Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello everyone. The Cautionary Tales team is on a
Speaker 1: Christmas break at the moment, but I have a special
Speaker 1: cautionary tale for you from the archives. Do you believe
Speaker 1: in magic? So Arthur Conan Doyle certainly does in this
Speaker 1: cautionary tale about a lie that gets out of control.
Speaker 1: I'll have another classic for you next week, one that
Speaker 1: may help with your New Year's resolutions, and then we'll
Speaker 1: be back in the new year with plenty of brand
Speaker 1: new cautionary tales. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2: In May nineteen twenty I heard that alleged photographs of
Speaker 2: fairies had been taken.
Speaker 1: These are the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the
Speaker 1: creator of Sherlock Holmes, in a book titled The Coming
Speaker 1: of the Fairies. Unlike The Sign of Four or The
Speaker 1: Hound of the Baskervilles, the Coming of the Fairies wasn't
Speaker 1: a work of fiction. It was deadly serious. These photographs
Speaker 1: were in the possession of Edward Gardner, an influential believer
Speaker 1: in spiritualism. The idea that the spirits of the dead
Speaker 1: can communicate with a living Spiritualism was all the rage
Speaker 1: at the time, and if you believed in spirits, it
Speaker 1: wasn't too much of a leap to believe in fairies too.
Speaker 1: Where had these photographs come from? Edward Gardner's sister explained
Speaker 1: to Conan Doyle.
Speaker 3: Edward has got into touch with a family in Bradford,
Speaker 3: where the little girl Elsie and her cousin Francis, constantly
Speaker 3: go into the woods and play with the fairies. Some
Speaker 3: time ago, Elsie said she wanted to photograph them and
Speaker 3: begged her father to lend his camera. For long he refused,
Speaker 3: but at last she managed to get the loan of it,
Speaker 3: and one plate off, she and Francis went into the
Speaker 3: woods near a waterfall. Francis ticed them, as they call it,
Speaker 3: and Elsie stood ready with the camera. Soon the three
Speaker 3: fairies appeared, and one pixie dancing in France's zorra. It
Speaker 3: was a long time before the father would develop the photo,
Speaker 3: but at least he did, and to his utter amazement,
Speaker 3: the four sweet little figures came out beautifully.
Speaker 1: The photographs are indeed beautiful. The first is a charming
Speaker 1: depiction of nine year old Francis surrounded by small, bright,
Speaker 1: dancing figures, crisp and elegant. Conan Doyle describes it like this.
Speaker 2: The waterfall and rocks are about twenty feet behind Frances,
Speaker 2: who standing against the bank of the beck. A fifth
Speaker 2: fairy may be seen between and behind the two on
Speaker 2: the right. The coloring of the fairies is described by
Speaker 2: the girls as being of very pale pink, green, lavender,
Speaker 2: and mauve, most marked in the wings, and fading to
Speaker 2: almost pure white in the limbs and drapery. Each fairy
Speaker 2: has its own special color.
Speaker 1: Conan Doyle was aware that the existence of fairies was controversial,
Speaker 1: so he affected the stance of a logical man, explaining
Speaker 1: every clue like Sherlock Holmes himself.
Speaker 2: The original negative is asserted by expert photographers to bear
Speaker 2: not the slightest trace of combination work, retouching, or anything
Speaker 2: whatever to market as other than a perfectly straight, single
Speaker 2: exposure photograph taken in the open air under natural conditions.
Speaker 1: His conclusion was inescapable.
Speaker 2: I have convinced myself that there is overwhelming evidence for
Speaker 2: the fairies.
Speaker 1: Turning to the second photograph showing Elsie holding hands with
Speaker 1: a little gnome, he muses on the contrast between the
Speaker 1: gnomes and the little fairy elves. It's hard not to laugh.
Speaker 2: Elves are a compound of the human and the butterfly. Well,
Speaker 2: the gnome has more of the moth. This may be
Speaker 2: merely the result of under exposure of the negative and
Speaker 2: the dulness of the weather. Perhaps the little gnome is
Speaker 2: really of the same tribe, but represents an elderly male
Speaker 2: while the elves are romping young women.
Speaker 1: A newspaper headline of the time put it bluntly. Has
Speaker 1: Conan Doyle gone mad, I'm Tim Harford and you're listening
Speaker 1: to cautionary tales. The story had begun five years earlier
Speaker 1: at the bottom of a garden in Cottingly, a village
Speaker 1: on the outskirts of Bradford in northern England. A beautiful stream,
Speaker 1: or beck as the locals say, flowed past the trees
Speaker 1: and moss covered banks. As the breeze toyed with the leaves,
Speaker 1: and the sun dappling danced across the grass, Little Francis
Speaker 1: Griffiths could imagine that she saw fairies at play. She
Speaker 1: talked with her dear friend and cousin, Elsie Wright, about
Speaker 1: what she saw. One day, Francis slipped on the rocks
Speaker 1: in the beck and soaked her clothes. It would happen
Speaker 1: a lot Elsie later.
Speaker 4: Remembered, Francis, for some unaccountable reason, always fell down when
Speaker 4: we went up the beck.
Speaker 1: Elsie tried to help little Francis sneak into the house,
Speaker 1: but Francis's mother saw her and scolded her. Francis protested
Speaker 1: that she had fallen because she had been playing with
Speaker 1: the Fairyes, that was the last straw. She was sent
Speaker 1: to her room. Elsie, comforting her tearful cousin, suggested a plan.
Speaker 1: The two of them would borrow Elsie's father's camera and
Speaker 1: take photographs of the fairies at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: garden to prove the adults wrong and little Francis right.
Speaker 1: And they did, making the iconic picture of Francis surrounded
Speaker 1: by dancing sprites. Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, developed the first
Speaker 1: photograph in his dark room. He wasn't impressed. It was
Speaker 1: a nice image of Francis, but what were all the
Speaker 1: pieces of paper in the foreground fairies, said Elsie. Nonsense,
Speaker 1: said her father. A few weeks later they took a
Speaker 1: second photograph, this time of Elsie wearing a hat, sitting
Speaker 1: on the grass and holding hands with a tiny prancing gnome.
Speaker 1: A joke, said Arthur Wright. Why would they not admit it?
Speaker 1: But they did not, and so the camera was confiscated.
Speaker 1: The story might have ended then in nineteen seventeen, but
Speaker 1: Elsie's mother, Polly Wright, was less of a skeptic than Arthur.
Speaker 1: A couple of years later, poly Wright went to a
Speaker 1: meeting of a spiritualist society on the subject of very life.
Speaker 1: She mentioned the existence of the photographs. There was some excitement,
Speaker 1: and before long the images had made their way to
Speaker 1: the influential mystic Edward Gardner. Gardner wrote back to Polly Wright,
Speaker 1: saying that the first picture was the best of its kind.
Speaker 1: I should think anywhere. Edward Gardner took the photographs to
Speaker 1: his friend Harold Snelling, an expert in photographic processing and retouching.
Speaker 1: Snelling told Gardner that the pictures looked unprocessed to him,
Speaker 1: single exposures taken out. Snelling's testimony was very important to
Speaker 1: Conan Doyle. If Snelling said they were genuine, they were genuine.
Speaker 1: But at this point the plot thickens. Gardner wanted large, sharp,
Speaker 1: spectacular prints to frame and hang on his wall, to
Speaker 1: show people when he gave public lectures, and to give
Speaker 1: to the newspapers, so he paid Snelling to make these prints.
Speaker 1: Snelling made new negatives by painting on the prints that
Speaker 1: Elsie's mother had sent and then rephotographing them. He added
Speaker 1: sparkle and sharpness, just as today a photoshop expert might
Speaker 1: retouch a supermodel for a magazine cover. But that meant
Speaker 1: that every subsequent expert was looking not at the original
Speaker 1: prints but at Snelling's upgrades. No longer were these the
Speaker 1: unprocessed single exposure photographs that he had vouched for. Snelling,
Speaker 1: of course, had no idea quite how much attention would
Speaker 1: later be devoted to the authenticity of these images, but
Speaker 1: having been paid about a year's wages by Gardner, he
Speaker 1: seems not to have uttered another word on the subject thereafter.
Speaker 1: Edward Gardner then took the photographs to experts at Kodak.
Speaker 1: They were confused, partly because Snelling's post processing made the
Speaker 1: lighting on the pictures look strange. The Kodak team believed
Speaker 1: the pictures might have been taken in a studio, but
Speaker 1: that wasn't true, and Gardner knew it. Whatever had been
Speaker 1: done would have required considerable technical skill, which of course
Speaker 1: Snelling had. In any case, they said, fairies don't exist,
Speaker 1: so the pictures must be a fake. Gardner, who was
Speaker 1: sure that fairies did exist, didn't find this very persuasive.
Speaker 1: He didn't realize or didn't care, that Snelling's work had
Speaker 1: confused everyone. As far as he was concerned, Snelling's work
Speaker 1: was cosmetic, the fairies had been in the original photograph,
Speaker 1: and the experts were mystified. What more proof did anyone want?
Speaker 1: So he wrote to the most famous advocate of spiritualist
Speaker 1: beliefs in the British Empire, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan
Speaker 1: Doyle was intrigued. He wrote to Elsie and to her father, Arthur,
Speaker 1: who was a huge fan of Conan Doyle, and both
Speaker 1: delighted and amused by the interest. And Conan Doyle sent
Speaker 1: Edward Gardner to Cottingly with a better camera in the
Speaker 1: hope that he could produce more images of fairies. Foiled
Speaker 1: by bad weather, he returned to London, leaving the camera
Speaker 1: with Elsie and Francis, together with dozens of expensive photographic plates,
Speaker 1: most of which tellingly did not survive. Still, soon enough,
Speaker 1: Gardner received three stunning new fairy images, one of a
Speaker 1: fairy in flight, one of a fairy presenting flowers to
Speaker 1: Elsie and one strange and ethereal image of fairies sunbathing
Speaker 1: in their little glade. Edward Gardner was completely convinced. He
Speaker 1: argued that the fairies were visible manifestations of the girl's
Speaker 1: psychic energy that would explain why, as several commentators noted,
Speaker 1: they bore such a close resemblance to illustrations from picture books.
Speaker 1: As for Conan Doyle, he began to write a spectacular
Speaker 1: account of a case that was stranger than anything Sherlock
Speaker 1: Holmes had ever tackled. Conan Doyle's account made a huge splash,
Speaker 1: first in a sellout issue of Strand magazine, then in
Speaker 1: his book. Many people found the whole thing laughable. Punch
Speaker 1: Magazine published a cartoon showing him with his head in
Speaker 1: the clouds, poor Sherlock Holmes sitting near by, mourning his
Speaker 1: creator's foolishness. But many backed Conan Doyle. After all, how
Speaker 1: could two simple rural girls possibly have faked such a thing?
Speaker 1: One popular novelist urged people to gaze on the innocent
Speaker 1: faces of the girls themselves in the photographs. There is
Speaker 1: an extraordinary thing called truth, he wrote. It is God's currency,
Speaker 1: and the cleverest coiner or forger can't imitate it. The
Speaker 1: Yorkshire Weekly Post kept its feet on the ground, but agreed.
Speaker 1: When one considers that these are the first photographs these
Speaker 1: children ever took in their lives, it is impossible to
Speaker 1: conceive that they are capable of technical manipulation, which would
Speaker 1: deceive experts. Indeed hard to understand how two little girls,
Speaker 1: on the first photograph they ever took could have faked
Speaker 1: an image so compelling that expert photographers could not explain it.
Speaker 1: But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's own creation Sherlock Holmes, could
Speaker 1: have explained that this puzzlement was hardly an argument for
Speaker 1: the existence of fairies. To quote mister Holmes.
Speaker 2: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,
Speaker 2: must be the truth.
Speaker 1: Indeed, for most observers, Sherlock Holmes's maxim was a good guide.
Speaker 1: Fairies do not dwell at the bottom of gardens, and
Speaker 1: so the photographs must be fake. One critic summed it up.
Speaker 1: Knowing children, and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Oil has legs,
Speaker 1: I decide that the girls have pulled one of them.
Speaker 1: Of course they had, if you remember our earlier cautionary
Speaker 1: Tale of Abraham Bradius and the Fake vmir You'll also
Speaker 1: remember that if a person wants to believe something passionately enough,
Speaker 1: expertise is no defense. Doyle was not only a doctor
Speaker 1: and a formidable intellect, he was also a skilled amateur photographer.
Speaker 1: He knew very well that photographs could be faked, but
Speaker 1: he also knew that such fakes took skill. He couldn't
Speaker 1: quite imagine how two little girls could have done it,
Speaker 1: and more to the point, he didn't want to imagine.
Speaker 1: But how had the fakery been achieved? That question wasn't
Speaker 1: conclusively answered until nineteen eighty two, sixty five years after
Speaker 1: the first two fairy photographs were taken. We'll find out
Speaker 1: the answer after the break. After the flurry of interest
Speaker 1: following the publication of Conan Doyle's book, the Cottingly Fairies
Speaker 1: were largely forgotten for half a century. Then in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies there was a revival of interest by newspapers
Speaker 1: and TV shows. But the man who would crack the
Speaker 1: case wide open was Jeffrey Crawley, the editor of the
Speaker 1: British Journal of Photography. Crawley deployed the forensic logic one
Speaker 1: might expect from Sherlock Holmes himself in a remarkable series
Speaker 1: of ten articles titled That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingly Fairies.
Speaker 1: Crawley was sure the photographs were fakes, but his methods
Speaker 1: of observation and deduction revealed a great deal. First, he
Speaker 1: obtained the original camera that Francis and Elsie had used
Speaker 1: to produce the first photograph, serviced it to bring it
Speaker 1: to full working order, and took his own prints. He
Speaker 1: concluded right away that the original photograph of Francis and
Speaker 1: the fairies cannot possibly have been what it claimed to
Speaker 1: be in those lighting conditions. The primitive camera wasn't capable
Speaker 1: of taking photographs that sharp. Elsie had said that the
Speaker 1: shutter speed was one fiftieth of a second, but Crawley
Speaker 1: believed that in reality, the shutter would have had to
Speaker 1: have been open for a second or more. That meant
Speaker 1: that anything which moved would be blurred. As indeed, the
Speaker 1: waterfall in the background of the photograph is The fairy wings, however,
Speaker 1: are pin sharp. Crawley kept sifting the evidence and obtained
Speaker 1: a copy of the first photograph. This copy had never
Speaker 1: been near the retouching specialist Harold Snelling. When Crawley saw it,
Speaker 1: he was stunned. It was strikingly different from the endlessly
Speaker 1: reproduced photographs of Francis and the dancing troop of fairies.
Speaker 1: It was overexposed and blurred. Francis's face lacked detail, and
Speaker 1: the fairies were hard to make out. They were little
Speaker 1: more than vague, pale shapes. For the first time since
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, a photographic expert saw not Snelling's processed copy
Speaker 1: but the original and realized quite how significant and how
Speaker 1: confusing Snelling's post processing had been. Crawley realized that the
Speaker 1: confusion had deepened because the photographs used different techniques to
Speaker 1: achieve the effect of fairies. The third photograph, for example,
Speaker 1: taken three years after the first two, is probably a
Speaker 1: double exposure, a fairy in one shot superimposed over an
Speaker 1: image of Francis in another. The fourth features a dramatic
Speaker 1: new composition, with Elsie three years older, looking less like
Speaker 1: a child an awkward hat, and more like a fashion model.
Speaker 1: The fairy is simply a paper cutout. The fifth photograph,
Speaker 1: a strange and blown out image of a fairy sun bath,
Speaker 1: is also a double exposure, but one which creates a trippy,
Speaker 1: psychedelic effect rather than a crisp picture of a flying fairy.
Speaker 1: Both Elsie and Francis claimed to have taken that photograph.
Speaker 1: Crawley's conclusion is that they both did unknowingly photographing the
Speaker 1: same scene twice on a single photographic plate. Any stage
Speaker 1: magician could explain why the combined effect is so bewildering.
Speaker 1: Magicians make a useful distinction. The method is the technique
Speaker 1: used to produce the illusion, for example, palming a coin
Speaker 1: so that it seems to be in the left hand,
Speaker 1: when in fact it's in the right hand. The effect
Speaker 1: is the illusion itself. The coin has vanished, the coin
Speaker 1: reappears from behind your ear. And while it's often said
Speaker 1: that a magician should never perform the same trick twice,
Speaker 1: some do exactly that. They repeat the same effect over
Speaker 1: and over again, but they change the method each time.
Speaker 1: The cumulative impact is bewildering, and often the more expert
Speaker 1: the spectator, the more bewildering it is. Every time the
Speaker 1: spectator produces a theory about how the trick is done,
Speaker 1: the method changes and the theory is disproved by a
Speaker 1: combination of luck and fate. The sequence of Cottingly Fairy
Speaker 1: photographs use the same bewildering strategy. The first is created
Speaker 1: by Harold Snelling's liberal retouching, then later effects use cutouts,
Speaker 1: double exposures and even a fluke. If you look at
Speaker 1: them and try to find a single trick behind them all,
Speaker 1: you can't. Jeffrey Crawley of the British Journal of Photography
Speaker 1: concluded that the five pictures had used four different methods
Speaker 1: to achieve the illusion. Crawley then turned to the question
Speaker 1: of the characters involved. The Yorkshire Weekly Post had found
Speaker 1: it impossible to conceive that these two innocent looking girls
Speaker 1: could have mastered the techniques of image manipulation. But perhaps
Speaker 1: the girls weren't quite as innocent as everyone assumed. Francis,
Speaker 1: of course, was aged just nine when the first photograph
Speaker 1: was taken. She is literally the poster child for the
Speaker 1: Cottingly Fairies. But Elsie Wright, her cousin Elsie, is another matter.
Speaker 1: Elsie was hardly a child. She turned sixteen the summer
Speaker 1: that the first photographs were taken. Elsie had struggled at
Speaker 1: school and left at the age of thirteen to study
Speaker 1: near by at the Bradford College of Arts. One of
Speaker 1: her teachers later recalled she was very clever at art,
Speaker 1: and particularly with drawing fairies and cutting them out. That
Speaker 1: recollection may be tinged with hindsight, but once you know
Speaker 1: that Elsie wasn't a nine year old girl but a
Speaker 1: student at an art college, it puts those photographs of
Speaker 1: fairies into another light. And there's another thing that didn't
Speaker 1: seem to have registered with the people who thought the
Speaker 1: girls were naive little children. Elsie had a job, not
Speaker 1: just any job either. She worked at the photography studio
Speaker 1: of a greetings card factory, doing post processing work. Early on,
Speaker 1: she'd done spotting, or touching up flowed photos using paint.
Speaker 1: Later she colorized black and white work and created composite photographs,
Speaker 1: combining the images of soldiers who died during the war
Speaker 1: with portraits of the family they'd left behind. It was
Speaker 1: skilled work. Is it really so impossible to imagine that
Speaker 1: Elsie Wright could have created a manipulated photograph? Writing in
Speaker 1: the British Journal of Photography, Jeffrey Crawley didn't think so,
Speaker 1: And that's when there was another twist in the story.
Speaker 1: Crawley received a letter from an eighty two year old
Speaker 1: lady called Elsie Hill the married name of Elsie Wright,
Speaker 1: and Elsie Wright had a confession to make. After sixty
Speaker 1: six years of lying, she had finally decided to tell
Speaker 1: the truth. Elsie had hatched the plan to comfort Francis
Speaker 1: after a stern scolding from her mother. First Francis had
Speaker 1: soaked her clothes and the beck. Then she had compounded
Speaker 1: the sin by blaming it on the fairies, making up
Speaker 1: stories about fairies with an other to get her sent
Speaker 1: to her room. Elsie was indignant. Grown ups lie all
Speaker 1: the time. She said, they're always making up fantastical stories.
Speaker 1: Why should Francis be in such trouble for doing the same.
Speaker 1: And so Elsie comforted Francis with the promise that they
Speaker 1: would prove the adults wrong by producing a picture of
Speaker 1: the fairies. Elsie was quite right. Adults do tell a
Speaker 1: lot of lies. Some of them are every bit as
Speaker 1: delightful and absurd as fairies at the bottom of the garden.
Speaker 1: Think about Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. We grown ups
Speaker 1: tell children that Rudolph pulls Santa's slay, and that his
Speaker 1: shiny red nose lights the way for Santa. When Christmas
Speaker 1: Eve is foggy, it's a touching story, but also absurd.
Speaker 1: Santa's magic is so powerful that in a single night
Speaker 1: he can fill every stocking with Christmas gifts. Why on
Speaker 1: earth would he need a silly, shiny nose to navigate?
Speaker 1: And yet we tell our children such tales. As they
Speaker 1: grow up, they realize that there is such a thing
Speaker 1: as a magical lie, and lies are often necessary, whether
Speaker 1: they're magical or not. In nineteen seventy five, the sociologist
Speaker 1: Harvey Sachs gave a lecture titled Everyone Has to Lie,
Speaker 1: in which he pointed out that society is lubricated by
Speaker 1: a continual trickle of falsehoods. More recently, the psychologist Robert
Speaker 1: Feldman filmed first time conversations between two strangers talking together.
Speaker 1: He concluded that people lied every three or four minutes.
Speaker 1: Of course they did. When the restaurant's server asks how
Speaker 1: are you, we're not supposed to give a truthful answer.
Speaker 1: Say I'm nervous, this is my first date since my
Speaker 1: psycho X had an affair with my best friend, emptied
Speaker 1: my bank account and then left me. Or my hemorrhoids
Speaker 1: are killing me. But otherwise not bad. We say thanks,
Speaker 1: I'm great. At the end of a dinner party. We
Speaker 1: don't say the food was mediocre and the conversation was awkward,
Speaker 1: but at least it's not far to get home. We
Speaker 1: say that we had a wonderful time. And when our
Speaker 1: children ask us about Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, we
Speaker 1: don't tell them, oh him. He was made up in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine by an advertising copywriter at Montgomery Ward.
Speaker 1: It's a story. To make awkward kids with no friends
Speaker 1: feel better about themselves. We tell them the magical lie
Speaker 1: that without Rudolph, Santa would be lost. We lie out
Speaker 1: of politeness, we lie to make ourselves look good, and
Speaker 1: we lie because the truth would be cruel. More on that.
Speaker 1: After the break, sixty six years after she created the
Speaker 1: first fairy photographs, Elsie Wright was confessing. One of the
Speaker 1: letters that she wrote to Jeffrey Crawley at the British
Speaker 1: Journal of Photography hinted at why it had taken her
Speaker 1: so long.
Speaker 4: Dear mister Crawley, thank you for your letter revealing so
Speaker 4: much depth and understanding of the pickle Francis and I
Speaker 4: got ourselves into on that day when our practical joke
Speaker 4: fell flat on its face, when no one would believe
Speaker 4: we'd got pictures of real fairies. Just imagine if they had,
Speaker 4: the joke would have ended there. And then when we
Speaker 4: would have told all instead, the laugh was on us.
Speaker 1: Elsie imagined that when their parents saw the fairy photographs,
Speaker 1: they'd be astonished. They would apologize for scolding Francis, and
Speaker 1: then Elsie would reveal the trick and that all have
Speaker 1: a good laugh together. Except that Arthur Wright never believed
Speaker 1: in fairies for a second. He was scornful and angry
Speaker 1: when the children would not explain how they'd done it.
Speaker 1: Elsie's pride was wounded. She believed in her talent as
Speaker 1: an illustrator and a photographer with hindsight, Arthur Wright could
Speaker 1: have got to the truth if his initial reaction had
Speaker 1: been gentler. He missed the only chance because once Elsie
Speaker 1: had let the lie linger, when was the moment for
Speaker 1: the truth. When Polly Wright, Elsie's mother, returned from a
Speaker 1: spiritualist meeting in nineteen nineteen, having told others of the
Speaker 1: photographs that would humiliate her mother. When Edward Gardner, a
Speaker 1: fine gentleman, requested copies, even worse, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Speaker 1: one of the most famous men in the country, wrote
Speaker 1: separately both Elsie and her father calamitous. Conan Doyle's involvement
Speaker 1: raised the stakes far beyond what any of them could
Speaker 1: have imagined. Arthur Wright was a true fan of Conan
Speaker 1: Doyle's and he couldn't quite believe that r Elsie, at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the class, had the great man fooled.
Speaker 1: Three years after her father's painfully dismissive reaction to the
Speaker 1: original photographs, this must have been a real temptation for
Speaker 1: Elsie to stretch her creative wings and prove her talents
Speaker 1: on the biggest stage imaginable. She must have been exhilarated
Speaker 1: and terrified all at once, and her father, Arthur Wright,
Speaker 1: couldn't abide the suggestion of fraud the risk of social disgrace.
Speaker 1: So was now the moment to confess. You could hardly
Speaker 1: fault Elsie for biting her tongue. At first, Elsie Wright
Speaker 1: had been trying to comfort Forcis. Then she had been
Speaker 1: showing off her talents as an artist and a photographer.
Speaker 1: But as the deception continued, she began lying because it
Speaker 1: would have been heartless to tell the truth. Edward Gardner
Speaker 1: and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had so publicly put their
Speaker 1: trust in Elsie and Francis and their photographs, and been
Speaker 1: so mocked for it, that for the young women to
Speaker 1: confess would be to humiliate both men utterly. Not for
Speaker 1: the first time in human history, young women decided to
Speaker 1: keep quiet to spare the fragile egos of men. Conan
Speaker 1: Doyle had a long standing curiosity about the unseen and
Speaker 1: the paranormal. Shortly before he heard about the fairy photographs,
Speaker 1: this had firmed into a passionate belief in spiritualism, triggered
Speaker 1: by a series of bereavements. First, his wife Louisa, died
Speaker 1: at the age of fifty. Then Conan Doyle lost both
Speaker 1: his brother and his oldest son in the great flu
Speaker 1: epidemic that followed the First World War. As Conan Oyle
Speaker 1: was writing an essay about fairies, his mother, to whom
Speaker 1: he had always been very close, also died. Edward Gardner was
Speaker 1: in mourning too for his late wife. Both men, it seems,
Speaker 1: were desperate to believe there was something on the other
Speaker 1: side of death after a devastating war and a deadly
Speaker 1: flu pandemic. They were not alone in that desperation. Remember
Speaker 1: how popular spiritualism was how many people were attempting to
Speaker 1: contact their lost loved ones through seances. Elsie Wright understood
Speaker 1: this very well. Remember that she had been working in
Speaker 1: a photography studio, adding color to the black and white
Speaker 1: portraits of dead souls, or creating composite images of them
Speaker 1: and their families. The living pictured alongside the dead. Elsie recalled, there.
Speaker 4: Were stacks and stacks of work, and it was all
Speaker 4: rather sad, as most all the tickets set on top
Speaker 4: killed in action.
Speaker 1: Few young women could have understood better what Conan Doyle
Speaker 1: and Gardner might be going through. Elsie felt sorry for them.
Speaker 1: She agreed with Francis that they would simply wait until
Speaker 1: the old men passed away. In nineteen thirty, Sir Arthur
Speaker 1: did Elsie and Francis were both in their twenties when
Speaker 1: it happened. The New York Times headline noted that Conan
Speaker 1: Doyle's family were waiting for a message from his spirit.
Speaker 1: All Francis and Elsie had to do was to wait
Speaker 1: for Edward Gardner to pass away and they could finally
Speaker 1: reveal the truth. But that moment never seemed to arrive.
Speaker 1: Gardner lived until nineteen sixty nine, just shy of his
Speaker 1: one hundredth birthday, and by then his son was also
Speaker 1: an evangelist for the fairies. Elsie and Francis, both in
Speaker 1: their sixties, were still trapped by their joke. From nineteen
Speaker 1: seventeen Throughout the nineteen seventies, Elsie dropped hints, telling journalists
Speaker 1: that the photographs were.
Speaker 4: Pictures of figments of our imagination.
Speaker 1: Edward Gardner had always said that the fairies were manifestations
Speaker 1: of the psychic energy of the girls, that Elsie's phrasing
Speaker 1: was distinctly ambiguous. It was only in nineteen eighty one
Speaker 1: that Gardner's son died. Francis was working on a tell
Speaker 1: all memoir. Neither woman wanted to be left dangling if
Speaker 1: the other one confessed. Tabloid journalists, academics, and the British
Speaker 1: Journal of Photography were all sniffing around the story. Finally,
Speaker 1: the truth came out, Just as Conan Doyle didn't know
Speaker 1: the full truth about Elsie Wright, Elsie Wright can't have
Speaker 1: known the full truth about Conan Doyle. She would have
Speaker 1: had no idea, for example, that Conan Doyle's father, Charles,
Speaker 1: was afflicted first by depression, then by epilepsy and finally
Speaker 1: by alcoholism. She wouldn't have known that Charles Altamont Doyle
Speaker 1: lived his final years at the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum.
Speaker 1: She wouldn't have known that in those final years in
Speaker 1: the asylum he sketched elegant pictures of fairies, one with
Speaker 1: a scrawled note I have known such a creature. But
Speaker 1: she did know that Conan Doyle was a man in mourning.
Speaker 1: Didn't want to add to his pain, and so a
Speaker 1: joke that was supposed to last for a couple of
Speaker 1: hours ended up lasting sixty five years. The editor of
Speaker 1: the British Journal of Photography, Geoffrey Crawley, mused.
Speaker 5: If you take as the criterion of success coverage in
Speaker 5: the national media in column inch's and television time, quite
Speaker 5: apart from articles, books and having a street name to
Speaker 5: commemorate your efforts, then Elsie's by far the most successful
Speaker 5: photographer in the graph's history. If it is remembered that
Speaker 5: that success has been based on the first photograph she
Speaker 5: ever took, then whether or not you believe in fairies,
Speaker 5: it has to be admitted that her record will probably
Speaker 5: remain unsurpassed.
Speaker 1: Elsie and Francis both died within a few years of
Speaker 1: Elsie's confession. Francis herself always maintained that even though the
Speaker 1: photographs were faked, she really had seen fairies. Fairies are
Speaker 1: famous for casting mischievous spells, and I can't help thinking
Speaker 1: about Elsie and Francis heading down to cottingly Beck that
Speaker 1: summer over a century ago, where the water danced and
Speaker 1: the leaves provided shelter from the blazing sun and from
Speaker 1: the skeptical eyes of the grown ups. Elsie was cradling
Speaker 1: the fragile camera. Francis had Elsie's beautiful drawings and a
Speaker 1: pocket full of hatpins to prop them up. Together, they
Speaker 1: cast a spell that lasted a lifetime. For a full
Speaker 1: list of our sources, please see the show notes at
Speaker 1: Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Speaker 1: Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with
Speaker 1: support from Courtney Gerino and Emily Vaughan. The sound design
Speaker 1: and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia
Speaker 1: Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of
Speaker 1: Ben Crowe, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford and Rufus Wright. The
Speaker 1: show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Speaker 1: Mere LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane john S, Carli Migliori,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Royston Berserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicolmarano, Daniela Lakhan, and
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
Speaker 1: and review, and if you want to hear the show,
Speaker 1: add free and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tale shorts.
Speaker 1: Then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page
Speaker 1: in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus