Photographing Fairies
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It was deadly serious. These photographs were in the possession of Edward Gardner, an influential believer in spiritualism, the idea that the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. Spiritualism was all the rage at the time, and if you believed in spirits, it wasn't too much of a leap to believe in fairies too. Where had these photographs come from? Edward Gardner's sister explained to Conan Doyle,

Edward has got into touch with a family in Bradford where the little girl, Elsie, and her cousin, Francis, constantly go into the woods and play with the fairies. Some time ago, Elsie said she wanted to photograph them and begged her father to lend his camera. For long, he refused, but at last she managed to get the loan of it and one plate. Off she and Francis went into the woods near a waterfall. Francis ticed them, as they call it, and Elsie stood ready with the camera.

Soon, the three fairies appeared, and one pixie dancing in Francis' aura. It was a long time before the father would develop the photo, but at least he did. And to his utter amazement, the four sweet little figures came out beautifully. The photographs are indeed beautiful. The first is a charming depiction of nine-year-old Francis, surrounded by small, bright, dancing figures, crisp and elegant. Conan Doyle describes it like this.

The waterfall and rocks are about 20 feet behind Francis, who's standing against the bank of the Beg. A fifth fairy may be seen between and behind the two on the right. The colouring of the fairies is described by the girls as being of very pale pink, green, lavender and mauve, most marked in the wings and fading to almost pure white in the limbs and drapery. Each fairy has its own special colour.

Conan Doyle was aware that the existence of fairies was controversial, so he affected the stance of a logical man, explaining every clue like Sherlock Holmes himself.

The original negative is asserted by expert photographers to bear not the slightest trace of combination work, retouching or anything whatever to mark it as other than a perfectly straight single exposure photograph taken in the open air under natural conditions. His conclusion was inescapable. "I have convinced myself that there is overwhelming evidence for the fairies.

Turning to the second photograph, showing Elsie holding hands with a little gnome, he muses on the contrast between the gnome and the little fairy elves. It's hard not to laugh. "Elves are a compound of the human and the butterfly. While the gnome has more of the moth, this may be merely the result of underexposure of the negative and the dullness of the weather.

Perhaps the little gnome is really of the same tribe, but represents an elderly male, while the elves are romping young women. A newspaper headline of the time put it bluntly, Has Conan Doyle gone mad? I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

The story had begun five years earlier, at the bottom of a garden in Cottingley, a village on the outskirts of Bradford in northern England. A beautiful stream, or beck as the locals say, flowed past the trees and moss-covered banks. As the breeze toyed with the leaves and the sun-dappling danced across the grass, little Frances Griffiths could imagine that she saw fairies at play.

She talked with her dear friend and cousin, Elsie Wright, about what she saw. One day, Frances slipped on the rocks in the beck and soaked her clothes. It would happen a lot, Elsie later remembered. Frances, for some unaccountable reason, always fell down when we went up the beck. Elsie tried to help little Frances sneak into the house, but Frances's mother saw her and scolded her. Frances protested that she'd fallen because she'd been playing with the fairies.

That was the last straw. She was sent to her room. Elsie, comforting her tearful cousin, suggested a plan. The two of them would borrow Elsie's father's camera and take photographs of the fairies at the bottom of the garden to prove the adults wrong and little Francis right. And they did, making the iconic picture of Francis surrounded by dancing sprites. Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, developed the first photograph in his darkroom,

He wasn't impressed. It was a nice image of Francis, but what were all the pieces of paper in the foreground? Fairies, said Elsie. Nonsense, said her father. A few weeks later, they took a second photograph, this time of Elsie wearing a hat, sitting on the grass and holding hands with a tiny prancing gnome. A joke, said Arthur Wright. Why would they not admit it?

But they did not, and so the camera was confiscated. The story might have ended then, in 1917, but Elsie's mother, Polly Wright, was less of a sceptic than Arthur. A couple of years later, Polly Wright went to a meeting of a spiritualist society on the subject of fairy life. She mentioned the existence of the photographs.

There was some excitement, and before long, the images had made their way to the influential mystic Edward Gardner. Gardner wrote back to Polly Wright, saying that the first picture was the best of its kind, I should think, anywhere. Edward Gardner took the photographs to his friend Harold Snelling, an expert in photographic processing and retouching,

Snelling told Gardner that the pictures looked unprocessed to him, single exposures taken outside. Snelling's testimony was very important to Conan Doyle. If Snelling said they were genuine, they were genuine. But at this point, the plot thickens. Gardner wanted large, sharp, spectacular prints to frame and hang on his wall, to show people when he gave public lectures, and to give to the newspapers.

So he paid Snelling to make these prints. Snelling made new negatives by painting on the prints that Elsie's mother had sent and then re-photographing them. He added sparkle and sharpness, just as today a Photoshop expert might retouch a supermodel for a magazine cover. But that meant that every subsequent expert was looking not at the original prints, but at Snelling's upgrades.

No longer were these the unprocessed single-exposure photographs that he'd vouched for. Snelling, of course, had no idea quite how much attention would later be devoted to the authenticity of these images, but having been paid about a year's wages by Gardner, he seems not to have uttered another word on the subject thereafter.

Edward Gardner then took the photographs to experts at Kodak. They were confused. Partly because Snelling's post-processing made the lighting on the pictures look strange, the Kodak team believed the pictures might have been taken in a studio. But that wasn't true, and Gardner knew it. Whatever had been done would have required considerable technical skill, which of course Snelling had.

In any case, they said, fairies don't exist. So the pictures must be a fake. Gardner, who was sure that fairies did exist, didn't find this very persuasive. He didn't realise, or didn't care, that Snelling's work had confused everyone. As far as he was concerned, Snelling's work was cosmetic. The fairies had been in the original photograph, and the experts were mystified. What more proof did anyone want?

So he wrote to the most famous advocate of spiritualist beliefs in the British Empire, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle was intrigued. He wrote to Elsie and to her father Arthur, who was a huge fan of Conan Doyle and both delighted and bemused by the interest. And Conan Doyle sent Edward Gardner to Cottingley with a better camera, in the hope that he could produce more images of fairies.

Foiled by bad weather, he returned to London, leaving the camera with Elsie and Francis, together with dozens of expensive photographic plates, most of which, tellingly, did not survive. Still, soon enough, Gardner received three stunning new fairy images, one of a fairy in flight, one of a fairy presenting flowers to Elsie,

and one strange and ethereal image of fairies sunbathing in their little glade. Edward Gardner was completely convinced. He argued that the fairies were visible manifestations of the girls' psychic energy. That would explain why, as several commentators noted, they bore such a close resemblance to illustrations from picture books.

As for Conan Doyle, he began to write a spectacular account of a case that was stranger than anything Sherlock Holmes had ever tackled. Conan Doyle's account made a huge splash, first in a sell-out issue of Strand magazine, then in his book. Many people found the whole thing laughable.

Punch magazine published a cartoon showing him with his head in the clouds, poor Sherlock Holmes sitting nearby, mourning his creator's foolishness.

But many backed Conan Doyle. After all, how could two simple rural girls possibly have faked such a thing? One popular novelist urged people to gaze on the innocent faces of the girls themselves in the photographs. There is an extraordinary thing called truth, he wrote. It is God's currency, and the cleverest coiner or forger can't imitate it.

The Yorkshire Weekly Post kept its feet on the ground, but agreed. When one considers that these are the first photographs these children ever took in their lives, it is impossible to conceive that they are capable of technical manipulation which would deceive experts. It was indeed hard to understand how two little girls, on the first photograph they ever took, could have faked an image so compelling that expert photographers could not explain it.

But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's own creation, Sherlock Holmes, could have explained that this puzzlement was hardly an argument for the existence of fairies. To quote Mr Holmes, Indeed.

For most observers, Sherlock Holmes' maxim was a good guide. Fairies do not dwell at the bottom of gardens. And so the photographs must be fake. One critic summed it up. Knowing children, and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that the girls have pulled one of them. Of course they had.

If you remember our earlier cautionary tale of Abraham Bradyus and the fake Vermeer, you'll also remember that if a person wants to believe something passionately enough, expertise is no defence. Doyle was not only a doctor and a formidable intellect, he was also a skilled amateur photographer. He knew very well that photographs could be faked, but he also knew that such fakes took skill.

He couldn't quite imagine how two little girls could have done it. And more to the point, he didn't want to imagine. But how had the fakery been achieved? That question wasn't conclusively answered until 1982, 65 years after the first two fairy photographs were taken. We'll find out the answer after the break.

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After the flurry of interest following the publication of Conan Doyle's book, the Cottingley Fairies were largely forgotten for half a century. Then, in the 1970s, there was a revival of interest by newspapers and TV shows. But the man who would crack the case wide open was Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography.

Crawley deployed the forensic logic one might expect from Sherlock Holmes himself in a remarkable series of ten articles titled That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies. Crawley was sure the photographs were fakes, but his methods of observation and deduction revealed a great deal. First, he obtained the original camera that Francis and Elsie had used to produce the first photograph.

serviced it to bring it to full working order and took his own prints. He concluded right away that the original photograph of Francis and the fairies cannot possibly have been what it claimed to be. In those lighting conditions, the primitive camera wasn't capable of taking photographs that sharp. Elsie had said that the shutter speed was 1 50th of a second.

But Crawley believed that in reality, the shutter would have had to have been open for a second or more. That meant that anything which moved would be blurred, as indeed the waterfall in the background of the photograph is. The fairy wings, however, are pin sharp. Crawley kept sifting the evidence and obtained a copy of the first photograph. This copy had never been near the retouching specialist Harold Snelling.

When Crawley saw it, he was stunned. It was strikingly different from the endlessly reproduced photographs of Francis and the dancing troupe of fairies. It was overexposed and blurred. Francis' face lacked detail and the fairies were hard to make out. They were little more than vague, pale shapes. For the first time since 1920, a photographic expert saw not Snelling's processed copy, but the original.

and realised quite how significant and how confusing Snelling's post-processing had been. Crawley realised that the confusion had deepened because the photographs used different techniques to achieve the effect of fairies. The third photograph, for example, taken three years after the first two, is probably a double exposure. A fairy in one shot, superimposed over an image of Francis in another.

The fourth features a dramatic new composition, with Elsie, three years older, looking less like a child in an awkward hat and more like a fashion model. The fairy is simply a paper cutout. The fifth photograph, a strange and blown-out image of a fairy sunbath, is also a double exposure, but one which creates a trippy, psychedelic effect rather than a crisp picture of a flying fairy.

Both Elsie and Francis claimed to have taken that photograph. Crawley's conclusion is that they both did, unknowingly photographing the same scene twice on a single photographic plate. Any stage magician could explain why the combined effect is so bewildering.

Magicians make a useful distinction. The 'method' is the technique used to produce the illusion, for example palming a coin so that it seems to be in the left hand when in fact it's in the right hand. The 'effect' is the illusion itself. The coin has vanished! The coin reappears from behind your ear,

And while it's often said that a magician should never perform the same trick twice, some do exactly that. They repeat the same effect over and over again, but they change the method each time. The cumulative impact is bewildering. And often, the more expert the spectator, the more bewildering it is.

Every time the spectator produces a theory about how the trick is done, the method changes and the theory is disproved. By a combination of luck and fate, the sequence of Cottingley fairy photographs use the same bewildering strategy. The first is created by Harold Snelling's liberal retouching, then later effects use cutouts, double exposures and even a fluke,

If you look at them and try to find a single trick behind them all, you can't. Geoffrey Crawley of the British Journal of Photography concluded that the five pictures had used four different methods to achieve the illusion. Crawley then turned to the question of the characters involved. The Yorkshire Weekly Post had found it impossible to conceive that these two innocent-looking girls could have mastered the techniques of image manipulation.

But perhaps the girls weren't quite as innocent as everyone assumed. Frances, of course, was aged just nine when the first photograph was taken. She is literally the poster child for the Cottingley Fairies. But Elsie Wright, her cousin? Elsie is another matter. Elsie was hardly a child. She turned 16 the summer that the first photographs were taken.

Elsie had struggled at school and left at the age of 13 to study nearby at the Bradford College of Art. One of her teachers later recalled, she was very clever at art and particularly with drawing fairies and cutting them out. That recollection may be tinged with hindsight, but once you know that Elsie wasn't a nine-year-old girl but a student at an art college, it puts those photographs of fairies into another light.

And there's another thing that didn't seem to have registered with the people who thought the girls were naive little children. Elsie had a job. Not just any job, either. She worked at the photography studio of a greetings card factory, doing post-processing work. Early on, she'd done spotting, or touching up flawed photos using paint. Later, she colourised black-and-white work.

and created composite photographs, combining the images of soldiers who died during the war with portraits of the families they'd left behind. It was skilled work. Is it really so impossible to imagine that Elsie Wright could have created a manipulated photograph? Writing in the British Journal of Photography, Geoffrey Crawley didn't think so. And that's when there was another twist in the story.

Crawley received a letter from an 82-year-old lady called Elsie Hill, the married name of Elsie Wright. And Elsie Wright had a confession to make. After 66 years of lying, she'd finally decided to tell the truth.

Elsie had hatched the plan to comfort Frances after a stern scolding from her mother. First, Frances had soaked her clothes in the beck. Then she'd compounded the sin by blaming it on the fairies. Making up stories about fairies was enough to get her sent to her room. Elsie was indignant. "'Grown-ups lie all the time,' she said. "'They're always making up fantastical stories. "'Why should Frances be in such trouble for doing the same?'

And so Elsie comforted Francis with the promise that they would prove the adults wrong by producing a picture of the fairies. Elsie was quite right. Adults do tell a lot of lies. Some of them are every bit as delightful and absurd as fairies at the bottom of the garden. Think about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

We grown-ups tell children that Rudolph pulls Santa's sleigh and that his shiny red nose lights the way for Santa when Christmas Eve is foggy. It's a touching story but also absurd. Santa's magic is so powerful that in a single night he can fill every stocking with Christmas gifts. Why on earth would he need a silly shiny nose to navigate? And yet we tell our children such tales.

As they grow up, they realise that there is such a thing as a magical lie. And lies are often necessary, whether they're magical or not. In 1975, the sociologist Harvey Sachs gave a lecture titled Everyone Has to Lie, in which he pointed out that society is lubricated by a continual trickle of falsehoods.

More recently, the psychologist Robert Feldman filmed first-time conversations between two strangers talking together. He concluded that people lied every three or four minutes. Of course they did. When the restaurant server asks, how are you, we're not supposed to give a truthful answer.

We don't say, "I'm nervous. This is my first date since my psycho ex had an affair with my best friend, emptied my bank account and then left me." Or, "My haemorrhoids are killing me but otherwise not bad." We say, "Thanks, I'm great." At the end of a dinner party, we don't say, "The food was mediocre and the conversation was awkward but at least it's not far to get home." We say that we had a wonderful time.

And when our children ask us about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, we don't tell them, "Oh, him! He was made up in 1939 by an advertising copywriter at Montgomery Ward." It's a story to make awkward kids with no friends feel better about themselves. We tell them the magical lie that without Rudolph, Santa would be lost. We lie out of politeness. We lie to make ourselves look good. And we lie because the truth would be cruel.

More on that after the break.

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66 years after she created the first fairy photographs, Elsie Wright was confessing. One of the letters that she wrote to Geoffrey Crawley at the British Journal of Photography hinted at why it had taken her so long.

Dear Mr Crawley, Thank you for your letter revealing so much depth and understanding of the pickle Francis and I got ourselves into on that day, when our practical joke fell flat on its face, when no one would believe we'd got pictures of real fairies. Just imagine if they had. The joke would have ended there and then when we would have told all. Instead, the laugh was on us.

Elsie imagined that when their parents saw the fairy photographs, they'd be astonished. They would apologise for scolding Francis. And then Elsie would reveal the trick and they'd all have a good laugh together. Except that Arthur Wright never believed in fairies for a second. He was scornful and angry when the children would not explain how they'd done it.

Elsie's pride was wounded. She believed in her talent as an illustrator and a photographer. With hindsight, Arthur Wright could have got to the truth if his initial reaction had been gentler. He missed the only chance. Because once Elsie had let the lie linger, when was the moment for the truth? When Polly Wright, Elsie's mother, returned from a spiritualist meeting in 1919, having told others of the photographs,

That would humiliate her mother. When Edward Gardner, a fine gentleman, requested copies? Even worse. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most famous men in the country, wrote separately to both Elsie and her father? Calamitous! Conan Doyle's involvement raised the stakes far beyond what any of them could have imagined.

Arthur Wright was a true fan of Conan Doyle's, and he couldn't quite believe that our Elsie, at the bottom of the class, had the great man fooled. Three years after her father's painfully dismissive reaction to the original photographs, this must have been a real temptation for Elsie to stretch her creative wings and prove her talents on the biggest stage imaginable.

She must have been exhilarated and terrified all at once. And her father, Arthur Wright, couldn't abide the suggestion of fraud, the risk of social disgrace. So was now the moment to confess? You could hardly fault Elsie for biting her tongue. At first, Elsie Wright had been trying to comfort Frances. Then she'd been showing off her talents as an artist and a photographer.

But as the deception continued, she began lying because it would have been heartless to tell the truth. Edward Gardner and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had so publicly put their trust in Elsie and Francis and their photographs, and been so mocked for it, that for the young women to confess would be to humiliate both men utterly.

Not for the first time in human history, young women decided to keep quiet to spare the fragile egos of men. Conan Doyle had a long-standing curiosity about the unseen and the paranormal. Shortly before he heard about the fairy photographs, this had firmed into a passionate belief in spiritualism, triggered by a series of bereavements. First, his wife Louisa died at the age of 50.

Then Conan Doyle lost both his brother and his oldest son in the great flu epidemic that followed the First World War. As Conan Doyle was writing an essay about fairies, his mother, to whom he'd always been very close, also died. Edward Gardner was in mourning too for his late wife. Both men, it seems, were desperate to believe there was something on the other side of death.

After a devastating war and a deadly flu pandemic, they were not alone in that desperation. Remember how popular spiritualism was. How many people were attempting to contact their lost loved ones through seances.

Elsie Wright understood this very well. Remember that she'd been working in a photography studio, adding colour to the black and white portraits of dead soldiers, or creating composite images of them and their families, the living, pictured alongside the dead. Elsie recalled, There were stacks and stacks of work, and it was all rather sad as most all the tickets said on top, killed in action.

Few young women could have understood better what Conan Doyle and Gardner might be going through. Elsie felt sorry for them. She agreed with Francis that they would simply wait until the old men passed away. In 1930, Sir Arthur did. Elsie and Francis were both in their 20s when it happened. The New York Times headline noted that Conan Doyle's family were waiting for a message from his spirit.

All Francis and Elsie had to do was to wait for Edward Gardner to pass away, and they could finally reveal the truth. But that moment never seemed to arrive. Gardner lived until 1969, just shy of his 100th birthday. And by then, his son was also an evangelist for the fairies.

Elsie and Francis, both in their 60s, were still trapped by their joke from 1917. Throughout the 1970s, Elsie dropped hints, telling journalists that the photographs were "pictures of figments of our imagination". Edward Gardner had always said that the fairies were "manifestations of the psychic energy of the girls", but Elsie's phrasing was distinctly ambiguous.

It was only in 1981 that Gardner's son died. Francis was working on a tell-all memoir. Neither woman wanted to be left dangling if the other one confessed. Tabloid journalists, academics and the British Journal of Photography were all sniffing around the story. Finally, the truth came out. Just as Conan Doyle didn't know the full truth about Elsie Wright…

Elsie Wright can't have known the full truth about Conan Doyle. She would have had no idea, for example, that Conan Doyle's father, Charles, was afflicted first by depression, then by epilepsy, and finally by alcoholism. She wouldn't have known that Charles Altamont Doyle lived his final years at the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum.

She wouldn't have known that in those final years in the asylum, he sketched elegant pictures of fairies. One with a scrawled note. I have known such a creature. But she did know that Conan Doyle was a man in mourning. She didn't want to add to his pain. And so a joke that was supposed to last for a couple of hours ended up lasting 65 years.

The editor of the British Journal of Photography, Geoffrey Crawley, mused... If you take as the criterion of success...

coverage in the national media, in column inches and television time, quite apart from articles, books, and having a street name to commemorate your efforts, then Elsie is by far the most successful photographer in the craft's history. If it is remembered that that success has been based on the first photograph she ever took, then, whether or not you believe in fairies, it has to be admitted that her record will probably remain unsurpassed.

Elsie and Frances both died within a few years of Elsie's confession. Frances herself always maintained that even though the photographs were faked, she really had seen fairies. Fairies are famous for casting mischievous spells. And I can't help thinking about Elsie and Frances heading down to Cottingley Beck that summer over a century ago, where the water danced.

And the leaves provided shelter from the blazing sun and from the sceptical eyes of the grown-ups. Elsie was cradling the fragile camera. Francis had Elsie's beautiful drawings and a pocketful of hat pins to prop them up. Together, they cast a spell that lasted a lifetime. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com.

Portionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

And if you want to hear the show ad-free and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page, in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.

To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.

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