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

Where'd the week go?

Well, I completely lost track of the days this week and don't have a new post.  I thought I'd share an article I read recently, though.  It's peripherally related to the Victorian fabric dye article, and so I thought it might be of interest.  Enjoy!

Licensing agreement reached on brilliant new blue pigment discovered by happy accident.

Also, Happy Pi day!

Violet Oakley

            Back in 2010 my family took a trip to Philadelphia.  On the way we stopped in Harrisburg and went to the Capitol building (we’d go to any capitol building we could when on vacation).  One of the first things you notice about the capitol is the gorgeous green dome.  When you enter the building it’s just as gorgeous.  A big part of what makes Pennsylvania’s capitol special is the murals throughout.  The murals were done by Violet Oakley, the first American woman to receive a public mural commission.

            Violet Oakley was born on June 10, 1874 in Bergen Heights, New Jersey (her birthplace is often listed as Jersey City; Bergen Heights was part of Jersey City, so neither is wrong).  Both of Violet’s grandfathers were members of the National Academy of Design, so when Violet wanted to be an artist, she had a relatively easy path.  In 1892 she started at the Art Students League of New York, and the following year went to study in England and France.  In France she studied at the Académie Montparnasse.

            In 1896 Violet returned to the US to study.  She began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but less than a year later she left and transferred to the Drexel Institute School of Illustration after the urging of her sister, Hester, who was already attending Drexel.  At Drexel, Violet studied under Howard Pyle.  At this time she also made friends with Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jessie Willcox Smith, other students of Pyle’s; Pyle nicknamed them the Red Rose Girls because they lived together at the Red Rose Inn (1).

            Violet had success as an illustrator.  She had pieces in The Century Magazine, Collier’s Weekly, St. Nicholas Magazine, and Women’s Home Companion.  At the time, about 88% of subscribers to magazines were women, and so there was a push to show the world from a woman’s perspective, and so women were hired as illustrators. (2).

Despite the success at illustration, and teaching her illustration, Pyle actually encouraged Violet to pursue large scale pieces and helped Violet get commissions for murals and stained glass pieces.  Violet still worked on small pieces when she could.

            Violet attributed her style to Pyle and to the Pre-Raphaelites.  Her art also showed a “commitment to Victorian aesthetics during the advent of Modernism” (3).  Violet had also become a Quaker in her adult life (she was raised Episcopalian), and wanted to showcase the Quaker ideals of pacifism, equality of races and sexes, and economic and social justice (4).

            In 1902, architect Joseph M. Huston chose Violet to create murals for the Governor’s Reception Room in the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, purely on the basis of her talent (5).  Before this point, her only mural had been at the All Angels Episcopal Church in New York City.  Violet admired William Penn’s utopian vision for Pennsylvania, and wanted to highlight this.  She travelled to Europe to study about Penn’s life.  The murals in the Reception Room took Violet over four years, and highlight her talents as well as her interest in history.  Violet would do fourteen murals total for the Reception Room, and 43 murals in total in the Capitol building.

            In 1903, while she was working on these murals, Violet joined Christian Science.  While she had been in Florence, Violet had her asthma cured through prayer and so joined Christian Science.  She was a member of the Second Church of Christ, Scientist in Philadelphia from its founding in 1912 until her death in 1961.  In 1939, Violet even illustrated a poem by Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science) in the style of illuminated manuscripts.

            In 1911, Violet was working with Edwin Austin Abbey on the Senate Chamber and Supreme Court Rooms at the Capitol, when Abbey died.  Due to her talent and work with Abbey, Violet was chosen to finish Abbey’s work.  This work took Violet nineteen years, over which time she completed the murals, six illuminated manuscripts, and a book about the murals.

            After her work at the Pennsylvania Capitol, Violet did a mural at the League of Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland; the Henry Memorial Library at the Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia; and the First Presbyterian Church in Germantown in Philadelphia (6).

            Throughout the rest of her life lived on and off with the Red Rose Girls and Henrietta Cozens.  Their home in Mt. Airy, PA was called Cogs from their initials (Cozens, Oakley, Green, and Smith).  The home was later called Cogslea, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Violet Oakley Studio in 1977.  Her home and studio in Yonkers, NY, where she lived on and off from 1912 to 1915, are also in the National Register as Plashbourne Estate.

            Violet lived at Cogslea with her longtime companion Edith Emerson after the other Red Rose Girls moved out.  Edith was the director and president of the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia.  They lived together for the rest of their lives.  Violet Oakley died on February 25, 1961.  She is buried in the Oakley family plot in Green-Wood Cemetery.

            While Violet’s work had fallen out of favor after World War II, there was renewed interest starting in the 1970s.  In 1996, Violet Oakley was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame - the last of the Red Rose Girls to be inducted.  In June 2014, Violet’s grave was featured on the first gay themed tour of Green-Wood Cemetery (7).

1, 2, 3, 4, 7 - Violet Oakley

5 - Women of History: Violet Oakley

6 - Violet Oakley Historical Marker

Happy Leap Day!

            Happy Leap Day!  When I realized that it was a leap year, and that leap day was on a Monday, I realized I had to do something about leap day, even if there wasn’t much.  How could I resist?  (Boy did I find some funny, but kinda awful at the same time, vintage leap day cards.)  This probably won’t be terribly long, but like I said, how could I resist?

            Leap years occur because each year isn’t actually 365 days.  A year is closer to 365.25 days, and so every four years (more or less) we have to add a day to the calendar in order to keep everything in check.  Without the day added, eventually holidays and seasons would be all out of whack.  When we add a day to the calendar, this causes the date to jump a day the following year.  For example, yesterday, February 28, was a Sunday.  Next year, February 28 is a Tuesday.  It “leapt over” Monday.  This seems to be the agreed upon reason for why the day is called “leap day”.

            Until the time of Julius Caesar, the year was 355 days.  Every two years a whole 22 day month was added.  Caesar had the astronomer Sosigenes develop a new calendar.  This new calendar was adjusted by Pope Gregory XIII to be even more accurate.

            In some calendars they still add a whole month; Hindu and Hebrew calendars add a month every three years on average.  Other calendars have had extra, extra days; in 1700 Sweden also had a February 30.  Sweden had been on their own calendar and was slowly moving over to the Gregorian calendar.  When Sweden went to war at this time, though, they didn’t keep up with the slow move, and so had to add another extra day in 1700.

            Since February 29 only occurs every four years (generally), people with leap day birthdays have to celebrate their birthday some other day.  Most of the United States, the U.K., and Hong Kong use March 1 as the birthday in non-leap years.  In China, Taiwan, and New Zealand they use February 28.  People who have a leap day birthday are generally called leaplings.  Personally, they can choose to celebrate their birthday every year, and pick a date, or have a birthday every four years (they’re recognized to have a birthday every year though, hence why different countries have different official dates for them).  Back in 2012, Parks and Recreation did an episode for Jerry’s “Sweet 16” since he had a leap day birthday.

            Most traditions involving leap day involve women proposing to men on the day.  In Ireland the tradition is supposed to have been started by St. Patrick and/or Brigid of Kildare.  Since they most likely never met, or if they did Brigid was about five, and that records of the tradition weren’t documented until the nineteenth century…  That’s probably not where the tradition started.  In Denmark, women were supposed to propose to men on February 24 of the leap year, not actually on leap day.

            In England it was believed that anything that happened on leap day was acceptable since the day wasn’t officially recognized by English law.  The day is also seen to be lucky, and it’s believed that anything started on a leap day will be successful.  In Scotland it was unlucky to be born on a leap day.  (It’s also called St. Oswald’s Day since he died on the day in 992.)  Also in Scotland women were supposed to wear red petticoats, so men could see them, when they would propose to men.

            In much of upper-class Europe there were traditions that men had to buy the woman something if they turned down the woman’s proposal.  In some places the man had to buy her twelve pairs of gloves (possibly to cover up that she doesn’t have a ring on).  In Finland the man had to buy the woman fabric for a skirt.  In Greece it was viewed as unlucky to marry either on leap day or during the whole leap year.

            More modern observations of leap day include: since 1980, the French satirical paper, La Bougie du Sapeur, which is only published on leap day; in 1988, Anthony, Texas declared itself the “leap year capital of the world”, even having a leapling birthday club; in some of the U.S. it has been seen as sort of a Sadie Hawkins Day, where gender roles could be reversed.  Leap day has shown up on tv shows at least twice (I can think of two and I’m sure I don’t know of others).  As mentioned earlier, Parks and Rec threw Jerry a sweet 16 back in 2012, and on 30 Rock we were introduced to Leap Day William.

            That’s about it for leap day.  There wasn’t a whole lot of varying information, and most of the traditional aspects are pretty much all just variations on the same theme.  I don’t even have any links to add today since it’s basically all common knowledge.  It’s a fun little day though.  Make sure you wear your yellow and blue! 

Victorian Fabric Dyes

            Despite my main interest being the period between World Wars One and Two, I’ve been getting increasingly interested in the Victorian Era.  There’s always been a bit: I love watching adaptations of Dickens, Gaskell, Burnett; The Forsyte Sage is one of my favorite miniseries and books (not written in the period, but the first two parts take place during it); I loved The Young Victoria.  After Christmas I picked up three or four books on Victoria and the Era, and I’m working through one of them currently.  In the book, the author takes you through a day in the life of a Victorian, covering different classes and different years in the period.  There is a lengthy discussion of changes in fashion and the new colors that were created at this time due to the discovery of chemical dyes.

            Dyeing clothes has been around for millennia.  Dyes were made from plants and animals.  The first popular fabric dye was a purple made from crushed mollusk shells; it was the most expensive dye ever, literally costing its weight in gold.  By about the year 300, instead of things that actually made purple, people were using blue and red to make purple; this was more affordable, and, well, the mollusk had gone extinct.  Late in the fourth century, the Emperor of Byzantium issued a decree that only the imperial family could wear purple.  You could be killed if you went against the decree.

            The next popular dye was red.  In Europe, madder root was used to make red.  In South America, Brazilwood was used for a brighter red.  In Central America, cochineal, an insect, was used.  In the fifteenth century, “Cardinal’s Purple” was used for the clergy, but was actually a crimson red made from a different insect related to cochineal; cochineal was brought back to Europe around 1519.  In the seventeenth century, it was found that adding tin to this made for a deeper, more intense red; this was used for the British Army’s coats and for those bright red hunting jackets you see.

            Now we’re finally caught up to where dyes were at coming into the Victorian Era.

            In the 1850s, William Henry Perkins was trying to cure malaria by creating artificial quinine.  In the process, Perkins discovered aniline dyes.  Aniline dyes were “a byproduct created from distilling tar left from coal that was ‘cooked’ to produce gas for commercial use” (1).  Perkins created the “first mass produced chemical dye” (2) – mauveine.  At first Perkins called it Tyrian Purple after the Roman purple, but since this was a real thing, that name was dropped.  Next the color was called mauve, after a flower, but personally Perkins called it mauveine.  (This mauveine is a different shade than modern mauves, so that’s why that name is still used. (3))

            Mauveine wasn’t the first aniline dye - the first dyes from coal tar were blues and reds - but Perkins was the first to really pursue aniline dyes.  There were issues at the beginning: the earliest mauveine dyes weren’t very colorfast, fading in the sun; they couldn’t dye cotton - the most popular fabric at the time - only wool and silk; creating aniline dyes was incredibly expensive.  Perkins experimented though and found that tannins (the same things found in wines and whatnot) helped the dye work on cotton.  He also found a way to produce the dyes much more cheaply; he found his own dyer and built his own factory. (4)

            Around this same time, the Empress Eugenie decided she really loved wearing purple.  In 1858, Queen Victoria wore a pale purple to her daughter’s wedding.  Purples, of all shades, were on the rise.  In 1859, Punch magazine was joking about the “mauve measles”.  After mauve went out of fashion, there were reds, browns, other purples, yellows, blues, and greens.  Perkins kept up with the changing fashions, coming up with new colors: dahlia, Britania violet (a deep blue), Perkin’s green, aniline black, and others (5).

            Aniline dyes were very popular.  Many of the colors were bright (though not all were; aniline blacks were incredibly popular) and the new dyes didn’t fade in the sun or rinse out in the wash.  Natural dyes were more pale, and would fade or wash out over time; the market for natural dyes just collapsed.

Aniline dyes also were safer than some of the older dyes.  As mentioned with purples, greens could only be made by mixing blues and yellows until the late 1700s.  In 1775 Carl Wilhelm Scheele created a bright, colorfast green by mixing copper and arsenic.  Scheele’s Green was used for everything from wallpaper and paintings to clothing.  It looked good in natural light and the new gas lighting.  It was used for the fake flowers that were so popular.  It was everywhere.  It could also be dangerous; it did have arsenic in it after all.  Aniline greens took over from the arsenic dyed greens in the 1870s.

(Honestly though, these arsenic dyes weren’t as dangerous as they’ve been made out to be - especially not the greens.  The most dangerous arsenic dyes were red and black, and possibly blue.  Green got the bad rap probably mostly from the fake flowers it was used on.  Unless you had very sensitive skin, or allergies to the metals in them, fabric dyes probably wouldn’t really hurt you.  The people that suffered the most from arsenic dyes were the people that created the dyes and the dyed items.  The worries about arsenic dyes were more likely about “Victorian morality and condemnation of fashion and female vanity” than anything else (6).)

By the late nineteenth century nearly all colors could be created with aniline dyes.  Not everyone approved of chemical dyes though.  By 1900, the Shah of Persia had even banned the dyes from being used in making rugs.  If someone did make a rug with chemical dyes, the carpets were taken and the guilty party was fined at double the value and possibly even burned in public.  Aniline dyes helped pave the way for modern dyes.

            So that’s a brief telling of the evolution of fabric dyes, and Victorian chemical dyes.  I didn’t find quite as much as I would have liked (I do have a whole book about the creation of mauve, but I haven’t read it yet, and that’s still limited in scope), but I found it pretty interesting.  Besides, those pretty, crazy colors!

1 - Fabric Dye: Dyeing to be Fashionable

2, 3, 4, 5 - Terminology: What are aniline dyes? (or, thehistory of mauve and mauveine)

6 - Drop Dead Gorgeous: A TL;DR Tale of Arsenic in VictorianLife

Happy Presidents Day!

I'll be back with a regular post next week!

Happy birthday, Galileo!