The Cottingley Fairies photographs

1917

In mid-1917 Elsie Wright, 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, 9, borrowed a camera in Cottingley, West Yorkshire and returned half an hour later with a photograph of Frances beside four dancing fairies; a second, of Elsie with a gnome, followed two months later. The figures were cardboard cut-outs Elsie copied from Claude Shepperson's illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, propped up with hatpins and thrown in the beck afterwards. Arthur Conan Doyle publicised them in The Strand in December 1920. The cousins admitted the fakery in 1983, though Frances maintained to the end that the fifth photograph was genuine.