Last of the Cottingley Fairies
The final fraudulent Cottingley fairies photograph was taken on 21 August 1920 by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths.
The Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine opened with an ‘an epoch-making event’: Arthur Conan Doyle had photos that proved the existence of fairies.
They had been taken three years earlier by Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths – 16 and ten – at the bottom of Elsie’s garden in Cottingley, near Bradford.
Elsie’s father, an amateur photographer, thought them fake – ‘illustrated fibs’. His daughter had a talent for art and a fierce imagination. Neighbours considered her ‘a bit strange, perhaps a bit otherly’. But encouraged by the theosophist Edward Gardner, the girls captured three more fairy images in the summer of 1920. The last was taken on 21 August.
For Conan Doyle it was all consolation after the death of his son in the First World War. He compared the moment to Columbus on the shores of America. ‘He was trying to comfort himself through unworldly things’, Elsie said.
Media harassment lost Elsie her job in Bradford. She emigrated to America. ‘The fairies … opened up a different life for me altogether’, she said.
Frances was still at school when the story broke. ‘I was determined afterward to be ordinary’, she said. Elsie and Frances were many things, but never that.
