#cottingleyfairies

[weirdgardenerd]

If you haven’t seen the latest episode of Fortean Photography, you should. We examine the famous Cottingley Fairies photographs and share their story. Link in to our YouTube channel is in my bio.🧚🏻‍♂️🧚‍♀️ #cottingleyfairies #forteanphotography #paranomal #supernatural #singularfortean (at Madison, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxKO_puH3hK/?igshid=6sksxr21a7e1

[danitougher]

Exactly 100 Years since the first photographs were taken, a genuine picture of a Cottingley Fairy in the wild... Throwback Tuesday to one of my favourite photoshoots with @scottchalmersphotography with wings by @l.o.m_fashion 😍 ... #cottingleyfairies #fairy #photoshoot #photographer #wings #dance #pointe #nofilter #throwback

[jolie-coquille-blog]

✨Nouvel article/vidéo☁️Chroniques mai 2017✨ •• Aujourd'hui, une nouvelle série voit le jour sur ma chaine 🌹 Chaque mois, on fera des jolies choses ensemble : j'innoverai, je découvrirai... et je vous amène avec moi 💛 Au menu ce mois-ci : on rencontre les Fées de Cottingley, on déniche des robes & jupes à fleurs vintage, et je découvre les résultats de mon test ADN sur mes origines... ✨ { Commentaires sur le blog & ma chaîne 💌 } . . . #youtubeuse #youtuber #frenchblogger #frenchyoutuber #frenchyoutubeuse #youtube #dnatest #testadn #cottingleyfairies #feesdecottingley #vintageclothing

[zanyradtree-blog]

[enchantedliving]

The Cottingley Fairies & How Two Young Cousins Fooled Sherlock Holmes

by Carolyn T. Hughes and from our “Vintage & Victoriana” issue, Autumn 2016

In the summer of 1917 two cousins, ten-year-old Frances Griffiths and sixteen-year-old Elsie  Wright, spent a lazy afternoon lounging by a narrow brook behind the Wright family garden in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. By all accounts, Frances, who had moved from South Africa with her mother Annie to live with the Wrights, was an adventurous child. In fact, she was playing on the rocks by the brook when she slipped and fell in. Frances’s mother Annie, decidedly not amused by the state of her daughter’s dress or by the girl’s insistence that she was playing with fairies, sent her daughter to the attic bedroom she shared with her cousin. Elsie, feeling sorry for Frances, joined her there, and it was while the girls fumed at the injustice of it all that they hatched a plan to play a practical joke on their parents. They cut out pictures of fairies that were in one of Elsie’s books, Princess Mary’s Gift Book (which happened to have a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the legendary author and creator of Sherlock Holmes, in it), and pasted the fairy pictures on cardboard. Then the girls asked Elsie’s father Arthur if they could borrow his Midg quarter-plate camera, and Arthur, unaware of the girls’ plans, acquiesced.

One can imagine the cousins giggling as they set off for the brook the next day, blindly unaware that the pictures they would take that afternoon would make them—through the vagaries of fate—the initiators of one of the greatest hoaxes in the twentieth century. All they knew was that the day was sunny and bright. Elsie, who had been given one glass plate for the camera by her father, put flowers in Frances’s hair and posed the cut-out fairies around her using simple hat pins. She took four pictures of Frances with her various "fairy” companions that day and then anxiously brought the camera back to her father, who had a darkroom under the stairs. Alas, instead of being excited about seeing a phalanx of little people around his niece when he developed the film, Arthur got angry. He ignored the girls’ protests that there were real fairies in the pictures; instead, he said they looked like “bits of paper.” (He was correct). Not to be deterred, a month later the girls decided to try the ruse again. This time Frances posed Elsie on the grass with a gnome pinned to her skirt, high-kicking like a performer out of Riverdance. When the much-put-upon Arthur developed this new batch of photographs, he’d had enough. In fact, he was so angry at the girls’ “nonsense” that he banned them from ever using his camera again. The whole matter would have died then and there except for the fact that the girls’ mothers actually believed their daughters and began discussing the pictures at the various theosophy meetings they attended. Elsie’s mother Polly even went so far as to bring copies of the pictures to several meetings  

News of the photographs spread slowly—but spread it did. In 1920, some three years after the pictures were taken, forty-nine-year-old building contractor and ardent theosophist Edward L. Gardner was sent the prints in the post. Already pro-fairy in his leanings, Gardner was amazed by the pictures and decided to make it his mission in life to prove their authenticity. As luck would have it (and this is a story of luck, both good and bad), word of the photos also found its way to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who happened to be writing an article about fairies for The Strand, the very magazine where Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance. A spiritualist and proponent of spirit photography, Doyle was, to say the least, Team Fairy. He was born in Ireland—a country rich in tales of “little people.” His father, who suffered from mental illness for decades, drew pictures of them in his notebooks while in the Montrose Royal Lunatic Society. His uncle Richard, a talented artist, not only told Doyle that he had had conversations with fairies but also illustrated fairy-themed books. (Some of his illustrations have made it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Gallery of Ireland.) If that wasn’t enough, Doyle’s own children professed to have seen fairies in the family garden. Thrilled about the pictures, Doyle put the initial article that he was working on aside. (It would be published in The Strand in 1921.) He and Gardner would now combine forces, with Gardner doing most of the work on the ground with the Wright and Griffith families. (Doyle would never actually meet Frances and Elsie, or their parents.) Both men sent the pictures to various photography experts who, depending upon their own beliefs, either thought the pictures were legitimate or, in the case of the Kodak company, had serious doubts, though it said it could not prove that the plate had been tampered with. Friends like author Sir Oliver Lodge and the magician Harry Houdini thought Doyle had fallen for a hoax and told him his reputation would take a huge hit (which it did). He didn’t listen because not only did he believe the photographs were real, he thought they “marked an epoch in human thought.”

Both Gardner and Doyle wanted more pictures of fairies, so Gardner met with the family in early August 1920 and gave each girl a Cameo quarter-plate folding camera. Gardner was so entranced by what he deemed the innocence of the girls that he didn’t even grow suspicious when the girls claimed that the fairies tended to come out only for them. Some two weeks after Gardner left for London, Elsie and Frances produced three more pictures of the “little people.” Gardner, ecstatic over these new photographs, sent prints to Doyle, who was in Australia at the time on a lecture tour. Armed with what he considered even more photographic proof of the existence of fairies, Doyle completed his new article, which was published in The Strand in December 1920. (The editor of the magazine, Herbert Greenhough, felt that Doyle was being duped, but he ran the article anyway.) The headline was anything but subtle. “Fairies Photographed—An Epoch Making Event Described by A. Conan Doyle.” The issue sold out in three days.

The existence (or lack thereof) of fairies and the legitimacy of the pictures became part of the public debate in the United Kingdom and elsewhere for over sixty years. In 1920, there was no CNN or Twitter to spread stories in the blink of an eye. (Hanging with fairies #tiny). The Strand’s circulation averaged 500,000 at its peak, certainly admirable numbers for a literary magazine but not enough to make this particular story stay in the public’s imagination for as long as it did. It seems clear that the sheer fame and reputation of Doyle (co-mingled with the reputation of his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes) played a massive role in keeping the pictures alive. In Holmes, Doyle had created a larger-than-life character. Holmes battled criminal masterminds and won! He was logic personified. There is little doubt that, as regards the case of the Cottingley fairy pictures, many readers blurred the lines between the author and his creation, or, to quote Yeats, “the dancer and the dance.” Thus when Doyle calmly wrote about the validity of the pictures—“after carefully going into every possible source of error … a strong prima-facie case has been built up”—one practically expected to read, “Why, it’s elementary, my dear Watson.” Certainly, Doyle’s judgment held more sway in the public’s mind than just about any other writer of his time. Even Elsie’s father, a man who had serious doubts about the pictures from the very beginning, was so awed upon receiving a letter from the author that he kept his feelings to himself.

Doyle wrote that the only thing separating us from “these little folk who appear to be our neighbors” were “vibrations.” He went into even greater detail about his theory in his 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies: The Cottingley Incident (which also included the two Strand articles). “If we could conceive a race of beings which were constructed in material which threw out shorter or longer vibrations, they would be invisible unless we could tune ourselves up or tone them down.” To Doyle, it was clear that Elsie and Frances were “clairvoyant” and because of this gift they could photograph the normally invisible fairies. In this argument, Doyle was helped by the fact that the post–World War I population had spent the past four or five years having the invisible made manifest. Science had developed and unearthed invisible gases that poisoned solders on the battlefield; unseen zeppelins had dropped bombs on cities; submarines lurking underneath the water’s surface had sunk ships. In addition, the invisible but deadly Spanish influenza had wiped out anywhere from 50 million to 100 million of the world’s population. The logic that unseen things could be created and/or unearthed by scientific methods—although grasping in this case—was certainly there.

           Another factor was that the population after World War I was crippled by loss and at a standstill over how to deal with their grief. In his book Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, historian Jay Winter paints communities in perpetual mourning because there were millions of soldiers whose bodies were never found. Devastated families had a desire to connect with their departed and to get the answer to the eternal question: Was there life after death? Spiritualism (i.e., the communication with the dead) and spirit photography (where unscrupulous photographers took advantage of this grief and tampered with pictures so family members believed they saw their loved ones in the images) bloomed during this time, and Doyle, who had lost family members in the war, believed in and was a proponent of both. Initially, the author was hesitant to link these things with the Cottingley fairy narrative, but he eventually relented. Spiritualism, spirit photography, the existence of fairies—all these things proved, in his mind at least, that there were other worlds to be discovered. “When Columbus knelt in prayer upon the edge of America what prophetic eye saw all that a new continent might do to affect the destinies of the world?” Doyle wrote. “We seem to be on the edge of a new continent.”

    Ouch.

 And what of Elsie and Frances—the ringleaders in this great hoax? Gardner and Doyle went to their deaths convinced of the innocence of the girls, while Frances and Elsie rued the day that the men came into their lives. They were bitter toward Doyle because the author gave them only £20 each for their story. They envisioned him making oodles of money off the pictures. (He was paid £500.) Despite the fact that Doyle used pseudonyms for the girls and their family in his writing, it wasn’t long before reporters tracked the cousins down. Frances was teased in school about it. Elsie was simply mortified. They both left the country—relieved to be anonymous. But eventually they migrated back to England and time and again were given the chance to come clean. The Daily Express tracked Elsie down in 1966, but the most she would admit was that the fairies “might have been figments of her imagination.” In 1976, both women were interviewed for a BBC program called Nationwide. Once again, they refused to admit any wrongdoing. In 1983, they finally started to tell the truth. Frances admitted to a reporter from the Times that four pictures were fake—and Elsie, impressed by Geoffrey Crawley’s erudite exposé about the pictures in the British Journal of Photography, wrote him a letter admitting everything.

According to the letter, Elsie felt bad for Doyle and Gardner—and was particularly affected by the publication of a cruel cartoon of the author in a newspaper in which he was “chained to a chair with his head in a cloud, and Sherlock Holmes … beside him.” Thus, according to Elsie, the girls kept quiet as to not hurt the men any more than they had already done. As far as Doyle’s reasons for believing in the pictures, Elsie speculated that “he had lost his son in the war and the poor man was probably trying to comfort himself with unworldly things.” Perhaps the most important reason for coming clean, though, was that Elsie didn’t want to leave her grandchildren with the specter of a “weirdly grandmother.”

Like just about everything with the case of the Cottingley fairies, the story ends with a strange twist. Frances had admitted to the Times that the pair had faked four pictures—but she contended that the fifth, The Fairy Bower, was real. (This proclamation came as quite a shock to Elsie.) Frances was in the middle of writing a book about her life when she passed away in 1986—leaving the fifth picture forever shrouded in mystery. Perhaps after lying for so many years, Frances could not entirely give up being a fabulist. Perhaps she had a psychological break and had convinced herself that she had seen a fairy. Or perhaps the light was right on that fateful summer day all those decades ago and something from another world had been captured on film for the world to see. Alas, these are questions not even Sherlock Holmes could answer.

Carolyn Hughes is a novelist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Village Voice.You can follow her on Twitter @hughesnews333.

[houseofsharkey]

Right, now to come up with some flowery stuff to fill in the gaps. #stitch #craft #creative #handmade #bag #fairies #flowers #pink #purple #cottingleyfairies