve deeper social purposes: comfort, politeness, or the necessity of hope.
• The irony of innocence: Elsie and Frances carried their secret for most of their lives not for personal gain, but to sustain the illusions of others, especially the men in power.

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Key Timestamps

• 03:32 — Doyle reads of the “fairy photographs”
• 06:04–06:25 — Doyle, imitating Holmes, argues for the evidence’s authenticity
• 08:22 — Genesis of the first photos and their in-house skepticism
• 16:04 — Holmes’s dictum on eliminating the impossible
• 21:24 — Geoffrey Crawley begins rigorous investigation
• 36:33 — Elsie Wright’s letter and confession
• 44:20 — Crawley’s reflection on Elsie's unrivaled “success”

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Conclusion

“Photographing Fairies” is a sparklingly told narrative, blending detective story with psychological analysis. It is both a gentle warning and a celebration of wonder. How far will a playful fib travel before it becomes truth for others? The Cottingley fairies — born of a child’s creative talent and an adult’s longing for meaning — remind listeners that the line between magical enjoyment and tragic self-deception is thinner than we often realize.

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For further reading and sources, visit timharford.com or see the episode show notes.

Transcript

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[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Pushkin. Hello everyone.

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The Cautionary Tales team is on a.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Christmas break at the moment But I have a special cautionary tale for you from the archives. Do you believe in magic? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle certainly does in this cautionary tale about a lie that gets out of control. I'll have another classic for you next week, one that may help with your New Year's resolutions. And then we'll be back in the new year with plenty of brand new cautionary tales. Enjoy the episode.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quoted)]

In May 1920, I heard that alleged photographs of fairies had been taken.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

These are the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, in a book titled the Coming of the Fairies. Unlike the Sign of Four or the Hound of the Baskervilles, the coming of the fairies wasn't a work of fiction. It was deadly serious. These photographs were in the possession of Edward Gardner, an influential believer in spiritualism, the idea that the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. Spiritualism was all the rage at the time, and if you believed in spirits, it wasn't too much of a leap to believe in fairies too. Where had these photographs come from? Edward Gardiner's sister explained to Conan Doyle.

[Edward Gardner (Quoted)]

Edward has got into touch with a family in Bradford where the little girl Elsie and her cousin Frances constantly go into the woods and play with the fairies. Some time ago Elsie said she wanted to photograph them and begged her father to lend his camera for long. He refused, but at last she managed to get the loan of it and one plate off. She and Frances went into the woods near a waterfall. Francis ticed them, as they call it, and Elsie stood ready with the camera. Soon the three fairies appeared and one pixie dancing in Frances aura. It was a long time before the father would develop the photo, but at least he did. And to his utter amazement, the four sweet little figures came out beautifully.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

The photographs are indeed beautiful. The first is a charming depiction of nine year old Francis surrounded by small bright dancing figures, crisp and elegant. Conan Doyle describes it like this.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quoted)]

The waterfall and rocks are about 20ft behind Francis, who's standing against the bank of the A fifth fairy may be seen between and behind the two on the right. The coloring of the fairies is described by the girls as being of very pale pink, green, lavender and mauve, most marked in the wings and fading to almost pure white in the limbs and drapery. Each fairy has its own special color.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Conan Doyle was aware that the existence of of fairies was controversial, so he affected the stance of a logical man, explaining every clue. Like Sherlock Holmes himself.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quoted)]

The original negative is asserted by expert photographers to bear not the slightest trace of combination work. Retouching or anything whatever to mark it as other than a perfectly straight single exposure photograph taken in the open air under natural conditions.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

His conclusion was inescapable.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quoted)]

I have convinced myself that there is overwhelming evidence for the fairies.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Turning to the second photograph showing Elsie holding hands with a little gnome, he muses on the contrast between the gnome and the little fairy elves. It's hard not to laugh.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quoted)]

Elves are a compound of the human and the butterfly. Well, the gnome has more of the moth. This may be merely the result of under exposure of the negative and the dullness of the weather. Perhaps the little gnome is really of the same tribe, but represents an elderly male while the elves are romping young women.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

A newspaper headline of the time put it bluntly. Has Conan Doyle gone mad? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. The story had begun five years earlier at the bottom of a garden in Cottingley, a village on the outskirts of Bradford in northern England. A beautiful stream, or beck, as the locals say, flowed past the trees and moss covered banks. As the breeze toyed with the leaves and the sun, dappling danced across the grass. Little Frances Griffiths could imagine that she saw fairies at play. She talked with her dear friend and cousin, Elsie Wright, about what she saw. One day, Frances slipped on the rocks in the beck and soaked her clothes. It would happen a lot, Elsie later remembered.

[Elsie Wright (Quoted)]

Frances, for some unaccountable reason, always fell down when we went up the beck.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

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.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quoted)]

Eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Indeed, for most observers, Sherlock Holmes maxim was a good guide. Fairies do not dwell at the bottom of gardens, and so the photographs must be fake. One critic summed it up. Knowing children and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that the girls have pulled one of them. Of course they had. If you remember our earlier cautionary tale of Abraham Bredius, and the fake Vermeer. You'll also remember that if a person wants to believe something passionately enough, expertise is no defence. Doyle was not only a doctor and a formidable intellect, he was also a skilled amateur photographer. He knew very well that photographs could be faked, but he also knew that such fakes took skill. He couldn't quite imagine how two little girls could have done it, and more to the point, he didn't want to imagine. But how had the fakery been achieved? That question wasn't conclusively answered until 1982, 65 years after the first two fairy photographs were taken. We'll find out the answer after the break.

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[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

After the flurry of interest following the publication of Conan Doyle's book, the Cottingley fairies were largely forgotten for half a century. Then, in the 1970s, there was a revival of interest by newspapers and TV shows. But the man who would crack the case wide open was Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography. Crawley deployed the forensic logic one might expect from Sherlock Holmes himself in a remarkable series of 10 articles titled that Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies. Crawley was sure the photographs were fakes, but his methods of observation and deduction revealed a great deal. First, he obtained the original camera that Francis and Elsie had used to produce the first photograph, serviced it to bring it to full working order, and took his own prints. He concluded right away that the original photograph of Francis and the fairies cannot possibly have been what it claimed to be. In those lighting conditions, the primitive camera wasn't capable of taking photographs that sharp. Elsie had said that the shutter speed was 1/50 of a second, but Crawley believed that in reality the shutter would have had to have been open for a second or more. That meant that anything which moved would be blurred, as indeed the waterfall in the background of the photograph is the fairy. Wings, however, are pin sharp. Crawley kept sifting the evidence and obtained a copy of the first photograph. This copy had never been near the retouching specialist, Harold Snelling. When Crawley saw it, he was stunned. It was strikingly different from the endlessly reproduced photographs of Francis and the dancing troupe of fairies. It was overexposed and blurred. Francis's face lacked detail and the fairies were hard to make out. They were little more than vague, pale shapes. For the first time since 1920, a photographic expert saw not Snelling's processed copy, but the original, and realised quite how significant and how confusing Snelling's post processing had been. Crawley realised that the confusion had deepened because the photographs used different techniques to achieve the effect of fairies. The third photograph, for example, taken three years after the first two, is probably a double exposure, a fairy in one shot superimposed over an image of Francis in another. The fourth features a dramatic new composition with Elsie three years older, looking less like a child in an awkward hat and more like a fashion model. The fairy is simply a paper cutout. The fifth photograph, a strange and blown out image of a fairy sunbath is, is also a double exposure, but one which creates a trippy, psychedelic effect rather than a crisp picture of a flying fairy. Both Elsie and Frances claim to have taken that photograph. Crawley's conclusion is that they both did, unknowingly, photographing the same scene twice on a single photographic plate. Any stage magician could explain why the combined effect is so bewildering. Magicians make a useful distinction. The method is the technique used to produce the illusion. For example, palming a coin so that it seems to be in the left hand, when in fact it's in the right hand. The effect is the illusion itself. The coin has vanished. The coin reappears from behind your ear. And while it's often said that a magician should never perform the same trick twice, some do exactly that. They repeat the same effect over and over again, but they change the method each time. The cumulative impact is bewildering, and often the more expert the spectator, the more bewildering it is. Every time the spectator produces a theory about how the trick is done, the method changes and the theory is disproved by a combination of luck and fate. The sequence of Cottingley fairy photographs use the same bewildering strategy. The first is created by Harold Snelling's liberal retouching. Then later effects use cutouts, double exposures and even a fluke. If you look at them and Try to find a single trick behind them all. You can't. Geoffrey Crawley of the British Journal of Photography concluded that the five pictures had used four different methods to achieve the illusion. Crawley then turned to the question of the characters involved. The Yorkshire Weekly Post had found it impossible to conceive that these two innocent looking girls could have mastered the techniques of image manipulation. But perhaps the girls weren't quite as innocent as everyone assumed. Frances, of course, was aged just nine when the first photograph was taken. She is literally the poster child for the Cottingley fairies. But Elsie Wright, her cousin Elsie is another matter. Elsie was hardly a child. She turned 16 the summer that the first photographs were taken. Elsie had struggled at school and left at the age of 13 to study nearby at the Bradford College of Art. One of her teachers later recalled, she was very clever at art, and particularly with drawing fairies and cutting them out. That recollection may be tinged with hindsight, but once you know that Elsie wasn't a nine year old girl but a student at an art college, it puts those photographs of fairies into another light. And there's another thing that didn't seem to have registered with the people who thought the girls were naive little children. Elsie had a job. Not just any job either. She worked at the photography studio of a greetings card factory doing post processing work. Early on, she'd done spotting or touching up flawed photos using paint. Later, she colourised black and white work and created composite photographs, combining the images of soldiers who died during the war with portraits of the families they'd left behind. It was skilled work. Is it really so impossible to imagine that Elsie Wright could have created a manipulated photograph? Writing in the British Journal of Photography, was Geoffrey Crawley didn't think so. And that's when there was another twist in the story. Crawley received a letter from an 82 year old lady called Elsie Hill, the married name of Elsie Wright. And Elsie Wright had a confession to make. After 66 years of lying, she'd finally decided to tell the truth. Elsie had hatched the plan to comfort Frances after a stern scolding from her mother. First, Frances had soaked her clothes in the beck. Then she'd compounded the sin by blaming it on the fairies. Making up stories about fairies was enough to get her sent to her room. Elsie was indignant. Grown ups lie all the time, she said. They're always making up fantastical stories. Why should Frances be in such trouble for doing the same? And so Elsie comforted Frances with the promise that they would prove the adults wrong by producing a picture of the fairies. Elsie was quite right. Adults do tell a lot of lies. Some of them are every bit as delightful and absurd as fairies at the bottom of the garden. Think about Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer. We grown ups tell children that Rudolph pulls Santa's sleigh and that his shiny red nose lights the way for Santa when Christmas Eve is foggy. It's a touching story, but also absurd. Santa's magic is so powerful that in a single night he can fill every stocking with Christmas gifts. Why on earth would he need a silly shiny nose to navigate? And yet we tell our children such tales as they grow up.

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[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Thing as a magical lie, and lies are often necessary whether they're magical or not. In 1975, the sociologist Harvey Sachs gave a lecture titled Everyone has to Lie in which he pointed out that society is lubricated by a continual trickle of falsehoods. More recently, the psychologist Robert Feldman filmed first time conversations between two strangers talking together. He concluded that people lied every three or four minutes. Of course they did. When the restaurant server asks, how are you? We're not supposed to give a truthful answer. We don't say, I'm nervous. This is my first date since my psycho ex had an affair with my best friend, emptied my bank account and then left me or my haemorrhoids are killing me, but otherwise not bad. We say thanks, I'm great at the end of a dinner party. We don't say the food was mediocre and the conversation was awkward, but at least it's not far to get home. We say that we had a wonderful time and when our children ask us about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, we don't tell them, oh him. He was made up in 1939 by an advertising copywriter at Montgomery Ward. It's a story to make awkward kids with no friends feel better about themselves. We tell them the magical lie that without Rudolph, Santa would be lost. We lie out of politeness, we lie to make ourselves look good. And we lie because the truth would be cruel. More on that after the break.

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[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

60 six years after she created the first fairy photographs, Elsie Wright was confessing. One of the letters that she wrote to Geoffrey Crawley at the British Journal of Photography hinted at why it had taken her so long.

[Elsie Wright (Quoted)]

Dear Mr. Crawley, thank you for your letter revealing so much depth and understanding of the pickle Frances and I got ourselves into on that day, when our practical joke fell flat on its face, when no one would believe we'd got pictures of real fairies. Just imagine if they had. The joke would have ended there and then when we would have told all. Instead, the laugh was on us.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Elsie imagined that when their parents saw the fairy photographs, they'd be astonished. They would apologise for scolding Frances and then Elsie would reveal the trick and they'd all have a good laugh together. Except that Arthur Wright never believed in fairies. For a second, he was scornful and angry. When the children would not explain how they'd done it. Elsie's pride was wounded. She believed in her talent as an illustrator and a photographer. With hindsight, Arthur Wright could have got to the truth if his initial reaction had been gentler. He missed the only chance because once Elsie had let the lie linger. When was the moment for the truth? When Polly Wright, Elsie's mother, returned from a spiritualist meeting in 1919, having told others of the photographs that would humiliate her mother. When Edward Gardiner, a fine gentleman, requested copies? Even worse, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most famous men in the country, wrote separately to both Elsie and her father. Calamitous. Conan Doyle's involvement raised the stakes far beyond what any of them could have imagined. Arthur Wright was a true fan of Conan Doyle's and he couldn't quite believe that RLC at the bottom of the class had the great man fooled. Three years after her father's painfully dismissive reaction to the original photographs, this must have been a real temptation for Elsie to stretch her creative wings and prove her talents on the biggest stage imaginable. She must have been exhilarated and terrified all at once. And her father, Arthur Wright, couldn't abide the suggestion of fraud, the risk of social disgrace. So was now the moment to confess? You could hardly fault Elsie for biting her tongue. At first, Elsie Wright had been trying to comfort Frances. Then she had been showing off her talents as an artist and a photographer. But as the deception continued, she began lying, because it would have been heartless to tell the truth. Edward Gardiner and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had so publicly put their trust in Elsie and Frances and their photographs and been so mocked for it, that for the young women to confess would be to humiliate both both men utterly. Not for the first time in human history, young women decided to keep quiet to spare the fragile egos of men. Conan Doyle had a long standing curiosity about the unseen and the paranormal. Shortly before he heard about the fairy photographs, this had firmed into a passionate belief in spiritualism, triggered by a series of bereavements. First, his wife, Louisa, died at the age of 50. Then Conan Doyle lost both his brother and his oldest son in the great flu epidemic that followed the First World War. As Conan Doyle was writing an essay about fairies, his mother, to whom he'd always been very close, also died. Edward Gardiner was in mourning too, for his late wife. Both men, it seems, were desperate to believe there was something on the other side of death. After a devastating war and a deadly flu pandemic, they were not alone in that desperation. Remember how popular spiritualism was? How many people were attempting to contact their lost loved ones through seances? Elsie Wright understood this very well. Remember that she'd been working in a photography studio, adding colour to the black and white portraits of dead soldiers or creating composite images of them and their families, the living pictured alongside the dead. Elsie recalled.

[Elsie Wright (Quoted)]

There were stacks and stacks of work and it was all rather sad, as most all the tickets set on top of killed in action.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Few young women could have understood better what Conan Doyle and Gardiner might be going through. Elsie felt sorry for them. She agreed with Francis that they would simply wait until the old men passed away in 1930. Sir Arthur did. Elsie and Francis were both in their 20s when it happened. The New York Times headline noted that Conan Doyle's family were waiting for a message from his spirit. All Francis and Elsie had to do was to wait for Edward Gardner to pass away and they could finally reveal the truth. But that moment never seemed to arrive. Gardiner lived until 1969, just short of his hundredth birthday, and by then his son was also an evangelist for the fairies. Elsie and Francis, both in their 60s, were still trapped by their joke. From 1917 throughout the 1970s, Elsie dropped hints, telling journalists that the photographs were.

[Elsie Wright (Quoted)]

Pictures of figments of our imagination.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Edward Gardiner had always said that the fairies were manifestations of the psychic energy of the girls. But Elsie's phrasing was distinctly ambiguous. It was only in 1981 that Gardiner's son died. Frances was working on a tell all memoir. Neither woman wanted to be left dangling if the other one confessed. Tabloid journalists, academics and and the British Journal of Photography were all sniffing around the story. Finally, the truth came out. Just as Conan Doyle didn't know the full truth about Elsie Wright, Elsie Wright can't have known the full truth about Conan Doyle. She would have had no idea, for example, that Conan Doyle's father, Charles, was afflicted first by depression, then by epilepsy, and finally by alcoholism. She wouldn't have known that Charles Altamont Doyle lived his final years at the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum. She wouldn't have known that in those final years in the asylum he sketched elegant pictures of fairies, one with a scrawled note, I have known such a creature. But she did know that Conan Doyle was a man in mourning. She didn't want to add to his pain. And so a joke that was supposed to last for a couple of hours ended up lasting 65 years. The Editor of the British Journal of Photography, Geoffrey Crawley, mused, if you take.

[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quoted)]

As the criterion of success coverage in the national media in column inches and television time, quite apart from articles, books and having a street name to commemorate your efforts, then Elsie is by far the most successful photographer in the craft's history. If it is remembered that that success has been based on the first photograph she ever took, then whether or not you believe in fairies, it has to be admitted that her record will probably remain unsurpassed.

[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

Elsie and Francis both died within a few years of Elsie's confession. Frances herself always maintained that even though the photographs were faked, she really had seen fairies. Fairies are famous for casting mischievous spells and I can't help thinking about El Elsie and Frances heading down to Cottingley Beck that summer over a century ago, where the water danced and the leaves provided shelter from the blazing sun and from the skeptical eyes of the grown ups. Elsie was cradling the fragile camera. Frances had Elsie's beautiful drawings and a pocket full of hats pins to prop them up. Together they cast a spell that lasted a lifetime. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes@tim harford.com. Cautionary Tales is written me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge Stella Harford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of me LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. And if you want to hear the show ad free and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tale shorts, then sign up for Pushkin plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin FM plus. And Doug Here we have the Limu IMU in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

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[Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)]

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