The Cottingley Fairies

            I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to pick this subject.  I’ve been interested in the Cottingley Fairy story since FairyTale: A True Story came out in 1997 (I would’ve guessed it was earlier than that, actually).  It just ticks all the right boxes for me: the right era, fairies, photos, a hoax.  It’s just great.  Like I said, I should’ve done this post earlier.

            In 1917, Frances Griffiths and her mother went to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins, the Wrights, in Cottingley, near Bradford, in England.  Frances had grown up in South Africa, but due to World War One, her father was now in the army and she and her mother had to go live with family.  Frances was about ten, and her cousin, Elsie, was about sixteen.  They played together down by the Cottingley beck (stream) and would often come back filthy, much to their parents chagrin.  They claimed they were down at the beck playing with fairies.  One Saturday, they decided to borrow Arthur Wright’s Midg camera and “take a photo of the fairies they had been playing with all morning” (1).

            They came back from the beck a picture of Frances and some fairies.  Arthur knew that Elsie was an artist and liked drawing fairies and so thought the photo was faked somehow.  About a month later the girls borrowed the camera again and came back with a picture of Elsie and a gnome.  Again, Arthur thought it was faked, and didn’t let the girls borrow his camera anymore.  Polly Wright, though, believed her daughter’s and niece’s photos were real.

In mid-1919, Polly took the photos to a theosophy meeting.  Theosophy believes in finding divinity in the mysteries of nature.  Theosophy also believes that humanity is evolving towards perfection.  The photos fit in with these beliefs because they showed people being able to interact with “higher beings”, that were one of those mysteries of nature.

            Polly showed the photos to the speaker at the theosophy meeting, asking if they might be real; the speaker took them and showed them at the society’s conference a few months later.  At this conference Edward Gardner became interested in the photos.  Gardner sent the photos to the photographic expert Harold Snelling.  Snelling believed the negatives were authentic in that they photographed what was in front of them; he wouldn’t comment if the fairies were real though.  Gardner had Snelling clean up the negatives so they could be better printed and better analyzed.  Gardner sold the prints at his lectures.  The photos quickly spread through the spiritualist community.

            The photos were gaining an audience.  In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard of the photos from the editor of Light, a spiritualist publication.  Doyle had long been interested in mysticism and spiritualism; after the deaths of his wife, son, brother, brothers-in-law, and nephews all in a fairly short span, this interest deepened.  Doyle contacted Gardner about the photos to find out more about them.  Doyle then contacted Arthur and Elsie Wright, asking their permission to use the photos for an article he was writing.  Arthur agreed, but didn’t want to be paid for their use believing “if genuine, the images should not be ‘soiled’ by money” (3).

            Gardner was still trying to prove the authenticity of the photos.  He went to Kodak for a second opinion.  Kodak said the photos “showed no signs of being faked” but that “this could not be taken as conclusive evidence … that they were authentic photographs of fairies” and wouldn’t give a certificate of authenticity to them (4).  The photographic company Ilford also believed there was evidence of faking.  Doyle, too, was seeing if other people thought they were real.  He showed the photos to the psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge.  Lodge believed they were fake, sighting their “distinctly ‘Parisienne’ hairstyles” (5).

            In July 1920, Gardner went to Cottingley.  He brought two Kodak cameras and “secretly marked photographic plates” and wanted Elsie and Frances to take more photos (6).  By this time Frances was living in Scarborough with her parents, but she was invited back for the summer.  The weather was bad that summer and it wasn’t until August 19 that they were able to take more photos.  Polly Wright was with the girls, but they told her the fairies wouldn’t come out if others were around, so Mrs. Wright left.  The girls were then able to take three new photos.

            The new photos were carefully packaged and sent to Gardner in London.  Gardner was thrilled with the pictures and sent a telegram to this effect to Doyle who was lecturing in Australia.  Doyle replied, “When our fairies are admitted other psychic phenomena will find a more ready acceptance” (7).

            The article Doyle had been working on, and used the photos for, came out in The Strand around Christmas 1920.  The issue sold out in two days.  In the article, the Wrights were called the Carpenters, Elsie was called Iris, and Frances was called Alice.  Press coverage of Doyle’s article was mixed, but with a lot of “embarrassment and puzzlement” (8).

            In 1921, Doyle wrote another article for The Strand about other accounts of fairy sightings.  These articles formed the basis for his 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies.  The second article and the book, too, had mixed receptions.

            In 1921, Gardner made his last trip to Cottingley.  Again he brought cameras and photographic plates, but he also brought the clairvoyant, Geoffrey Hodson.  This time the girls didn’t see any fairies and no photos were taken, but Hodson took a lot of notes about all the fairies he saw around.  By this point Elsie and Frances were tired of the fairies and just played along with Hodson “out of mischief” (9).  The girls grew up, married, and moved abroad, the Cottingley fairies left behind them.

            While mostly fading from view, the photos still popped up after this.  In 1945 Gardner’s book, Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel, was published.  Still, criticisms persisted.  People said they looked like paper cutouts and that people just needed something to believe in after the war.

In 1966, the Daily Express found Elsie back in England and interviewed her.  She said maybe the fairies were just her imagination and maybe she’d found a way to photograph her thoughts.  This interview renewed interest in the photos.  In 1971, Elsie was interviewed on the television program Nationwide, and said the same thing as 1966.  In 1976, Elsie and Frances were interviewed together.  They said “a rational person doesn’t see fairies” but still said the photographs were real (10).

In 1978 James Randi investigated the photos.  He found the fairies looked very similar to images in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, which came out in 1915.  In 1982-83, Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography, came out saying the photos were fakes.

In 1983 in The Unexplained magazine, Elsie admitted the fairies were faked to Joe Cooper.  She admitted that they were drawings and that hatpins were used to hold them in place.  She still claimed that they had seen fairies and only the ones in the photos weren’t real.  Frances admitted to the fakes as well.  However Elsie said all five photos were faked, while Frances claimed the fifth one was real.  In 1985, on Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Elsie expanded, saying that once Doyle was brought in, believing in the photos, she and Frances were too embarrassed to tell the truth.  Frances said, “it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun – and I can’t understand why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in” (11).

Frances died in 1986 and Elsie died in 1988, both not long after they came clean.  Interest in the photos continued though.  In 1998 prints, a first edition of The Coming of the Fairies, and some other items were auctioned off for £21,620.  Also in 1998, Geoffrey Crawley sold off all the Cottingley things he had acquired; this included prints, two of the cameras, fairy watercolors Elsie did, and a letter in which Elsie admitted the hoax.  Crawley sold the items to the, now called, National Media Museum in Bradford (near Cottingley).

In 2001, some of the glass plates were auctioned for £6,000 to an unnamed buyer.  In 2009, Frances’s daughter went on Britain’s Antiques Roadshow with some of the photos and one of the cameras from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  She, like her mother, believed the fifth photo was real.  Her items were appraised at £25,000-£30,000.  Later in 2009 Frances’s memoirs were published.

In 1994, Terry Jones and Brian Froud parodied Cottingley in Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book.  In 1997 two movies related to Cottingley came out: FairyTale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies.

            The lure of the fairies continues…  I think part of it is the wonder and mystery, but also how someone like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in them.  I think it also tells you something about the time period that the photos became so popular and had both believers and skeptics.

1 - The Cottingley Fairies

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - Cottingley Fairies

Harold Gillies

            I’m not sure where I first heard about Harold Gillies.  It may have been through a podcast, or maybe in a book I was reading since we’re in the midst of the World War One centenary.  I don’t really know.  But, I remembered him because what he did really stuck with me.  And it turns out he kept doing cool stuff after the First World War!

            Harold Delf Gillies was born on June 17, 1882 in Dunedin, New Zealand, the youngest of Robert and Emily Gillies’ eight children.  Robert was a Member of Parliament and a businessman, but died when Harold was only four.  Because of his positions, though, Robert left his family well taken care of.  Harold followed his brothers to prep school in England, and then to Wanganui College back in New Zealand.  Harold was a skilled artist and throughout school, he was also good at sports, including cricket, golf, and rowing.  After Wanganui, Harold went to Caius College at Cambridge, back in England, and won ribbons for rowing, “despite a stiff elbow sustained sliding down the banisters at home as a child” (1).

            At Cambridge Harold studied medicine and became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1910, specializing in ear, nose, and throat surgery.  When the First World War broke out, Harold decided to join the Red Cross rather than waiting to be drafted.  In 1915 he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and went to Wimereux in France.  In France Harold met Charles Auguste Valadier, a French dentist, and Bob Roberts, an American dental surgeon.  Roberts lent Harold a German book about jaw and mouth surgery.  Valadier “was not allowed to operate unsupervised but was attempting to develop jaw repair work” (2).  Valadier was trying early skin grafts on his patients.

            We have to go off on a little bit of a tangent here for a minute and talk about skin grafts and early facial surgeries.  In India, they had been doing a sort of rhinoplasty for centuries, using “crescent shaped flaps of skin … drawn from patients’ foreheads and fashioned into substitute noses” (3).  In the nineteenth century, the French and the Germans “had developed a technique whereby skin could be transferred from one part of the body to another,” “’but appearance was of secondary importance’” (4).  This is probably what was in the book Roberts lent Harold.  Harold saw all this and wanted to make the person look normal, or even better than they looked before.

            Harold left Wimereux for Paris to try and meet Hippolyte Morestin, a renowned surgeon.  Morestin had also done similar surgeries, having removed a tumor on a face and covering it with jaw skin from the patient (5).  After meeting Morestin, Harold returned to England to try and convince “the army’s chief surgeon, [William] Arbuthnot-Lane, that a facial injury ward should be established at the Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot” (6).  This ward was quickly outgrown and a new hospital just for this purpose was opened at Sidcup, becoming Queen Mary’s Hospital later on.

            Harold’s artistic abilities played into how he viewed himself as a surgeon, and surgeons in general.  As mentioned earlier, Harold wanted to make his patients look at least as good as they did before their injuries.  He saw facial reconstructive surgeons as a type of artist and plastic surgery as “a strange new art” (7).  In order to have the results he wanted, Harold came up with a number of new techniques for facial surgeries.

            First, Harold made sure to visualize how he wanted the person to look in the end.  He took the time to make drawings on paper, worked with wax, or even made plaster models of his patients.  Secondly, Harold made sure his teams included anyone he could possibly need.  He understood the importance of having a dental surgeon on hand since so much of the facial structure is related to the mouth and jaw.  Thirdly, “because surgery on damaged faces was impossible when a mask was used to anaesthetise the patient, he encouraged anaesthetists to develop alternative techniques, such as using a tube in the trachea” (8).  Harold was also one of the first, if not the first, to document the entire process.  Henry Tonks, a surgeon and painter, helped Harold document both “pre- and post-facial reconstruction cases” (9).

            After the Somme (1916), Harold and his team at Aldershot helped over two thousand men with jaw and facial mutilations (10).  Despite everything he did during World War One, and his fame now for his advancements, “his work during the First World War went largely unnoticed” (11).  Harold was recognized by other countries for his work before he was recognized in England.

            In the early 1920s Harold went to Copenhagen “to treat a number of Danish naval officers and men who had been severely burned in an accident” (12) when a Royal Danish Navy ship exploded.  The Danish government decorated Harold for his services.  Finally, in June 1930, Harold was knighted for his services to England; Arbuthnot-Lane said “Better late than never” (13).

            After World War One, Harold opened a private practice for surgery, gave lectures, taught, and promoted his new techniques.  In 1920 his first book, Plastic Surgery of the Face, was published.  (He would also co-author 1957’s The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery.)  In 1930, Harold invited his cousin, Archibald McIndoe, to join his practice; McIndoe became well-known for plastic surgery as well, making new advances during the Second World War.  In 1938, Harold and his practice began correcting breast abnormalities, going back to Harold’s wanting to make people look as good or better than they had been.

During World War Two, Harold was called on to be a consultant for the Minister of Health, the Royal Air Force, and the Admiralty; he helped organize plastic surgery units across the country, and trained many Commonwealth doctors in plastic surgery.  After the war, in 1946, Harold was “elected foundation president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons; he later became honorary president of the International Society of Plastic Surgeons” (14).  In 1948, Norway decorated Harold for his work during World War Two.  He was also made an “honorary fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, of the American College of Surgeons and of the Royal Society of Medicine, London” (15).

In 1946, Harold and a colleague performed “one of the first sex reassignment surgery from female to male on Michael Dillon” (16).  In 1951, they performed a male to female sex reassignment surgery; their way of performing this surgery became standard for the next forty years.

Going back a bit, for his personal life, on November 9, 1911, Harold married Kathleen Margaret Jackson in London.  They had four children.  Their oldest son, John, became a RAF pilot during World War Two and spent much of the war as a POW.  Their youngest son, Michael, also became a doctor.  Harold had been good at sports while he was in school, but continued on, becoming a champion golfer.  He also continued with his art, exhibiting at Foyale’s Art Gallery in London in 1948.

In May 1957, Kathleen died, and in November of that year, Harold married Marjorie Ethel Clayton, who had been his surgical assistant.  In August 1960, while operating on the leg of an 18-year-old girl, Harold suffered a “slight cerebral thrombosis” (17).  On September 10, 1960, Harold died at The London Clinic in Marylebone.  Despite his fame and having earned around £30,000 a year between the wars, he only left £21,161 upon his death.  To finish I’m going to quote at length from Sir Heneage Ogilvie, a renowned British surgeon, who wrote in 1962:

“During my life I have only known three surgeons who were undoubtedly first-class.  They were Geoffery Jeferson, Harold Gillies and Russell Brock.  Apart from Arbuthnot Lane, who was before my time, they are the only men in Europe or America who have taken a branch of surgery and by their own effort, by their leadership, their research and craftsmanship, have left it far higher than they found it.  To say that of Gillies is an understatement: he invented plastic surgery.  There was no plastic surgery before he came.  Everything since then, no matter whose name be attached to it, was started by Gillies, perfected by him and handed on by him to lesser men, who have often claimed it as their own” (18).

1, 2, 5, 6, 13, 16, 17 - Harold Gillies

10, 11, 12 - Harold Delf Gillies

8, 14, 15 - Rex Wright-St Clair, “Gillies,Harold Delf,” Te Ara, The Encyclopedia ofNew Zealand.

3, 4, 7, 9, 18 - CJ Williams, “Harold Gillies: Aesthetic Reconstructor,” NZEDGE, June 26, 2002.