The Cottingley Fairies (1917-1920): Five Photographs, Two Cousins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

What the Cottingley case is, in a paragraph.

In July 1917, two cousins — sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths — produced two photographs at the beck behind Elsie's family home in the West Yorkshire village of Cottingley. The first, taken by Elsie, showed Frances looking past the camera with four small winged fairies dancing in the foreground. The second, taken by Frances a month later, showed Elsie reaching out to a winged gnome-figure. Elsie's father Arthur Wright, a skilled amateur photographer who had developed the plates, dismissed them as obvious paper cutouts and refused to discuss them. Three years later, in 1920, the photographs reached Edward L. Gardner, a leading figure in the Theosophical Society, through Elsie's mother Polly. Gardner showed them to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle, then completing an article on fairies for the Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine, was electrified. With Doyle's encouragement Gardner sent the girls a new camera, sealed plates, and instructions; in August 1920 they produced three additional photographs, including one Doyle later described as the most remarkable of the series, depicting a group of fairies in what looked like a vegetal sun-bath. Doyle's December 1920 Strand article, "Fairies Photographed — An Epoch-Making Event," published the photographs to the English-speaking world, and his 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies elaborated his case. The photographs were debated, defended, and intermittently investigated for sixty years. In 1981 and 1983, in separate interviews with researchers Joe Cooper and Geoffrey Crawley, Elsie Wright (then 81) and Frances Griffiths (then 76) admitted that four of the five photographs had been faked, using paper cutouts of fairies drawn by Elsie from images in Princess Mary's Gift Book (1914) and held in place with hatpins. They disagreed only about the fifth and final photograph: Elsie said it too was a fake; Frances insisted it was genuine. Both held their positions until their deaths — Frances in 1986, Elsie in 1988.

The documented record.

The two cousins and the beck

Frances Griffiths and her mother had come from South Africa to England in 1917 and were lodging with the Wrights at 31 Main Street, Cottingley, while Frances's father was on active service in France. Verified The beck — a narrow wooded stream running below the back garden — was a favorite play area for the two cousins. Frances later said that the photographs began as a child's attempt to defend herself after she had come home repeatedly with wet shoes from playing there; she had told her parents she went to the beck "to see the fairies," and was being scolded for the wet shoes more than humored about the fairies. The first photograph, by this account, was an attempt to prove the fairies' existence to skeptical adults [1].

The 1917 photographs

The first photograph, taken in July 1917 by Elsie using her father Arthur Wright's quarter-plate Midg camera, shows Frances behind a small group of dancing winged figures. Verified Arthur Wright developed the plate. He examined the original and concluded almost immediately that the figures were paper cutouts; he searched the girls' bedroom and the area around the beck for the cutouts but found nothing. He banned them from using the camera. The second photograph, taken a month later by Frances, shows Elsie reaching toward a small bearded gnome-like figure [2].

The matter went no further at the time. The plates were kept in a family drawer. Arthur Wright considered the question closed; Polly Wright was less certain. Frances and her mother returned to South Africa briefly in 1919, returning to England again the following year.

Theosophy enters: Edward L. Gardner

In 1919 Polly Wright attended a Theosophical Society lecture in Bradford on "fairy life." She mentioned afterward that her daughter and niece had photographed fairies in Cottingley. The remark was passed up the Theosophical channel and reached Verified Edward L. Gardner, head of the Society's Blavatsky Lodge in London and an active proponent of the view that nature spirits were a real, observable category of being [3]. Gardner obtained copies of the plates from the Wrights in spring 1920, had them examined by the photographer Harold Snelling, and on Snelling's preliminary judgment that the figures were "single-exposure" and "moved during the exposure," began to circulate the photographs as potentially genuine.

Conan Doyle takes the case

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, then sixty-one and at the height of his international fame, had been commissioned to write an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine's Christmas 1920 issue. Verified Doyle had been a committed Spiritualist since the death of his son Kingsley in 1918, and his interest in the photographs was framed by his broader conviction that the material and the spiritual worlds were connected in ways orthodox science had refused to investigate. He sent the photographs to Kodak in London for analysis. The Kodak technicians reported that the images showed no signs of double exposure or studio manipulation but added explicitly that this was not the same thing as confirming what was depicted. Kodak declined to issue a certificate of authenticity [4].

Doyle, by then in Australia on a Spiritualist lecture tour, kept in touch with Gardner by post. Gardner traveled to Cottingley in July 1920, met the family, and judged the cousins to be straightforward and incapable of having faked the photographs. He proposed a second series under more controlled conditions: he sent the girls two cameras (Cameo folding plate cameras) and twenty-four sealed photographic plates, instructed them to use only those plates, and arranged for him to be the first to receive the exposed plates back. Verified The girls produced three additional photographs in August 1920: Frances and the Leaping Fairy, Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie, and the photograph Doyle would describe as the most remarkable of the series, Fairies and Their Sun-Bath (often called the "fifth photograph") [5].

The Strand article and The Coming of the Fairies

Doyle's article, Fairies Photographed — An Epoch-Making Event, appeared in the December 1920 Strand Magazine, with the first two photographs reproduced. Verified The issue sold out within days. Doyle's name on the article carried more weight than the article's own arguments did; reviewers who would have dismissed the photographs as obvious from an anonymous correspondent had to engage them seriously because the creator of Sherlock Holmes was vouching for them. A second Strand article followed in March 1921 with the 1920 series. Doyle's book-length treatment, The Coming of the Fairies, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1922, defending the photographs and presenting a wider survey of fairy sightings in Britain and Europe [6].

The early skeptical response

Skeptical responses were immediate. Major John Hall-Edwards, an early radiology pioneer, published a critique in 1921 noting that the fairies' clothing was indistinguishable from contemporary Parisian fashion plates and that their shadowing was inconsistent with the scene. Claimed The conjurer Maurice Hewlett and the writer G.K. Chesterton expressed varying degrees of skepticism. The photographer Harold Snelling, who had initially supported the case, later admitted privately that his early endorsement had been overstated [7]. None of this dissuaded Doyle, who continued to defend the photographs publicly until his death in 1930.

James Randi and the Princess Mary's Gift Book identification

The most consequential single piece of skeptical work came in 1977–1978, when the writer and stage magician James Randi, working with members of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, applied computer enhancement to the photographs and identified the fairies in the 1917 images as drawings derived from illustrations by Claude Shepperson in the 1914 charity anthology Princess Mary's Gift Book. Verified The dancing figures in the first photograph correspond closely — in posture, costume, and proportion — to the illustrations accompanying a poem by Alfred Noyes titled "A Spell for a Fairy" in that volume. The identification was published in Randi's Flim-Flam! (1980) and was subsequently confirmed by the cousins themselves [8].

The 1981–1983 admissions

In 1981, the researcher Joe Cooper began a series of interviews with Frances Griffiths (now Mrs. Way) for an article in The Unexplained magazine. Verified In conversation with Cooper, Frances admitted for the first time on record that the first four photographs had been faked. The fairies, she said, were paper cutouts that Elsie had drawn, copying from Princess Mary's Gift Book, and they had been propped up in the grass with hatpins [9]. Elsie Wright (now Mrs. Hill) made a similar admission to Cooper and, independently and more comprehensively, in a 1983 interview series with the British Journal of Photography editor Geoffrey Crawley, who published a nine-part investigation of the case across 1982–1983 [10].

The cousins gave one consistent account of the first four photographs. They differed on the fifth.

The disputed fifth photograph

Elsie Wright told Crawley that all five photographs had been faked, the fifth like the others. Frances Griffiths told Cooper, and later repeated on the BBC's Nationwide in 1983 and to print interviewers until her death in 1986, that the fifth photograph — Fairies and Their Sun-Bath — was a genuine photograph of fairies and had not been staged. Disputed Frances's specific account was that she and Elsie had been at the beck preparing to take a fake photograph, that the fake had failed, and that as they were leaving she had seen and photographed an actual gathering of fairies; she said she had told no one for sixty years because, by then, no one would believe her [9][11]. Elsie's account was that the fifth photograph was a double exposure produced when Frances had pressed the shutter while a cutout was being moved. Both cousins held to their positions until their deaths — Frances in 1986, Elsie in 1988.

The plates and cameras today

The original glass plates from the 1917 and 1920 sessions, the two Cameo cameras provided by Gardner in 1920, and a large body of correspondence between the Wrights, Gardner, and Doyle, are held principally by the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Verified A smaller collection of family material, including Elsie's later drawings and notebooks, is held by the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds [12].

The contested interpretations.

The Theosophical reading

Edward Gardner's reading of the photographs, formed before and not substantially revised after the cousins' 1983 admissions, was that the images depicted genuine nature spirits of a kind Theosophy had long maintained were real but normally invisible to adult human perception. Claimed Children, Gardner believed, retained the perceptual openness that adults lost. On this reading the photographs were not a hoax that succeeded against the Theosophists; they were a confirmation Theosophy had been waiting for. Gardner held this position until his death in 1969, fourteen years before the admissions [3]. The reading is largely a museum piece today; it is preserved in the historiography because Doyle's defense rested on it.

Doyle's reading

Conan Doyle's reading was Theosophy-adjacent but not strictly Theosophical. Doyle's The Coming of the Fairies argued for the photographs on three combined grounds: the technical analysis (the Kodak finding that the plates showed no manipulation); the testimony of the cousins (whom he and Gardner judged incapable of sustained deception); and the consilience of the photographs with other modern fairy sightings he was simultaneously collecting. Claimed Doyle's reading was not that fairies were nature spirits in the Theosophical sense; it was that they were a real biological or quasi-biological category of being whose existence orthodox biology had simply not yet acknowledged. He held to this position until his death in 1930 [6].

The Crawley reading

Geoffrey Crawley's 1982–1983 series in the British Journal of Photography is the definitive technical account. Verified Crawley reconstructed how each photograph had been produced, identified the source illustrations, and corresponded with both cousins in the period of their admissions. His reading of the case is essentially the modern consensus: four of the photographs are cutout fakes; the fifth, on the balance of the technical evidence, is also a fake (probably a double exposure as Elsie described), but Frances's claim cannot be excluded with certainty on the photographic evidence alone [10].

The cousin-divergence reading

A more cautious modern reading, advanced by some historians of the case, treats the cousin-divergence on the fifth photograph as the most interesting datum in the entire case. Claimed On this reading, two children sustained a shared deception for sixty-six years, then agreed publicly that the deception had taken place — and then continued to disagree, publicly and in detail, about whether one of the photographs they had together produced was a fake. The divergence is harder to interpret as a continuation of the original deception (why would Frances continue to claim the fifth photograph was real when she had already conceded the other four?) than it is as a sincere disagreement about a specific event that took place when one cousin was twelve. The reading does not require the fifth photograph to be a real fairy photograph. It requires it to be the case that Frances, at the time of the photograph, believed she was photographing something she had seen.

The unanswered questions.

The original cutouts

The paper cutouts the cousins used in the 1917 photographs have never been recovered. Elsie said in 1983 that she had thrown them into the beck after each session. Unverified No surviving cutout has been produced for direct comparison with the photographed figures. The identification of the source illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book is strong enough that the absence of physical cutouts does not undermine the admission, but the cutouts themselves are not part of the evidentiary record.

What the fifth photograph actually shows

The technical interpretation of the fifth photograph, Fairies and Their Sun-Bath, is unresolved at the level of the photographic evidence alone. The image is unusual within the series: it does not show the cousins; it does not have the flat-paper appearance of the first four; the figures are partially obscured by foliage and have an indistinct character that the other photographs' figures lack. Disputed The available technical analyses are consistent with both the double-exposure account (Elsie) and a less elaborate account in which the photograph was attempted as a fake, the fake failed, and the resulting image was kept as a curiosity. They are also consistent — Frances's account — with the photograph being something other than a deliberate fake. Without the original plate's negative density data, which has not been published in a form that resolves the question, the fifth photograph is technically indeterminate [10][11].

Why Doyle believed

The deeper biographical question raised by the case is why Conan Doyle — whose fictional detective is the paradigm of skeptical reasoning — staked his public reputation on photographs that his own son-in-law and many of his correspondents told him were obvious cutouts. Claimed The standard biographical answer is grief: Doyle's son Kingsley had died of pneumonia after wounds sustained at the Somme; his brother Innes had died of pneumonia in 1919; his Spiritualist commitments were anchored in a need to believe that the dead persisted and could be contacted. The Cottingley photographs were, on this reading, less an evidentiary commitment than an emotional one [13]. The reading is well-supported by Doyle's own writings of the period but does not exhaust the question.

Whether the cousins were ever paid

Doyle and Gardner offered the Wright family financial inducements at several points to retain control of the photographs and the story; the amounts and the family's responses are documented in patches. Whether either cousin received money for the photographs themselves, beyond expenses and small honoraria, is not fully reconstructable from the surviving correspondence [12]. Unverified

The Doyle archive

Some of Doyle's private correspondence on the case has been published; the bulk remains in the family archive at the British Library and in private collections. A comprehensive scholarly edition of the Cottingley correspondence has not been produced. Whether a comprehensive edition would resolve any of the remaining questions, or simply elaborate the existing picture, is itself an open question.

Primary material.

The accessible primary record on the Cottingley case is held principally at four locations:

• The National Science and Media Museum, Bradford holds the original glass plates from both the 1917 and 1920 sessions, the Cameo cameras supplied by Gardner, Elsie Wright's later drawings, and a substantial run of correspondence between the Wright family, Gardner, and Doyle.
• The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds holds a smaller family collection including Elsie's notebooks and a portion of Polly Wright's correspondence.
• The British Library holds Doyle's surviving manuscripts of The Coming of the Fairies and related correspondence within the broader Conan Doyle papers.
• The Theosophical Society Archives, London hold Edward Gardner's working files on the case, including his correspondence with the Wright family during the summer of 1920.

Critical individual items include: the five original glass plates; the two Cameo cameras; Doyle's December 1920 and March 1921 Strand Magazine articles; the first edition of The Coming of the Fairies (1922); Geoffrey Crawley's 1982–1983 British Journal of Photography series; Joe Cooper's 1982 article in The Unexplained and his subsequent 1990 book The Case of the Cottingley Fairies; the 1983 BBC Nationwide interview with Frances Griffiths.

The sequence.

1. 1914 Princess Mary's Gift Book published, including the Claude Shepperson illustrations for "A Spell for a Fairy" by Alfred Noyes — the source images Elsie Wright would later use.
2. July 1917 First photograph taken by Elsie Wright at Cottingley Beck.
3. September 1917 Second photograph taken by Frances Griffiths. Arthur Wright examines the plates, concludes they are cutouts, and forbids further use of the camera.
4. 1919 Polly Wright attends a Theosophical Society lecture in Bradford and mentions the photographs.
5. Spring 1920 Edward Gardner obtains copies of the plates; consults Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
6. July 1920 Gardner visits Cottingley; sends the cousins sealed plates and two Cameo cameras.
7. August 1920 Three additional photographs taken by the cousins, including Fairies and Their Sun-Bath.
8. December 1920 Doyle's article Fairies Photographed — An Epoch-Making Event appears in The Strand Magazine.
9. March 1921 Second Strand article presents the 1920 series.
10. 1922 Doyle's The Coming of the Fairies published.
11. 1930 Conan Doyle dies, having defended the photographs to the end.
12. 1969 Edward Gardner dies, also without recanting.
13. 1977–1978 James Randi and CSICOP identify the source illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book.
14. 1981–1983 Joe Cooper interviews Frances Griffiths; Geoffrey Crawley conducts his nine-part British Journal of Photography investigation; both cousins admit four of the five photographs were faked.
15. 1983 Frances Griffiths appears on the BBC's Nationwide and publicly maintains that the fifth photograph is genuine.
16. 1986 Frances Griffiths dies, position on the fifth photograph unchanged.
17. 1988 Elsie Wright dies, position on the fifth photograph unchanged.

Cases on this archive that connect.

The Voynich Manuscript (File 013) — a different kind of case in which an object's perceived strangeness drew sustained interpretive attention from credentialed observers, with the question of authorship sitting at the heart of the puzzle.

Jack the Ripper (File 066) — the surrounding case in which the appetite for an answer outran the available evidence, with the credulity of the public an active participant in the case's longevity.

The Wow! Signal (File 036) — a contrasting case in which a single piece of putative evidence has not been resolved in the manner Cottingley eventually was: the radio detection was real, what produced it remains contested, and no admission has closed the file.

More related files coming as the archive grows. Planned: the Surgeon's Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster (the iconic 1934 hoax that outlived its makers, as Cottingley nearly did); the Bunyip photographs; and a comparative file on the social conditions under which photographic evidence is or isn't accepted.

Full bibliography.

1. Griffiths, Frances (with Christine Lynch). Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies. JMJ Publications, 2009.
2. Wright, Arthur. Correspondence and diary fragments, 1917–1920. National Science and Media Museum, Bradford.
3. Gardner, Edward L. Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel. Theosophical Publishing House, 1945.
4. Kodak Limited, London. Internal analysis correspondence on the Cottingley plates, 1920. Held in the Doyle papers, British Library, and in the Gardner files, Theosophical Society Archives.
5. Gardner, Edward L. Correspondence with Polly and Arthur Wright, July–September 1920. Theosophical Society Archives, London.
6. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Coming of the Fairies. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1922.
7. Hall-Edwards, John, et al. Contemporary letters to the editor, The Strand Magazine and The Bookman, 1921.
8. Randi, James. Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Lippincott & Crowell, 1980.
9. Cooper, Joe. "The Cottingley Fairies: An Update." The Unexplained, Issue 117, 1982; expanded in The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, Robert Hale, 1990.
10. Crawley, Geoffrey. "That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies." Nine-part series, British Journal of Photography, December 1982 – April 1983.
11. Griffiths (Way), Frances. Interview, BBC Nationwide, broadcast September 1983.
12. National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. Cottingley Fairies collection inventory and provenance documentation, updated 2024.
13. Lycett, Andrew. The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Free Press, 2007.
14. Smith, Paul. "The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend," in Peter Narvaez (ed.), The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, Garland, 1991.