In 1917, two young cousins borrowed a camera, walked to the stream at the bottom of the garden, and came back with a photograph of a little girl surrounded by dancing fairies. Within a few years that picture and four others had convinced one of the most famous authors in the world that fairies were real. The truth wouldn’t come out for more than sixty years.
A camera and a dare
It was the summer of 1917 in Cottingley, a village near Bradford in West Yorkshire. Elsie Wright, sixteen, and her younger cousin Frances Griffiths, nine — staying with the Wrights while her father was away at the war — spent their afternoons playing by Cottingley Beck. Scolded one day for coming home with wet shoes, Frances protested that she had been “to see the fairies”. Elsie backed her up, and borrowed her father Arthur’s quarter-plate camera to prove it.
When Arthur developed the plate, he found Frances posing calmly beside four winged fairies. An amateur photographer himself, he suspected a trick and thought little more of it. But Elsie’s mother, Polly — who was drawn to the spiritualist movement sweeping the country — believed every bit of it.
How two girls fooled a nation
For three years the photographs were just a family curiosity. Then, around 1919 and 1920, Polly showed them at a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. They caught the attention of a leading Theosophist, Edward Gardner — and, through him, of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle, by then a devoted spiritualist, was captivated. He had the plates examined, declared them genuine, and published them in The Strand Magazine at Christmas 1920, later expanding the story into a book, The Coming of the Fairies. The man who had invented literature’s most coldly rational detective staked his reputation on the existence of fairies.
The secret hidden in a children’s book
The fairies were cut-outs. Elsie, a gifted young artist, had copied fairy illustrations from a popular volume called Princess Mary’s Gift Book, coloured them in, and propped the paper figures upright in the grass with hatpins. Photographed at the right angle and in soft focus, they looked astonishingly like tiny living creatures caught mid-dance beside the girls.
Sixty years of silence
What began as a prank to get out of trouble spiralled far beyond the girls’ control. As the sensation grew, they felt trapped — Frances was teased at school, and Elsie could not bear to humiliate the famous Sir Arthur who had defended them so publicly. So they said nothing. Decade after decade, into old age, they stuck to their story.
Finally, in the early 1980s, they admitted the truth: the fairies had been cardboard cut-outs all along, and Elsie set it down in a letter of confession in 1983. But there was one last twist. Frances always insisted that one of the five photographs — the very last — was real, and that on that day, the fairies had genuinely been there.
Why it worked
It is easy to laugh now, but the hoax landed at a raw moment. Britain had just endured the First World War; a generation of young men was gone, and grieving families turned in enormous numbers to spiritualism and the hope that the unseen world was real. Two innocent-looking girls, a celebrated author desperate to believe, and a country aching for a little wonder — that was all it took to make fairies front-page news.
Frequently asked questions
Were the Cottingley Fairies real?
No. Four of the five photographs were admitted fakes, made with paper cut-outs held up by hatpins. The girls confessed in the 1980s.
Who took the photographs?
Cousins Elsie Wright, aged sixteen, and Frances Griffiths, aged nine, near Cottingley in West Yorkshire, beginning in 1917.
Why did Arthur Conan Doyle believe them?
A committed spiritualist, he wanted them to be true and published them as genuine evidence of fairies in 1920.
Did the girls ever say a photo was real?
Yes — Frances maintained to the end of her life that the fifth and final photograph was genuine.
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