“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it”.
– Roald Dahl
On a misty morning in 1917, two girls, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright, wandered down to the beck behind their Yorkshire garden,
a borrowed camera tucked beneath an arm and mischief in their pockets.
Frances, newly arrived from South Africa, found in Elsie a companion for wonder. Elsie, a few years older, had a steady hand for drawing and a mind full of possibilities. They paused by the stream, where the ferns bowed in the wind, and there, among the roots and water, fairies danced.
Or so the photographs would soon suggest.
A Garden Made of Secrets
Cottingley, near Bradford, was no stranger to overcast days. Its glades and footpaths had long fed the imagination. Elsie’s father was an amateur photographer, and his Midg quarter-plate camera became the girls’ gateway into make-believe.
The first of five photographs, a young girl in a starched frock, surrounded by flitting, translucent fairies, was received at home with indulgent disbelief. The figures looked oddly flat. But when questioned, the girls insisted: not paper. Not pins. Real.
And in the long shadows of the First World War, who was willing to call children liars?
A Nation Willing to Wonder
By 1920, Britain was a nation grieving. Séance tables filled sitting rooms, and letters were written to sons who would never reply. Into this aching silence stepped Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, doctor, writer, spiritualist. By then, the creator of Sherlock Holmes was one of the most recognisable names in Britain. He saw in the Cottingley images not deceit, but delicate proof.
In December of that year, The Strand Magazine featured the fairy photographs. Conan Doyle defended their authenticity in both his article and later in The Coming of the Fairies. “The recognition of fairies,” he wrote, “would jolt the material twentieth century.”
It did. Letters poured in, some sceptical, many hopeful, all enchanted. Experts examined the negatives. Kodak declined to authenticate them, though they could find no evidence of tampering. Ilford was rather more blunt in their assessment: clever girls, clever trick.
But Conan Doyle was undeterred. For him, belief was not foolishness. It was reverence. And perhaps, a way to reach beyond grief.
The Fifth Photograph
Four of the fairy photographs were staged in 1917. The fifth came later, in 1920. It shows Frances beside a fairy leaping through the air, less posed, more spontaneous.
Decades later, both women admitted to faking the earlier images using illustrations from Princess Mary’s Gift Book. They had drawn and cut out the figures, secured them with hatpins, and posed with solemn faces.
But Frances insisted the last photo was different.
“That one was real,” she said. “The others were products of our imagination. But the fifth one was real.”
Was this a truth she clung to, or a memory reshaped by years of magic and myth?
A Legacy of Lingered Wonder
Today, the Cottingley Fairies reside not in the woods but in museum archives and quiet corners of folklore. Their story endures not because it was true, but because it could have been. Because in a time of sorrow, people needed to believe in the unseen.
To believe in fairies was not childish. It was courageous.
A photograph can lie. But belief, that stubborn, shimmering flicker, often tells us what we most need to hear.
What We Still See
If you visit Cottingley Beck today, you may not find wings behind the foxglove. But you might see two girls laughing behind a hedge. You might hear a story whispered by leaves. You might remember, for just a moment, that not all truths come framed in glass or verified in ink.
Some come on a summer wind, caught in the folds of a borrowed dress, and handed back to history by those who dared to dream.