Elsie Wright
Elsie Wright, whose photographs of the Cottingley
Fairies were endorsed authentic by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, was a student of Bradford Art
College.
Born in 1901 to electrical engineer Arthur Wright and
his wife Polly, Elsie Wright became famous in 1917 as
one of the young girls who photographed ‘real fairies’
near her home in Cottingley.
Elsie was a talented watercolourist and accomplished
painter of both landscapes and portraits and attended
Bradford Art College. During WW1 she worked as an
illustrator, designing Christmas cards in a Bradford
Studio, and photographer, constructing composite
photographs showing deceased soldiers with their
family and friends.
On a Saturday afternoon in July 1917, Elsie took her
father’s camera to photograph her 10 year old cousin
Frances Griffiths. Later that afternoon when her father
was developing the plate, he saw strange white shapes
appearing and at first thought they were sandwich
papers or birds. Elsie informed him they were fairies.
She claimed they had seen real fairies at the bottom
of their garden near Cottingley Beck, and she had
photographed them with Frances to prove they really
do exist.
The next month, Frances took an under exposed
photograph of Elsie with a gnome, and as before, the
plate was developed by Elsie’s father. Suspecting them
of trickery, he banned the cousins from borrowing the
camera again, but was so amused by the events he
developed a few prints of each one. Both Elsie’s parents
searched her bedroom and the beck for evidence,
without success, and the girls stuck to their story.
Elsie’s mother Polly, like many others, believed in fairies
and the supernatural, and was a member of Madame
Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. When a
lecture on fairies was given at a local meeting, she was
keen to tell her friends all about the photographs her
daughter and niece had taken, and word soon spread.
In 1920, the photographs came to the attention of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle via his friend Edward L. Gardner, a
Theosophist who absolutely believed the photographs
to be authentic. By then, there were a total of 5
photographs. Sir Arthur endorsed them as real, and
asked the Eastman Co and Kodak for their opinion. The
photo experts later declared that they were not double
exposures and the negatives had not been altered. It
caused a media frenzy that was to last for decades.
In 1983, Elsie confessed on the BBC programme
Nationwide that she had drawn the fairies, Frances
had cut them out and they had stuck them on twigs
using hat pins. She said they had done it because the
adults had teased them about playing with the fairies.
Frances always maintained that fairies were real and she
had seen them. Frances always claimed that one of
the photos was genuine…
Photograph supplied by The Science Museum