Cottingley Fairies: Kodak Would Not Vouch, Doyle’s Book Says

Who took the five photographs, and when?

The accounts printed in 1920 agree on the outline. In the summer of 1917, by those accounts, Elsie Wright was sixteen and her cousin Frances Griffiths was ten (Exhibit A, pp. 42, 50). Elsie’s father, Arthur Wright, put one plate into his new “Midg” camera and let the girls take it to the beck behind the house (Exhibit A, pp. 50–51, 62, 64). The plate showed Frances with a group of dancing figures in front of her, captioned as taken by Elsie on a “Bright sunny day in July, 1917” (plate facing p. 49).

A second photograph, taken by Frances in September 1917, showed Elsie with a gnome (plate facing p. 32). Three years later the case reached Edward Gardner, a lecturer for the Theosophical Society, who left Elsie a good camera in July 1920 (p. 93). According to Gardner, the new plates had been marked privately by the Illingworth Co. The three photographs Doyle reproduced from that summer were taken on August 26 and 28, 1920 (pp. 101–102).

The five photographs as Doyle’s book describes them; the photographs themselves are not shown on this page. Drawn from the table published with this page (Exhibit A).

The five photographs, one row per photograph, with sources (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (New York: George H. Doran, 1922)

The book records no later fairy photographs. In August 1921 the cousins met again, this time with a stereoscopic camera and a cinema camera. Doyle reports that no fairy appeared on a plate (pp. 105–106).

The 1920 article did not use these names. Doyle called the family Carpenter, of a village he called Dalesby, to spare them callers (Exhibit A, p. 42). The Westminster Gazette named the Wrights within weeks, and the book uses the real names because, its footnote says, the family withdrew their objection (pp. 61–62).

What did the photographic experts find in 1920?

Gardner first took the two 1917 negatives to a photographer named Snelling at Wealdstone, near Harrow (Exhibit A, pp. 42, 46). Gardner wrote that Snelling found a single exposure and figures that had moved while the shutter was open (p. 31). Doyle later printed his statement that the two negatives were “entirely genuine, unfaked photographs of single exposure” (p. 54).

In July 1920 Doyle took the negatives himself to the Kodak Company’s offices in Kingsway, London. A Mr. West and another expert examined them there. Doyle wrote that “neither of them could find any evidence of superposition, or other trick” (p. 33). Yet the two men believed they could produce such pictures by natural means, so “they would not undertake to say that these were preternatural.”

Gardner’s letter of July 31, 1920 put it more bluntly: “The Kodak people and also the Illingworth Co. are unwilling to testify.” (p. 36) The Illingworth company said clever studio painting and modelling could produce a similar negative. Gardner summed up that the photograph could be made by studio work, though the negatives showed no positive evidence of it. Showing that a method could work is not showing that it was used, a gap that also runs through the Mechanical Turk, where an 1821 critic showed how a hidden player could work the machine.

A report Gardner wrote on July 29, 1920 adds other experts he had consulted. One or two of them, he wrote, were against the photographs, and two claimed they could make the same kind of negative in a studio with painted models (p. 48). None of them, he added, would say positively that the photographs were faked. The report does not name them, so they may include the firms above.

Eight opinions on the negatives in 1920, as Doyle or Gardner reported them. No examiner’s own report has been read. Drawn from the table published with this page (Exhibit A).

Look at who reports the refusal. Every account of Kodak’s view comes from Doyle or Gardner, the two men arguing that the photographs were genuine. The reasons they give differ: in Doyle’s Strand article, the experts refused “in view of some possible trap” (p. 44). A report that cuts against the reporter’s own case is unlikely to be invented, but it is still second-hand.

Of the six opinions on the 1917 photographs that the book reports, two vouched for them: Snelling and a second, unnamed expert (p. 54). Four did not: the two Kodak experts, counted as one opinion; the Illingworth company; an unnamed firm that called the background theatrical properties; and an amateur who objected to the fairies’ fashionable hair (pp. 36, 44). The unnamed experts in Gardner’s report are not counted, since they may be the same firms. For the 1920 negatives, Gardner wrote that Snelling judged the bower picture impossible to fake, and that Illingworth’s staff, to his surprise, agreed (p. 96).

The 1920 opinions, one row per reported opinion, with sources (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (New York: George H. Doran, 1922), as reported by Doyle and E. L. Gardner

Why did Doyle and Gardner accept them?

In May 1920 Gardner showed the two photographs as lantern slides at a lecture in the Mortimer Hall, London (Exhibit A, p. 47). Doyle heard of them that month, while he was gathering material for an article on fairies (pp. 15, 40). After the visit to Kodak, he wrote that “it was the character and surroundings of the children upon which the inquiry must turn, rather than upon the photos themselves” (p. 33).

Illustration

An illustration, not a record: a lecture audience of 1920 watching a lantern screen. Gardner showed the two photographs as lantern slides at such a lecture in May 1920; the screen is left blank here because the photographs themselves are not shown on this page.

Gardner made the same move. Answering Hall-Edwards, he granted that the plate tests had not cleared the photographs entirely, because highly skilled processes could produce similar negatives. He rested the case on the photographs and the family’s honesty taken together (pp. 81–82).

His letter of July 31, 1920 calls Arthur Wright open and honest. It adds that Mrs. Wright had come into touch with theosophical teachings, which, Gardner wrote, explained the family’s cordial welcome (p. 37).

Doyle also wrote down what he hoped the photographs would do. Writing to Gardner from Melbourne on October 21, 1920, he said that anything widening the mental horizon “must have a good effect in breaking down materialism.” Séance messages, he added, had promised that “a visible sign was coming through” (pp. 98–99). He noted the “curious coincidence” that such an event had happened in a family already inclined to occult study, then set the thought aside as “far-fetched and remote” (p. 94).

These are Doyle’s and Gardner’s own stated reasons. This page has read no study that weighs how far such hopes shaped their judgment, so it draws no conclusion about it. Acceptance by famous names is not a test of an object, as the Vinland Map, another fake that well-known specialists accepted for years, also shows.

What did the critics propose?

The Westminster Gazette sent a special commissioner to Cottingley and printed his report on January 12, 1921; Doyle reprinted it (Exhibit A, pp. 60–69). Everyone he spoke to about it in Yorkshire, he wrote, dismissed the story as untrue. Yet he could not settle it: “I frankly confess that I failed.” (p. 61) He also learned that Elsie had worked for a few months for a photographer in Manningham Lane, Bradford, mostly running errands; the only other work she did there was “spotting” (p. 65).

Doyle called the attack by Major Hall-Edwards, an authority on radium, the most severe; it ran in the Birmingham Weekly Post (pp. 77–79). Hall-Edwards noted that Elsie had been described as drawing fairies for years and had worked for photographers. He named two possible methods. One was to cut out figures and set them near the sitter; the other was to stick onto a print “the figures of fairies cut from some publication” and photograph it again (p. 79).

Hall-Edwards also wrote that the photographs showed no evidence of movement, against Snelling’s reading. Doyle, answering the Westminster Gazette, granted that “Elsie could only have done it by cut-out images.” He then dismissed the idea, since it needed many models made in secret: “Surely this is a large order!” (p. 71)

The writer Maurice Hewlett, in John o’ London, went to the chain of evidence itself: “But why does he believe it? Because the young ladies tell him that they are genuine.” (p. 84) He judged that the girls “have pulled one of” Doyle’s legs (p. 88).

Dancing fairies drawn by Claude Shepperson for a poem by Alfred Noyes in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in London in 1914, p. 104. Shown as an example of the printed fairy pictures of the time; no source read here ties it to the Cottingley figures (Exhibit B).

Printed fairy pictures of the kind Hall-Edwards had in mind were easy to find. Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in London in 1914 (Exhibit B), includes the drawing above. This page has read no study that names a printed source for the Cottingley figures, so the drawing shows the type of source, not a proven one. Even a proven match could not expose a fake by its date alone, because a book of 1914 is older than a photograph claimed for 1917, as the terminus post quem page explains: an early date sets a floor, and a floor that fits the claim proves nothing.

What did the cousins say at the time?

In this record, the cousins never speak in their own writing. Every statement of theirs reaches the page through someone else: a parent, Gardner, Doyle or a reporter. Each of those people had a view on the photographs before passing the words on.

Seven statements by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in Doyle’s book, with the person who passed each one on. Drawn from the table published with this page (Exhibit A).

Mrs. Wright told the Westminster Gazette that as the first plate was developed, Elsie cried out, “Oh, Frances, the fairies are on the plate!” (Exhibit A, p. 64) Doyle’s Strand article had already told the same story under the false names (p. 43). Mrs. Wright also told the commissioner that the parents had questioned the girls about how they faked the pictures. “The children persisted in their story, and denied any act of dishonesty.” (p. 66)

Doyle reported that during Gardner’s visit in July 1920, Elsie said she had no power over the fairies and simply sat quietly until they came (p. 52).

When the commissioner found Elsie at Sharpe’s Christmas Card Manufactory in Bradford, she first refused to see him. Then, like her parents, she said she was “fed up” with the thing (p. 67). Asked where the fairies came from, “Miss Wright hesitated, and laughingly answered, ‘I can’t say.’” (p. 68) She told him the cousins had first seen fairies in 1915 (p. 69).

The cousins’ statements, one row per statement, with who reported it (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (New York: George H. Doran, 1922)