Cottingley Fairies: Famous photographs which fooled the world to go under the hammer
They were childhood snaps which went on to fool the world. And now more than a century on they still spark interest.
And two of the famous Cottingley Fairy photographs that entranced the world – appearing to prove the existence of fairies – are to go under the hammer in an auction in Lincolnshire next week after being entered by members of the family who have treasured them for more than 100 years.
The photographs were once owned by Frances Griffiths, the nine-year-old Cottingley schoolgirl who appears in the pictures with the fairies.
She gave them to her best friend – never revealing even to her that they had been faked. Such is the power of the images a film was made in 1997 starring Peter O’Toole, Paul McGann and Harvey Keitel.
James Laverack of auctioneers John Taylors said: “In 1917 16-year-old Elsie Wright took two photographs of her cousin Frances Griffiths with the fairies that they said lived around the beck at the bottom of their garden in the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire.
“When news of the photographs began to spread experts were asked to examine the glass plate negatives. Their verdict was that there was no evidence of tampering with the negatives.
"Some of them went even further and said the pictures were not fakes.
“The story went global when Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the Cottingley fairies in The Strand Magazine and the famous spiritualist Edward Gardner commissioned Harold Snelling, one of the experts who had examined the negatives, to produce a number of sets of high quality prints of the images that were sold in brown card wallets at meetings and lectures.”
“The girls were given sets and Frances passed one of hers on to her primary school best friend Mary Anderson, apparently without any hint that they were not what they seemed.
"That is the set that we’ll be auctioning at the saleroom in Louth next Tuesday.”
Mr Laverack added: “Mary treasured the photographs for more than sixty years – right until the day in 1983 when Elsie and Frances, then very old ladies, finally came clean and admitted that it had all been a hoax, a joke that got out of hand.
"The photographs were genuine but the fairies were simply cardboard cut-outs that they had made, inspired by pictures in a children’s book, which were propped up with hatpins.”
Mary’s son David Whittaker said: “My mother was completely shocked by the confession. She had totally believed her schoolfriends’ story and she was so proud to have those photographs, always willing to get them out to show friends or anyone else who was interested.
"Because of them she had spent her life believing in fairies!”
David added: “My mother felt so let down that she brought out the photographs and the archive of Cottingley fairies material that she had collected over the years and told us to throw it all out.
"It was only because my wife intervened and offered to take care of it in case she changed her mind that it did not end up in the dustbin. Mother never did change her mind.”
Now living at the village of Salfleetby on the Lincolnshire coast, Mr and Mrs Whittaker have decided that after caring for the collection for 42 years it is time to pass it on to other hands.
The two fairy photographs in their original brown card wallet, plus a photo of Mary with Frances Griffiths on an outing in the early 1920s and the archive of material is to be sold as a single lot.
It is expected to make well into four figures.