The Cottingley Fairies and me

Some things follow you around forever. I will never live down the Washington Post review that said the first Nic Costa book, A Season for the Dead, was better than The Da Vinci Code. Not that anyone ever bothers to read further into the review to the part where it says the book is nothing like The Da Vinci Code either.

Here's another pleasant millstone round my neck: the bizarre tale of the Cottingley Fairies. It's twenty six years since I wrote this story for The Times where I was then working as a reporter. But just a few weeks ago in Thailand I had someone come up to me and say, 'Tell me about the Cottingley Fairies.'

It's never going away, is it? So let me try and put it down on paper once and for all.



Back in 1983 I was enjoying life as a news reporter on The Times in Gray's Inn Road, London. Fun times when, as a general fire engine-chasing hack, I never knew what was going to come my way. One day the deputy editor Charles Wilson (later to be editor) came up to me with a clipping in his hand. It was a story from an obscure supernatural magazine involving a couple of young Yorkshire girls and Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, among other people. In 1917 the girls, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, had taken a set of photographs in the woods near their home outside Bradford which seemed to show fairies -- real fairies, cute little things with wings -- dancing through the leaves and posing with the two of them. Conan Doyle believed in the fairies, hook, line and sinker and in the Strand magazine in 1920 cited them as proof of the existence of spirits.

The cutting Charlie had in his hand suggested the photos were fakes. Really? You mean they weren't actual fairies? Just very nice little figures drawn by Elsie and Frances, cut out, stuck on pins and then photographed in the woods? Even in 1983, before the age of Photoshop, it was impossible for me to look at the photos of the fairies and believe they were anything other than a clever hoax. But Conan Doyle's intervention, hastened by his embrace of spiritualism after a series of family tragedies, made the fairies a worldwide sensation. Were they real or were they some clever trickery through which a couple of young girls had fooled one of the most famous men of the day?

Charlie Wilson, known to some on the paper as 'Gorbals', a little unfairly I thought, was not the kind of boss who took kindly to such responses as, 'You've got to be kidding me.' What he wanted was simple: Elsie and Frances were still alive somewhere in England. All I had to do was track down one or both and get them to confess to their subterfuge more than sixty years after they perpetrated it. Great, eh?

Now if they made a movie out of this story they'd do the usual thing: get newspapers all wrong. I'd set off with an unlimited budget, all the time in the world, and a carte blanche for expenses to track down Elsie and and Frances and make them talk. But movies never get newspapers right. In reality I had to chase down the pair while doing my normal work too -- and The Times was always skint in those days so all the chasing had to be done over the phone.

How? It soon became clear both women had moved around a lot after Cottingley, to places as far afield as India, South Africa and America. They were both back in the UK but it was apparent that Frances wasn't talking to anyone. That left Elsie. I got a few pointers from some people I tracked down who'd met her over the years. Through them I learned that her married name was Hill and she now lived, if I recall correctly, in the then mining belt of Nottinghamshire. We had no computers, no databases, no shortcuts in those days. But we did have banks of every phone directory in the UK in the office. So I simply called everyone with the name Hill in the area I thought Elsie lived. And after awhile I happened -- again this is memory, and perhaps inaccurate -- on her son.

We talked a little. He talked to his mother. Eventually -- and I think this was largely because I worked for The Times, not my own powers of persuasion -- she agreed to meet me with a photographer. So we drove up one spring day in 1983 and I walked into the little house where Elsie Hill, née Wright, who, as a girl had shaken hands with Arthur Conan Doyle, now lived. She was a lovely old woman, bright and inquisitive, with sparkling, mischievous eyes, a great sense of humour, and a very canny wit.

Elsie knew full well why I was there: I wanted a confession. But I wasn't going to say that out loud because, well, it would have been a bit rude after all that time. So I simply let her talk, ask her son questions from time to time, and after a while it all -- or most of it anyway -- came out. Again, I don't think this was down to my journalistic skills. Elsie was 82. I think in a way she felt a little guilty that Conan Doyle, a sad man with his own problems at the time, had fallen for what was originally meant to be a family joke. She told me the fairy story was made up when she got home late and was told off by her parents. She was already a talented artist. So she and Frances took a camera into the woods and decided to take the shots that proved her story. They were never meant to be made public, but Elsie's mother was a Theosophist, like Conan Doyle. She circulated the pictures in spiritualist circles, they reached the great man and suddenly they went all over the world. This left Elsie and Frances in a very awkward position. Did they admit they lied -- a terrible sin in those days? Or did they go along with the deception?

I listened and it all made so much sense that they chose the latter path. They were just two young girls from Yorkshire. How could they possibly embarrass a famous, much-admired man like Conan Doyle? And then, just to prove things, I asked if Elsie would show me how to draw a fairy. She picked up a pen and paper and produced one on the spot in front of the camera.

You can read my story from The Times of April 4, 1983 in their archives here. It's pretty short really given all the weeks of work I put in. But none of us believed it was quite such a big thing, and I see I referred to Elsie as Mrs Hill throughout, her married name, not her maiden one, which was how I got to know her. The piece went as page three lead. I was off the following day. Very early in the morning the phone rang. It was the news desk saying they were being inundated with calls from all over the world. TV stations, newspapers, radio, even movie companies wanted to talk to me. Well, no actually, they didn't. They wanted me to put them in touch with Elsie.

I had visions of her little house being surrounded by avaricious crews and hacks. I knew how hard it had been to track her down in the first place. So I knew too that, without my help, they'd struggle to find her. I said to the news desk, 'Tell them to go find her themselves.' And left it at that.

Amazingly I don't think any of them ever did. Instead they bombarded me with phone calls, offers of money and threats for weeks. I had Japanese TV stations promising me wads of cash, American network TV producers demanding to know if I understood who the hell I was dealing with. In the end I had to ask the switchboard to turn back any calls that came in for me about the Cottingley Fairies. I also phoned Elsie to make sure she was happy with the story and knew what was going on. She didn't want a media pack on her doorstep either.

In 1985 Elsie gave one last TV interview in which she said pretty much the same as she'd told me. 'Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle, well, we could only keep quiet.' Both she and Frances became trapped by the inoffensive little fib they'd begun with such skill. Elsie never wrote the book she promised, one in which she said she'd reveal one final secret, about the so-called 'fifth photograph' which Frances continued to claim was genuine. Frances died in 1986, Elsie two years later.

And more than twenty years on I still get asked about this story, one that, when I wrote it, didn't seem to those of us on the paper of such great curiosity at all. How wrong can you be?