%0 Journal Article
%T Power at play in paranormal history
%A Christine Ferguson
%D 2024
%V 
%N Autumn 2024
%K camera technology
%K Cottingley fairies
%K Edward Gardner
%K Elsie Wright
%K Frances Griffiths
%K Midg camera
%K object biography
%K photography
%K Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
%K spirit photography
%X This article presents a collective object biography and discussion of the Cottingley Fairy artefacts – cameras, photographs, watercolour sketches and print materials – held at the National Science and Media Museum. I demonstrate how the controversial paranormal claims made about the Cottingley cameras by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner relied on the manipulation and obfuscation of key episodes in their history of use, a strategy that worked to distance the objects from each other and from their young female working-class operators Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright. My article seeks to both interlink and restore the lost episodes in the histories of these objects as a way of redressing the power imbalance between the plebeian producers and elite cosmopolitan popularisers of the world-famous fairy photographs. I suggest how a new curatorial approach to the materials might reject the familiar – and largely inaccurate – narrative of deliberate hoax and deception still widely attached to the case, and instead use them to tell a new story about the technological experimentation, artistic aspirations and social restrictions experienced by working-class girls in early twentieth-century Britain.
    
    
        
            
        
    

 
%Z Elsie Wright was born on 19 July 1901 and Frances Griffiths on 4 September 1907. No precise date is available for when the five photographs were shot, but in The Coming of the Fairies Edward Gardner would claim that the first picture had been taken in July 1917 and the second in September. This makes it likely that Elsie was 16 at the time of the first photograph and 17 at the time of the second; Frances would have been nine for the first and possibly ten for the second (Conan Doyle, Arthur, 1922, The Coming of the Fairies  (London: Hodder & Stoughton) p 35). The second series was produced sometime in July of 1920, when Elsie would have been 18 or 19, and Frances 12. These ages are important, as they often misrepresented or minimised in subsequent accounts of the case. Gardner himself would continuously refer to both Elsie and Frances as 'children' in The Coming of the Fairies (Conan Doyle, 1922, p 72).
%Z The story of how the photographs first came to Conan Doyle’s attention has been much retold, mythologised, and debated. In The Coming of the Fairies, the author writes that he learned about them through the London theosophical whisper network in May 1920, first from David Gow (editor of the spiritualist weekly Light) and then spiritualist and activist Felicity Scatcherd. Neither Gow nor Scatcherd had seen the pictures themselves, but the latter, on sensing Conan Doyle’s interest, forwarded him a letter from Gardner’s sister that described the images in detail. Intrigued by what he read there, he then wrote to a friend of the Gardners, one Miss E Blomfield, who sent him prints of the two pictures (Conan Doyle, 1922, pp 12–13). Only after seeing the evidence himself and ascertaining that 'Mr. Gardner was a solid person with a reputation for sanity and character' (Conan Doyle, 1922, p 16), did Conan Doyle write to Gardner to learn more. Recounted at length in The Coming of the Fairies, this narrative of approach is clearly intended to establish Conan Doyle’s caution and circumspection as an investigator. Only later in The Coming of the Fairies, in another inset letter dated July 1920, did Gardner explain the circumstances that had instigated his own involvement in the case, claiming that he had 'heard from a friend of photographs of fairies having been successfully taken in the North of England', after which he 'made some inquiries, and these led to prints being sent to me with the names and addresses of the children who were said to have taken them' (Conan Doyle, 1922, pp 32–33). 

Like so many other aspects of the Cottingley case, this account of the ‘discovery’ of the images by two disinterested and (hence) credible male witnesses has been manipulated to remove the agency and involvement of the Wright family. In fact, as Geoffrey Crawley recounts in his article series on the case for the British Journal of Photography, it was Elsie’s mother Polly who first alerted the theosophical community to the existence of the images upon attending a talk on Fairy Life at the Bradford Theosophical Hall in January 1920. 'After the talk', he writes, 'Mrs Wright was overheard to say that her daughter and a friend had taken photographs they claimed to show fairies. The lady lecturer asked to see prints and these were accordingly sent. She in turn sent these to Edward L. Gardner, a lecturer on the paranormal and a member of the Executive Committee of the Theosophical Society, who lived in Harlesden, London' (Crawley, 1982a, p 1376). Thus, while the Wrights certainly did not seek to financially capitalise on the photographs, it is not true that they were entirely aloof to their supernatural potential, nor was it the case, as Conan Doyle had claimed, that 'no attempt appears ever to have been made by the family to make these photographs public' (Conan Doyle, 1922, p 37). The fullest account of Gardner’s travels to Cottingley to meet Frances and Elsie and the gift to them of new cameras can be found in Crawley, 1982a, 1374–80.
%Z Frances’s account was published initially, and without her permission, by Joe Cooper in his December 1982 article for The Unexplained magazine: ‘Cottingley: At Last the Truth’, 117 (1982) pp 2338–2340. 
%Z Hill, Elsie, 1983, Printed Materials and Ephemera, ‘Seventh Page of Manuscript. Letter from Elsie Hill (nee Wright) to Geoffrey Crawley’, 1998-5148/7, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford.
%Z Conan Doyle’s late-life campaigning for spiritualism was often, and mistakenly, interpreted as a reaction to his inconsolable grief over the deaths of his son Kingsley (1892–1918) and brother Innes (1873–1919) during the 1918-1920 flu pandemic. Yet the author’s first public announcement of his belief in the 1916 Light article ‘The New Revelation’ predates these bereavements by some time (Conan Doyle, Arthur, 1916, ‘The New Revelation: Spiritualism and Religion’, Light,   pp 357–58). Furthermore, at the time he wrote the article, he had been active in international spiritualist and psychical research scenes for decades, having first attended séances in Portsmouth in the 1880s and joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1893.
%Z For more on the spiritualist history of objects in the Science Museum Group collections, see the three Objects and Stories digital exhibitions produced for our project by Dr Emma Merkling: ‘Telecommunications and the Occult’, ‘Using Science to Investigate the Paranormal’ and ‘Spirit Photography and the Occult: Making the Invisible Visible’
%Z Gardner and Conan Doyle claimed to have sent the girls 24 marked Illingworth plates, five of which were used to attempt new fairy photographs, and three of which were successful. Yet as Geoffrey Crawley points out, in a letter sent to Elsie in August 1920, Gardner announced that he was in fact sending six dozen plates, a sum of which Mrs Wright confirmed receipt in a subsequent letter. Three ‘hits’ out of a possible 72 was clearly a far less impressive result for their purposes (Crawley, Geoffrey, 1983a ‘That Astonishing Case of the Cottingley Fairies Part 3’, British Journal of Photography,  7 January, pp 9–15, p 12). 
%Z As we do not know the exact date on which this photograph was taken in the summer of 1920, it is impossible to know whether it fell on or after Elsie’s nineteenth birthday.
%Z Negatives of the original prints can be found in the Cottingley Fairies Collection held in the University of Leeds’ Brotherton Library.
%Z In her fascinating reading of the case, Bown suggests that the Cottingley photographs allowed Gardner to work through the buried trauma of his own experiences of childhood seership, referred to fleetingly in his work: Gardner, Edward L, 1945, Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and their Sequel (London: Theosophical Publishing House). For Gardner, she writes, 'the transformation of trauma into fantasy through reversals of gender and power is marked by an eroticization of the scene that was previously distressing; in the new scene, the fearful elements are reversed…but they can only be seen by those who themselves figure the past – that is, children' (Bown, 1996, p 72). Intriguing as this analysis may be, it seems to take a hammer to crack a nut. Gardner may or may not have been honestly recalling his own childhood memories in the single sentence he devotes to this topic in Fairies; alternately, this may simply have been a rhetorical embellishment. Certainly, one does not require Freudian theory to render Gardner’s motivations legible; there are plenty of non-psychoanalytic explanations as to why he might have altered the images and infantilised the girls to produce a highly profitable account of the case.  
%Z In her 1983 letter to Crawley, Elsie Hill records her frustration that ‘this large nursing home was built by the Theosophist association, entirely from the proceeds of money from copy photos of the Cottingley Fairies booklet, and all writings related to them over many years, costing half a million pounds. Frances is a widow. And I expect she thought it a bit ironical as I sat mending flaws in cloth in a weaving mill far across the sea from my native home in the U.S.A. while at the same time Mr Gardener who was a Theosofist [sic] was on a fully paid tour of the Universities all over the USA telling our Fairy story’ (Hill, Elsie, 1983, Printed Materials and Ephemera, ‘Third Page of Manuscript. Letter from Elsie Hill (nee Wright) to Geoffrey Crawley’, 1998-5148/3, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford).
%Z Hill, Elsie, 1983, Printed Materials and Ephemera, ‘Third Page of Manuscript. Letter from Elsie Hill (nee Wright) to Geoffrey Crawley’, 1998-5148/3, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford
%Z Hill, Elsie, 1983, Printed Materials and Ephemera, ‘First and Second Page of Manuscript. Letter from Elsie Hill (nee Wright) to Geoffrey Crawley’, 1998-5148/1-2, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. The cartoon to which Elsie refers is ‘Mr Punch’s Personalities: Arthur Conan Doyle', drawn by Bernard Partridge and published in Punch on 12 May 1926.  
%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/power-at-play-in-paranormal-history/
%J Science Museum Group Journal