Away with the fairies

One hundred years ago, two girls convinced the world they had photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden. However did they get away with it, asks Richard Sugg

- Richard Sugg

FROM where I was, I could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I’ve always marvelled that anybody ever took it seriously,’ admitted Frances Griffiths in 1981, more than 60 years into the greatest hoax of the century. However did they get away with it for so long? Luck and accident were certainly part of this amazing British myth, but, more than that, the ‘fairy photographs’ taken by Frances and her cousin Elsie Wright offered a world of mystery and childish innocence to a nation traumatised by the horrors of war.

After the girls took the first two photographs, in July and September 1917, they came to the attention of Edward Gardner, a prominent member of the Theosophical Society; Elsie’s mother, Polly, was herself involved in Theosophy. Spiritualist movements were on the rise due to the mass bereavements suffered in the First World War and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had himself lost a son and a brother, would come to be the fairies’ most famous advocate. For all the forensic rigour of Sherlock Holmes, the author reacted against certain elements of late-Victorian science, which he feared ‘would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon’.