A Glamour and a Mystery

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1:14You have all these special materials here to keep things safe. Yeah. Yeah, a quick risk assessment. In March, we visited the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds in England. They have the very first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays and medieval manuscripts from the 12th century. But we were there to see something else. We were told it was going to be very cold, and we wouldn't be able to wear our coats inside. They're so delicate and precious. The conservation officer was setting up the room so we could see some negatives of old photographs. And I'm just merely putting these down to stop this light sheet moving around anywhere because it's a little bit light.

2:06So I don't want anything to suddenly slide away. I'll go and get the negatives now. Thank you. Thank you.

2:16Well, if you don't want anything ruined, put it in a library's archive. The negatives the conservation officer came back with were made of glass, and a little bigger than playing cards. They're more than 100 years old, and they were the source of a mystery that lasted for most of the 20th century. One of the things that really struck me about these the first time I saw them, which sounds like a silly thing, but the fact that they've got their own little cardboard box specially made for them. Professor Merrick Burrow. So which one is this? Yeah, so this one is Francis and the Fairies. Francis Griffiths was nine years old when that photo was taken.

3:01It was 1917, and she had just moved to a very small village in England called Cottingley. Francis had grown up in South Africa, where her father had been stationed with the English Army. but he had been called to join the campaign on the Western Front during World War I and so Frances and her mother went to live with Frances' aunt and uncle and 16-year-old cousin, Elsie, in England. It was a very small space for two families who, the sisters, that's to say Frances and Elsie's mothers obviously knew each other from childhood but in other respects the families were to some extent strangers because they'd lived so far apart.

3:44So I think it was quite a pressured environment, not an awful lot of space to get away and be on your own, and very, very different from what Frances had experienced growing up in South Africa, where they lived in a quite big house with servants and so forth. So it was a very, very alienating, disorienting kind of experience for her. Frances was shy and spoke with a South African accent. When she first got to England, she didn't even know what snow was. And they arrived in April in the middle of snow and things like that, So she was completely thrown by the whole thing. Plus there was sort of tension in the house, I think, to some extent.

4:20Her mother's hair all fell out, such was the stress of, I mean, her father went off to the wall. So there's a lot going on, obviously, but there was clearly a lot of tension going on in the house. And Frances spent a lot of time down on her own by the beckel stream at the bottom of the garden and was often getting in trouble for getting the shoes wet, which is how really the whole thing started. So the story goes that she came back with her shoes wet again and her mother was exasperated for having scolded her about it many times and asked her what it was that she was doing down the beck all the time and she said that I go to see the fairies.

4:58And obviously that was met with incredulity. But for whatever reason, her cousin Elsie decided that she was going to back up her story and say that she'd seen fairies too. Merrick Burrow says that Elsie, who was seven years older than Francis had started to take her cousin under her wing even when the adults in the house started teasing Francis about saying she'd seen fairies both of the cousins stuck to their story this went on for a few weeks and then Elsie said she would prove that Francis' fairies were real Elsie's father had just bought a camera and he'd set up a small dark room in the house.

5:41So Elsie asked him if she could borrow the camera and some slides and go down to the stream with Francis to get a picture of the fairies. The camera was quite a big deal for them, I think. But he reluctantly agreed to give them one slide. I think at the cajoling of the two mums who said, well, go on, let's see what they can do. It was the first photograph Elsie ever took. When the cousins came back from the stream, they asked Elsie's father to develop the negative right away. Elsie went into the darkroom with him. Here's an interview with Elsie and Francis, almost 70 years later, describing that moment.

6:26Elsie is first. Dad says, I'll tell you what it's coming up like, that picture you've taken. He says, it's very untidy. He says, you've been eating sandwiches, the sandwich paper's all sticking up. And then he says, oh, what's these little leg things down here? And Elsa shouted out, they've come, they've come, they've come out. The original image is quite, you know, underexposed and a little bit kind of messy. But at the centre of the image is Frances Griffiths looking at the camera, resting her arms on the bank of the stream, and in front of her are arranged a group of dancing fairies with wings.

7:12How did Elsie's father and the family react to this photograph? I think they were bemused. I don't think they took it seriously. Clearly they didn't believe that this was really a photograph of fairies, but they couldn't explain it. He was baffled and perplexed and demanded to know how they'd done it. And the girls absolutely stood rigidly to their story that they'd been down, they saw fairies and they'd taken this photograph of them and that's what it was. So what happened next? Well, I think they thought that this would, you know, quiet their parents down for mocking them. But actually it seems to have egged them on.

7:52They got more joking at their expense, more mocking about it. They kept asking, I think, questions about how they'd done it and that they stuck to their story that they had seen fairies. And so a few weeks later, they then asked, could they borrow the camera again? And they took another photograph to prove the point. Elsie's father let them take the camera and another slide, and Elsie and Francis went back down to the stream. This time, Francis took the photograph, which showed Elsie sitting in some grass, reaching towards what appeared to be a little man with a hat and wings. A couple of years later, in 1919, Elsie and Francis' mothers went to a lecture at a nearby chapter of an organization called the Theosophical Society.

8:41So the Theosophical Institute, I guess, was tapping into an interest in the occult and the paranormal and that kind of thing that had been really developing in the late 19th century. And it was a combination of occultism, the sort of thing that people were interested in, spiritualism with seances and that kind of thing. But there was also a lot of mystical Eastern philosophy, pantheism, those sorts of strands. A kind of new agey thing in many respects. Towards the end of the meeting, Elsie's mother mentioned that her daughter and her niece had taken a couple of photographs that appeared to have fairies in them.

9:20And suddenly people's ears pricked up and they were very interested because these were people who did believe in fairies. And when the mothers brought it up at the meeting, were they kind of saying, well, our daughters did something like this and not thinking that this would be taken so seriously? I don't think anybody was expecting what happened to happen. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

9:52The local Theosophical Society started making copies of the fairy photographs and circulating them to other Theosophical Societies in England. And they came to the attention of the president of the London branch, a 50-year-old man named Edward Gardner. And so he got in touch with the family and asked if he could have copies of them in order to use them in lectures that he was giving about fairies and about theosophy. And they proved to be a big hit, and that's then how it came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was most famous for writing Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, was also one of the most famous advocates for spiritualism, the belief in and practice of communicating with the dead.

10:42He started attending seances and writing articles about seances and spiritualism and communication with the dead around about the same time that he started writing the Sherlock Holmes stories. So people often think that he had this rational phase and then this kind of wacky phase at the end when he was getting interested in spiritualism, but actually the two things ran in parallel. But from around 1917, his interest in spiritualism deepened for a variety of reasons, but clearly the loss of his son after the First World War during the flu pandemic and the loss of his brother and his brother-in-law forms part of that picture.

11:22And at that point, he really devoted most of his energies to the promotion of the spiritualist cause and so was writing lots of articles for Strand Magazine where he published the Sherlock Holmes stories. And he'd been planning a series of stories called The Uncharted Coast about the paranormal, about poltergeists and ghosts and fairies was one of the things that he was writing an article about. So he was in the middle of researching this article about fairies when he got contacted by the editor of Light magazine, which is a big spiritualist magazine, saying, have you heard about these photographs that Edward Gardner is showing at the Theosophical Institute?

11:56You might be interested in finding out about them for your article. So he wrote to Gardner.

12:05Like a lot of the correspondence, there's evidence of water damage that looks like there's been a paperclip that's rusted on this one. Dear Sir, I'm very greatly interested in the fairy photographs, which really should be epoch-making, if we can entirely clear up the circumstances. Conan Doyle goes on to say that he needs more information about Francis and Elsie. He asks if they are psychic in any other ways, and how old they are. It would really help me in my description. We are all indebted to you as a channel by which this has come to the world. Yours sincerely, Arthur Conan Doyle. So that's his first letter to Gardner, Edward Gardner.

12:50Hmm. I think, to begin with, his plan was just to get some material for this article that he was writing. But when he saw the photographs, they were, I guess, much more impressive than he was expecting. And increasingly, his plan was to use this as an opportunity to strike a blow in his ongoing arguments with anti-spiritualists, like people who were decrying himself and people who were interested in spiritualism as kind of cranks and so forth. He thought, we've got the absolute proof here to prove them wrong. If fairies were real, everything else could be too. So that was his plan, I think, increasingly, was to use the fairies as a kind of chess piece in this sort of battle he was having with the anti-spiritualists.

13:44Just three months before, Arthur Conan Doyle had represented spiritualism in a public debate in London. In his closing argument, Conan Doyle said that his opponent would not have talked lightly of this matter if he had known, as I know, the consolation it has brought to thousands and thousands of people. So there was a lot of quite active hostility towards the things that he believed were genuine, which he believed there was a lot of comfort for people to take, you know, in the aftermath of the First World War, and saw the skepticism as quite destructive. So he was willing to sacrifice his own reputation, if you like.

14:25He said, I deeply feel the absolute importance of trying to remove all those barriers which stand between suffering humanity and this great knowledge which is pouring out week by week, but which is held back by honest, well-meaning men who cannot adapt their minds to a negation of all that they have been preaching during their whole lives. He knew what he was getting himself into when he was, you know, sticking his neck out with the stuff and he was prepared to run the risks.

15:01We'll be right back.

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16:56One of the first things that the theosophist Edward Gardner did when he saw the fairy photographs was send the negatives to an expert for analysis a man named Harold Snelling He asked Snelling to look at these photographs and evaluate whether they'd been faked up in a studio, whether they'd been done through some kind of special superimposition or something like that and he looked at them and examined them and said no, these have been taken in a camera, outside, single exposure. So they've not been faked up like that. He didn't express an opinion about whether what they'd photographed was a fairy or whether it was anything else.

17:32But Harold Snelling reportedly said that whatever it was wasn't made of paper or of fabric. He said it wasn't painted on. And quote,

17:46Later,

17:50Harold Snelling said, he would stake his reputation on the images being unfaked. Edward Gardner asked Harold Snelling to create new, better-developed copies that would show more detail. And Harold Snelling, you know, he was, you know, technology leading expert in photographic special effects and that kind of thing. So, yeah, what came out of it at the end of it were these really quite remarkable images. Arthur Conan Doyle wanted more testing. Conan Doyle took the negatives to Kodak and asked them for an opinion, and they said something very similar, that there was no evidence that they'd been tampered with or there was single exposure and all the rest of it.

18:36Kodak said that they wouldn't say that they were genuine photographs of fairies, because how could they? It was outside of their expertise, but all they could confirm was that they were single exposures. So Conan Doyle took that as being sufficient expert testimony to say that these hadn't been, you know, kind of mocked up in a studio or something. He showed them to other people as well who's opinionally trusted. He showed them to a prominent physicist who was also a spiritualist. But the man refused to believe the photographs were real. He outlined an elaborate method by which they could have been faked.

19:12But Conan Doyle reminded him that the photos were taken by children. Quote, Such photographic tricks would be entirely beyond them. Conan Doyle sent Edward Gardner to Cottingley to meet the family. Elsie showed him where the photographs had been taken. One of the controversial things about the first photo was that Frances was looking at the camera, not at the four fairies. People thought this didn't make sense. Elsie said that she and Frances saw the fairies all the time, but being able to use the camera was new. Edward Gardner wrote, This answer of Elsie's is typical of the simplicity I met with throughout the investigation.

19:59Indeed, that which impressed me most was the utter unconcernedness of Elsie at the affair being anything special. During that visit, Edward Gardner asked Elsie's parents if Arthur Conan Doyle could go public with the photographs. I think to begin with, the family didn't really want anything to do with it. They were a bit embarrassed about it. They thought this was all kind of silly. Maybe they regretted having mentioned it at all at this Theosophical Institute. But Conador's celebrity clearly changed things a bit. They become much keener. So the girls are increasingly kind of coming under pressure to comply and do what Gardner and Conador are asking them to do.

20:45Did their parents make any money off of this, do we know? Not really. There was talk of money. Gardner said, and he said this to the family as well, that he didn't want to bring money into it because it might muddy the waters, as it were, and what they were interested in was getting to the truth. But Conan Doyle sent presents. He did say that he was going to provide a dowry for Elsie, who, by the time he got involved in it, she was engaged to be married. So there was some suggested money there. But mostly where the money would have come from and should have come from would have been from copyright to the photographs.

21:23But Edward Gardner took the copyright out in his own name. Everyone agreed to this for the girl's privacy. Then after a while, they say, can we get you to take some more photographs? This time, Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner supplied the cameras. They set everything up so that no one could accuse them of doctoring anything and sent 24 glass slides that had been specially marked. Elsie and Francis agreed to try and sent back three slides. They said they couldn't do any more because the weather wasn't good. One is of Francis looking at a flying fairy. One is of a fairy offering flowers to Elsie.

22:07And then the final one that's sometimes called the fairy bower is this one that looks like a double exposure. It's one where there's some fairy figures that are semi-translucent in a kind of ball of grass or vegetation or something. And that one's disputed about who took that. Frances claims that she just took that one as a photograph of the earth and the fairies appeared. Elsie says that she'd taken up one day when Francis wasn't there. Now there were five photographs. The original two were published that winter in the Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand magazine. The headline was, Fairies Photographed, an epic-making event described by Arthur Conan Doyle.

22:56Which page is it on? Get past all the advertisements. Mm-hm. there we go so here's the original article so this is the original article so I mean one of the things that's interesting about this I suppose and helps maybe to explain why people believed it is that they're quite grainy photographs aren't they when they appear in the magazine so they're not very very high resolution so some of the features which perhaps are more obvious when you look at them in high resolution pictures are not so clear here and then you've got Conan Doyle setting the scene you've got Edward Gardner giving his testimony as as it were sort of signed and his address at the bottom so it's all kind of given like sworn testimony almost there's an element in which he's drawing on the kind of Sherlock Holmesian persona to to build his credibility.

23:57At the end, he writes, one or two consequences are obvious. The experiences of children will be taken more seriously. Cameras will be forthcoming. Other well-authenticated cases will come along. These little folk who appear to be our neighbours, with only some small differences of vibration to separate us, will become familiar. The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the material 20th century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud and will make it admit there is a glamour and a mystery to life.

24:46We'll be right back.

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