In nineteen eighty three, a woman in her eighties named Elsie admitted something she had kept quiet about for sixty-six years. She said, I could see the backs of them and the hat pins when the photos were being taken. The backs of what? The hat pins holding up what? Fairies, paper fairies, cut out with scissors, stuck in the grass with hat pins, and photographed by two little girls in Yorkshire. And those paper fairies fooled newspapers, photo experts, and the man who invented Sherlock Holmes. The plan was never to fool the world. The plan was to get out of trouble for having wet shoes. Hi, welcome to That Wasn't the Plan. I'm Emily White. Today's story is a bit of a hoax, a sweet one mostly. Nobody got robbed and nobody got hurt, but a lot of very smart people got it very, very wrong, and they were very fooled. The people who fooled them didn't want to. They just couldn't find a way out. So let's go to Yorkshire. Cottingley is a village in the Air Valley in what was then called the West Riding of Yorkshire. It is about two and a half miles from the market town of Bingley and a few miles from the big city of Bradford. It is old. It shows up in the Doomsday Book in 1086, spelled C-O-T-I-N-G-E-L-A-I. The name means something like the clearing of Kota's people, or Kata. Who is Kata? No idea. Kata had a clearing, good for Kata. In the 1100s, the Knights Templar held land here. Yes, those Knights Templar. And because it's old, it has old problems. In 1664, a record says a flood undermined Cottingley Bridge so badly that the whole bridge had basically shrunk. I don't know how bridges shrink. I just love that somebody wrote it down. So who lived here? Not many people. In the 1861 census, Cottingley had 113 houses and 667 people. I couldn't find a number for 1970 but think a small village, everybody knows everybody. People worked coal pits, worsted spinning, that's wool yarn, and farms. There was one pub, the Sun Inn, and there was a coral society. And for a while the whole village had one postman. Then the war came. In 1914, Cottingley opened its own rifle range, and two years later, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in France, Bradford's own volunteers went over the top together. Bradford Museum says about 1,770 Bradford men were killed or injured in the first few hours. The two quote unquote Bradford Pals battalions alone had more than a thousand men killed or wounded in two days. So this is the world our story drops into. Hold on to that. It matters later. So let's meet our girls. Frances Griffiths is nine years old. She was born in Bradford, but spent her early childhood in Cape Town, South Africa. Her dad is a soldier, and in 1917, he's serving with the army in France. So Frances and her mom Annie come to stay with family in Cottingley. The family is the Wrights. Arthur Wright is the dad. He's an amateur photographer with a dark room under the stairs. Polly Wright is the mom. Remember Polly, she's going to light the match. And then there's the daughter, Elsie. Elsie is Francis' cousin, and she is 16-ish. And Elsie is not just any teenager. She studied at Bradford Art School and she worked in a photography lab. An artist who knows photography, living in a house with a camera. You can see where this is going. Behind the Wright's house, there is a little wooded dell with a stream running through it, Cottingley Beck. Narrow, rocky, wet. Perfect if you're nine and bored. And Frances is down there all the time. She keeps falling in, she keeps coming home soaked, and the grown-ups are just done with it. So they ask her, why do you keep going down to the beck? And Francis says, I go to see the fairies. Now, if you're nine and you've just been yelled at, that's a pretty solid answer. You can't really get in trouble for fairies. But the adults don't buy it. So Elsie says, basically, fine, we'll prove it. In July 1917, Elsie borrows her dad's camera. It's a mid-quarter plate, which means one glass plate, one shot. The girls disappear down to the beck and they come back very pleased with themselves. Arthur goes into his dark room under the stairs to develop the plate. And there's Frances, chin in her hand, looking straight at the camera with four tiny fairies dancing in front of her. And Arthur's reaction is my favorite part of the whole story. He asks, what the bits of paper are. That's it, case closed, dad sold it in one take. Except Elsie says, no, they're fairies. A little later, they do it again. This time Frances takes the picture and it shows Elsie sitting on the grass holding her hand out to a little winged gnome. And Arthur is out. He refuses to lend them the camera again. Both sets of parents search the girls' room for scraps, cutouts, anything, but they find nothing. So the photos go in a drawer, and for about two years, that's the end of it. The plan worked, nobody's mad about the wet shoes anymore. If the story ended here, it'd be a cute family anecdote, but it doesn't end here because somebody opens the drawer. It's 1919, the war is over, and remember Polly, Elsie's mom. Polly has gotten interested in Theosophy. Quick explainer. Theosophy is a spiritual movement that was really popular at the time, big on the idea of hidden worlds, spirits, nature spirits. Fairies basically were on the menu. So Polly goes to a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford and she brings up a little family secret. She raises her hand and says, more or less, my daughter and niece took pictures of fairies. Those photos travel, they get shown at a Theosophist Conference in Harrogate, and then they land in the hands of Edward Gardner, one of the leading theosophists in England. Gardner's goal is simple. He wants proof that the spirit world is real, and these two photos look like proof. He has a photography expert, Harold Snelling, look at the plates and make cleaner copies, and the cleaner copies look even better. So now we meet our big name. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who invented Sherlock Holmes, the most famous fictional mind in the world, the guy who notices the mud on your boots and knows where you've been. And in 1920, the Strand magazine has asked Conan Doyle to write an article about fairies for its Christmas issue. You can't write this. The timing is too perfect. But here's the part I want to slow down on because it's not a punchline. Conan Doyle has been interested in spiritualism for years. And then his eldest son, Kingsley, died in 1918 during the flu pandemic, weakened by his war wounds. So when we laugh at the famous man who believed in fairies, I want us to also remember he was a dad who'd lost his son. A lot of people in Britain right then wanted proof there was something more. Gardner shows Doyle the photos. Doyle borrows them. Some people around him are skeptical, and somebody points out that the fairies have very fashionable Paris hairstyles. Fairies apparently get their hair done. But Gardner goes off to Conningly, he meets a family, he decides they're honest, and then he does something that changes everything. He hands the girls new cameras and fresh plates and says basically, go get more. So think about it, from Elsie and Francis's side. Elsie is now 19, Francis is 12. This was a kid's cover story, and now an important grown-up is standing in the garden with the cameras waiting for fairies. What do you do? You make more fairies. In August 1920, the girls produced three new photographs, including one called Fairies and Their Sunbath. Then in Christmas 1920 issue, the Strand publishes the first two photos. The headline is Fairies Photographed, an epoch making event. To protect the girls' privacy, Doyle gives them fake names, Alice and Iris, and the magazine sells out within days. Not everyone is charmed. Some critics make fun of it. One warns against the inculcation of such absurd ideas into the minds of children. But the story is out, and in 1921, Doyle writes a second strand article with new photos. And that August, a clairvoyant named Joffrey Hodson comes to Cottingley and says he can see the fairies too. The girls say they just humored him. Two young women standing in a wet doll, nodding along while a grown man points at nothing and describes fairies. In 1922, Doyle publishes a whole book about it, The Coming of the Fairies. And by now, critics are calling him gullible. The man who created Sherlock Holmes is being laughed at, and the two girls from the tiny village are the reason why. The plan was to get out of trouble, and now they are in it, and it's international. So now what? The girls grow up, life moves on the way it does. Elsie moves to America, marries a man named Frank Hill, and they live in India for years before coming back to England in 1949. Francis marries a soldier, Sidney Way. They're posted all over, including a long stretch in Egypt. For decades, the fairies just sit there, famous but quiet. Then in 1966, a journalist tracks Elsie down, and Elsie gives the most careful answer. She suggests the fairies might have been figments of my imagination that she somehow photographed. That's not a yes, that's not a no. That's a woman who has been holding something heavy for 50 years and still not ready to put it down. And the interest comes back. Magazines, radio, TV. In 1978, the BBC even makes a TV play about them. Then the skeptics show up with real tools. In the early 1980s, the British Journal of Photography investigates and concludes the photos were fate. So why didn't they just say it in the first place? Elsie answered that one herself later. She said, Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle, well, we could only keep quiet. And that's the whole story right there. They weren't protecting themselves, they were protecting him, a grieving, famous man who had put his name on the cardboard fairies. Conan Doyle died in 1930. He never heard them confess, and they were quiet for another 50 plus years. In 1983, they finally confessed. Elsie explains how they did it. She'd copy the fairies from illustrations in a popular children's book, Princess Mary's Gift Book. She drew them, cut them out, and stuck them in the ground with hat pins. And she says, I don't see how people could believe they're real fairies. And you can see the backs of them and the hat pins when the photos were being taken. Frances, talking to the BBC, puts it even more simply. She says, they wanted to be taken in. Nobody was tricked by brilliant special effects. The fairies have Paris haircuts. Arthur Wright called them bits of paper on day one. People believed because they needed to. But here's the last turn because this story doesn't let you off clean. There were five photos, and Francis agreed the first four were fakes. But the fifth one, fairies in their sunbath, she said was real for the rest of her life. And Elsie, Elsie said that one was fake too. The two cousins who held the same secret for 66 years didn't agree on how it ended. So what happened to everybody? Francis died in 1986. Elsie died in 1988. And in 1997, two movies came out about them in the same year. One of them, Fairy Tale, a True Story, was partly filmed in Cottingley. Today, the University of Leeds holds the most important letters, negatives, and prints. In 2021, they put on an exhibition with the best title, The Cottingley Fairies, a Study in Deception. In Cottingley, Cottingling throws a fairy fest. Good for them. The story everyone tells. Two little girls fooled Sherlock Holmes. We actually know that it's a little sadder and a little more human. A nine-year-old needed a reason for wet shoes. Her cousin, an art student, made that reason look real. And then the grown ups took it, ran with it, and wouldn't give it back because the grown-ups had lost so much that a paper fairy in a garden felt like hope. The girls didn't plan to fool anybody. They planned to stay out of trouble, and it cost them a secret they carried for 66 years. And one of them went to her grade saying the fifth photo was real. So I'll leave you with Frances' question, not mine. Look at fairies and their sunbath yourself. What do you see? I hope you had fun today. We'll be back with some more guests in the following weeks. And until then, please rate, subscribe, and review us. You can follow along anywhere. If you have any questions or you you know of any guests you'd like to be one yourself, you can always reach us at that wasn't the plan pod at gmail.com or through Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. You can watch all of our videos there as well. And until we talk to you next time, stay kind. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to That Wasn't the Plan. 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