Bradford

Cottingley and the Paper Fairies

In the summer of 1917 sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths came back from the beck behind the house with five photographs of themselves sitting beside tiny winged figures. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had just buried his son, published them in the Strand Magazine and defended them for the rest of his life. The fairies were cut from card, copied from illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, and held up on hatpins — one pin is visible in a print. Both women confessed in 1983, a few years before they died; Frances maintained to the end that the fifth photograph was real.