The Cottingley Fairies – the photographs that fooled the world for 60 years

On the BBC website last week (2^nd September 2025), there was a news article about the sale of a complete set of the infamous Cottingley Fairies photographs, which sold at auction for £3,100.

This hoax at the time fooled many including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who created the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. So I thought it was worth a short blog about how the photographs created such a stir at the time with them having originated in Yorkshire.

The 5 images which were sold at auction were taken between 1917 and 1920 by two young Yorkshire lasses in the village of Cottingley, a suburb of Bradford between Bingley and Shipley. The girls, 16 year old Elsie Wright and her 9 year old cousin Frances Griffiths were able to create such realistic fake photographs, that many people at the time were convinced they were real.

Frances had lived in South Africa for a number of years before returning back to England with her Mum and going to stay in Cottingley with her 16 year old cousin Elsie. The house they lived in backed onto a wooded valley where Cottingley Beck flowed through the trees and over gritstone outcrops. This was a magical area where the two cousins spent hours exploring. When asked what they had been up to after returning home wet and dirty they always responded with the line “we went to see the fairies”.

Their parents scoffed at this response, so the girls hatched a plot to change their view.

Elsie’s Dad Arthur was a keen photographer and also had built his own dark room in their house. One day the girls borrowed Arthur’s camera and came back an hour later asking if they could develop their plate. What appeared from the dark room was the famous photograph of Frances gazing off in to the distance with several winged fairies dancing in front of her!

The original photograph with Frances and the dancing fairies

The grown-ups were shocked, but Arthur had his suspicions knowing his daughter was interested in art, enjoyed photography herself and had even been shown by him how to re-touch pictures.

But Elsie’s Mum Polly was taken in and took the picture to a meeting of the Bradford Theosophical Society. One of its leading members believed the image to be real and that it was firm proof of the process of “theosophosis”, where human kind was going through a process of transformation into the perfect being.

The girls took more photographs and along with the original images they were copied, and started to appear in the press. The images were examined by the photographic expert of the time Harold Snelling who confirmed them as “authentic” and even Arthur Conan Doyle published an article with the pictures in The Strand magazine declaring their authenticity.

Elsie and one of her fairies

The debate about the photos continued until the 1980’s, when technology allowed the images to be investigated with greater scrutiny. Eventually Geoffrey Crawley the Editor of the British Journal of Photography declared them fakes.

The girls, now elderly women in their 80’s eventually confessed to their prank in 1983. They explained how they had created beautiful hand drawn copies of fairies, using images from the 1914 book “Princess Mary’s Gift book” and carefully adding delicate wings to the figures. The figures were cut out and positioned in standing positions, the girls showing their ingenuity by using hat pins to hold the cut out drawings in place.

They admitted what had started out as a harmless bit of fun to trick their parents had got a bit out of hand and how amazed they had been at how many people had been taken in. As the images had become more famous it had been harder for them to own up to their prank.

Even after their fraud was revealed the two girls still claimed that their final picture from 1920 was not a fake!

Elsie and another fairy

The 5 images sold at auction were not originals and no-one knows how many sets of prints were printed at the time. The ones that do exist are very rare and very collectable, particularly after a set were shown on the Antiques Roadshow a couple of years back.

A great little tale set in Yorkshire of a prank snowballing and fooling the world for decades. Now in a world of AI and photoshop the images could easily be created but in their day the girls certainly were wonderfully creative to create images of such authenticity.