James Baquet In 1917, Frances Griffiths, aged 9, moved with her mother from South Africa to England to live with Frances’ aunt and her family, including 16-year-old Elsie Wright. The girls would often play together at a “beck” or stream near the lower end of the Wright’s garden in Cottingley, and return with muddy feet. “But,” they said, “we were only going there to see the fairies!” To prove their alibi, they borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera and produced honest-to-goodness photographs of fairies! Arthur Wright naturally dismissed the photos as using “trick” photography; Elsie had worked in a darkroom. But his wife Polly believed in them wholeheartedly, and he could not prove they were fakes. Two months later the girls produced two more photos. Two years later Polly displayed the photos at the annual conference of a “spiritualist” society, and one of its leaders, Edward Gardner, took up the girls’ cause — perhaps because it helped him promote his own movement. Gardner sent the photos and their negatives to an expert who, without declaring that the images actually contained fairies, said, “these are straight forward photographs of whatever was in front of the camera at the time.” Enter Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the super-rational Sherlock Holmes, and himself a trained physician. As a “true believer,” he was thoroughly duped by this trick perpetrated by two girl cousins. Already he had been commissioned to write an article about fairies, and in June 1920 contacted first Gardner then Elsie’s father to request permission to use the photos. Arthur Wright granted permission but accepted no pay, saying that the images would be “soiled” by money. It sounds like, by now, he believed in fairies too! Gardner and Doyle submitted the photos to the Kodak company for further corroboration. Their technicians declined to issue a certificate of authenticity. Nevertheless, Gardner and Doyle forged ahead with their plans to present the photos as genuinely showing fairies. Too bad for them, in the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked; they had used cardboard cutouts of fairies — though both continued to maintain that a fifth photo, perhaps an accidental double-exposure, was genuine! Vocabulary: Which word above means: 1. place to print photographs 2. genuine 3. excuse 4. fooled 5. two superimposed photos 6. doctor 7. committed 8. extremely 9. completely 10. confirmation | 