The Cottingley Fairies: Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths photograph fairies at Cottingley Beck

1917. Cottingley, near Bingley in West Yorkshire. At the bottom of the Wright family garden, Cottingley Beck cuts a deep, narrow, rocky channel through a wooded glen. Elsie Wright was 16. Her cousin Frances Griffiths was 9, recently arrived from South Africa. Both girls said they went down to the beck to see the fairies.

July 1917. Elsie took a picture with her father Arthur's "Midg" quarter-plate camera. It showed Frances behind a bush. Four small winged figures danced in front of her. In September Frances took the camera and photographed Elsie seated with a winged gnome, stepping up toward her knee.

The girls described the colours: "The palest of green, pink, mauve. Much more in the wings than in the bodies, which are very pale to white." The gnome wore "black tights, reddish-brown jersey, and red pointed cap." It was even possible "to hear the very faint and high sound of the pipes." Arthur Wright suspected a hoax from the start. His wife Polly believed.

1919. Polly Wright raised the photographs at a Theosophical Society meeting. They reached Edward L. Gardner, and through him Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The photographer Harold Snelling called the negatives "entirely genuine, unfaked photographs of single exposure." Kodak's experts found no flaw but would not testify to their genuineness. Ilford reported some evidence of faking.

August 1920. Gardner gave the girls cameras and 24 privately marked plates. On 19 August, and again two days later, they came back with three new pictures. A fairy leaping close to Frances's face. A fairy offering a posy of harebells to Elsie. And "Fairies and Their Sun-Bath", figures in the grass around a strange cocoon. The leaping fairy, Elsie said, "seemed to hover at the top of its spring."

Doyle published the first two in the Christmas 1920 number of The Strand Magazine, billed as "An epoch-making event". "The Evidence for Fairies" followed in March 1921, and The Coming of the Fairies in 1922. In August 1921 the clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson visited the beck with the girls and recorded wood elves, a water nymph and fairies arriving in a bright radiance. The press largely ridiculed Doyle.

For about six decades the cousins kept their story. In 1966 the Daily Express traced Elsie. She suggested they might have photographed "thoughts". In 1971, on the BBC's Nationwide, she called the pictures "figments of our imagination". In 1978 James Randi used computer enhancement and claimed to see supporting strings.

1981 to 1983. Speaking to the investigator Joe Cooper, Elsie said all five photographs were faked. She had copied Claude A. Shepperson's dancing girls from Princess Mary's Gift Book, added wings, cut the figures from card and propped them up with hatpins. Afterwards the figures went into the beck. Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, concluded the photographs were fakes. Doyle, Elsie wrote, "had lost his son recently in the war".

Frances agreed about the first four. Never the fifth. "I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a photograph," she said. She held to it until her death in 1986. Elsie died in 1988.

The cameras, prints and Elsie's confession letter now rest at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. In 2024 the cameras went through a CT scanner at the University of Bradford. Prof. Andrew Wilson summed it up: "Of course, we didn't find any fairies but I think we did find a little bit of magic."