‘A rational person doesn’t see fairies.’
The biggest
misconception of the fairy race are that people think they are little creatures
with tiny little wings and bathed in moonlight, that they are mystical and
magical and can grant people wishes, sprinkle fairy dust and are happy little beings.
Captain
Jack Harkness however
didn’t believe all of that and called them malignant wraiths.
Gwen
Cooper didn’t believe
in them at all. She stated that the
Cottingley fairies were fakes and that writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was ‘gaga
at the time’ and his good friend Harry Houdini ‘was a self publicist’.
So is there any truth in
their existence? Or are we letting our imagination run away with us?
As children we were fed
tales of magical creatures and we read further their adventures with a
voracious appetite. Our parents
especially those who were brought up in the countryside told us tales of the
small folk who lived in amongst the brambles, and the fields, told us never to
step in fairy rings, never to jump in the middle of one, close our eyes and
turn three times, or we’d never come back home again. They scared us with tales of magical far off
places where winged creatures ruled over others, and that we could only dream
about visiting.
But were they just
tales, or were our parents the lucky ones who escaped and were merely
protecting the younger, most vulnerable of the species, their children.
Fairies after all were
children once, weren’t they?
In Small Worlds the
faeries were depicted as white fluttering creatures, dancing around the stone
circle in the middle of the forest, bathed in moonlight, but then they
transformed into hideous tall green creatures with stick thin legs and wings
and clawed hands and mischievous childish green faces, who for the rest of the
episode caused chaos and mayhem and death.
Hardly what you’d call friendly!
And definitely not like Tinkerbell!
In the episode Small
Worlds Estelle had met the fairies and produced a slide show of her
photographs. To start her talk, the
first slide featured Frances Griffiths, a nine year old girl in 1917, who was
pictured behind 4 dancing fairies.
Frances Griffiths moved
with her mother from South Africa to the UK during World War 1, while her
father fought in the war. She stayed in
the small village of Cottingley, in West Yorkshire with her cousin Elsie and
her aunt and uncle. Being from South
Africa, life in England was very different and she found it hard to
adjust.
In the summer of 1917,
Elsie took her young cousin down to the beck at the bottom of the garden, where
they played alongside it for hours until returning with wet feet and
clothes. When they were scolded for the
state they would return in, Frances told her mother and aunt that it was because
of the fairies they had gone to see.
Of course, her aunt and
mother disbelieved her which was a little hurtful to the young girl, until
Elsie used her father’s camera and snapped Frances in that now famous
Cottingley photo, with four dancing fairies in the forefront.
Frances Griffiths age 9
Her Uncle Arthur who had
his own dark room processed the photo but dismissed it as paper cut outs and
not a real photograph. In September, two
months after the first photograph was taken, Elsie took the camera again, this
time Frances photographed her cousin holding her hand out to a 1ft tall gnome
on the lawn. Again Arthur disbelieved it
and called it a prank, and forbade the use of his camera.
Elsie Wright 16
September 1917
These photographs were
taken using a Midg Quarter camera.
However, despite
Arthur’s lack of belief in his daughter and niece, Elsie’s mother, believed the
stories and the photographs to be true and used them at her next meeting of the
Theosophical Society in Bradford. The
lecture was on ‘Fairy Life’ and Polly Wright, showed the photographs to the
guest speaker. A few months later the
photographs were displayed at the annual conference in Harrogate and came to
the attention of Edward Gardner, the leading member of the Society.
The photographs came
under a lot of scrutiny. They were
studied minutely under various photographic procedures, and although many
stated that the photographs were straight forward photographs of whatever was
in front of the camera, the object to which was being photographed could not be
true.
Fairies did not exist!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
believed in the Cottingley fairies, so much so that he illustrated them in an
article he wrote for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle had always held a fascination for
fairies and the fantastical creatures that lived at the bottom of the
garden. His Uncle Richard was a notable illustrator
who designed the cover of Punch Magazine, and in 1846 produced a series of
illustrations for a new translation of the Brothers Grimm tales, the Fairy
Ring, causing the novelist William Thackeray to declare that Dick Doyle was the
new master of fairyland. It could possibly explain why in later years that
Conan Doyle became a Spiritualist, he was interested in the paranormal and the
photographs to him were clear evidence of psychic phenomena. His friend Harry Houdini was also interested
but was at that time exposing fraudsters such as mediums in a bid to find a
genuine one in which he could communicate with his dead mother.
Before he left for
Australia, Conan Doyle despatched a letter to the girls explaining that he
would really like to meet them but for his journey he was unable to. He did however send Edward Gardner with two
cameras for the girls in order to take more shots of these fairies. Although Gardner went down to the beck to
view these fairies for himself he came back empty handed. The girls went to the beck and returned with
three more photos.
The Cameo Quarter camera
could perform far clearer close ups depending on how far you moved the
‘bellows’, such as a photograph from 3 ft away could be brought closer by
moving the bellows out, in much the same way as modern cameras using zoom!
Francis 1920
Elsie 1920
In this photograph with
Elsie and the fairy offering her a posy, Elsie doesn’t appear to look at the
fairy. Elsie’s response was merely that
fairies are timid creatures and often shy away from people looking at them, and
as they’d seen so many fairies down at the beck, they often didn’t look at them.
In 1983 the cousins admitted
in an article published in The Unexplained magazine that the photographs were
faked but maintained that they’d still seen fairies. They admitted that the fairies were drawings
that Elsie had copied from illustrations of Claude Arthur Shepperson’s dancing
ladies in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in 1914. They had cut out the cardboard figures and
supported those using hatpins, and strings disposing of the props in the beck
once the photographs had been taken.
Although Elsie admitted
that all 5 photographs were fake, Frances Griffiths was adamant throughout that
this last photograph was real. “It was a wet Saturday afternoon and we
were just mooching about with our cameras and Elsie had nothing prepared. I saw
these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a
photograph.”
This photograph again
was reviewed as fake, but unlike the other photographs this one showed the lead
fairy with long flowing dark hair at the forefront of the photo with another
contemplating getting up to the left, along with a further two in the corner of
the right appearing also to wake up. The
sun bath appears like a flimsy cloth but again looks different to the previous
cardboard fairies, so what is the truth, is it real, are there really
fairies?
What do you think?
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Fascinating article. It’s interesting to see how little human nature changes – a girl desperate to fit it, men with a genuine interest in seeking out what may be beyond our world, applying new technology to the search, and encountering fraud along the way. Do fairies exist? There are a lot of things that defy explanation. Who knows?
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