Fairies (1978)

 

BBC play that tells the story of the Cottingley Fairies photos- just five years before the truth emerged.

Can you imagine if someone took a photograph of a strange creature now and posted it on Instagram how much fuss there would be? It would be trending in minutes. In 1917 this was not the case. Photographs were almost exclusively for private use so it’s not unusual that after two girls had taken pictures of what appeared to be real fairies they lay untouched for three years until a chance sighting of the pictures led to what was a lot of excitement around the world. The sensation was heightened when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by then a world famous author, believed that the pictures were real. It ignited a debate; a tabloid frenzy and differing opinions from the villagers whose quiet life was interrupted when word got out where these fairies apparently were. It’s a true story and BBC4 recently showed Fairies, a Play of the Week drama, first broadcast in 1978. It’s a pity it was made four years before he truth was finally uncovered…

 

Crucially the drama does not seek to either claim that the fairies were real nor to discredit it as a hoax. Instead, it stays period true showing mostly the reaction to the images and choosing not to show the moment when they were either taken or faked. To the modern eye they don’t look real of course; a more believable picture of such an event could be created now using a smartphone and some AI, but back then there were limited ways to analyse photographs. All you had was the plate from the camera, the monochrome picture itself and a lot of microscopes. So, in many ways Fairies has the tone of any umber of period dramas from the Seventies, a form at which the BBC could not be equalled.

There’s fabulous attention to detail whether in the cottage or the board room or the office and when outside near the brook where the “earth spirits” as someone calls them are allegedly lurking the production does not try to introduce any sort of supernatural atmosphere or the like. Director Moira Armstrong keeps it real and that goes for the performances, the narrative and ultimately the conclusion as well supporting writer Geoffrey Case’s similarly practical narrative. It’s a very plain spoken Yorkshire affair when we’re in the village and while the scenes of bullying can seem somewhat staged and awkward, there’s plenty of zest in the main performances and gravitas from the more experienced cast members.

We see the girls- nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her cousin sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright spending a summer together in the small village of Cottingley during which time they take the photos; not something the production shows. Its only three years later when photographic expert Edward Gardiner sees the pictures that he instigates a thorough investigation and when convinced he showed them to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had an interest in spiritual matters, a growing movement perhaps to salve post war anxieties. In the December 2020 issue of `The Strand` magazine the pictures were published with Conan Doyle’s endorsement as to their veracity. It was described on the cover as an “epoch making event.” It may not have quite been that but as the drama shows despite attempts to maintain the anonymity of the girls and the village both soon became famous with reporters descending on the place.

In the drama by the time this happens Frances is away at boarding school where she is teased relentlessly while Elsie’s work colleagues are somewhat blasé about the whole thing. A second set of photos neither conclusively proves nor disproves anything and after Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 the story faded to become a historical curio. This production certainly conveys the excitement of the outside world about the pictures- a lengthy sequence shows Conan Doyle being questioned by journalists from every viewpoint not just over the photography’s authenticity but their meaning. A fine cast gives it real period gusto- Conan Doyle is played by a pre–Inspector Morse James Grout as an urgent but broad minded fellow, Hugh Burden is the more forensic Gardiner and Charles Kay is excellent as the girl’s increasingly frustrated father. You can also spot a very young Nicholas Lyndhurst as a junior reporter. For the young actors playing the girls it seems like this was their only tv production, a slightly enigmatic fact that seems entirely in keeping with the nature of the story. As Elsie, Linda Searle shows tremendous promise with a well-pitched performance that maintains suitable playful mystery. You feel Elsie is hiding something even though when the play was made nobody actually knew.

As late as the mid Seventies Frances and Elsie still maintained that the pictures were not faked but improving technology meant that sooner or later the images would be subject to more rigorous analysis and in the early Eighties that’s what happened. In 1982 at the Brotherton Collection in Leeds University researchers determined that the camera which the girls claimed to have taken the picture could not have produced such a sharp negative. They believed the photographs were worked on by someone with expert knowledge to make the fairy figures more convincingly real and speculated that person was likely to have been Edward Gardiner.

In 1983 Frances and Elsie finally confessed that they had faked the pictures. The fairies had been traced from a book featuring dancing girls which were then cut out in cardboard. They used hat pins to make them stand upright. The sense of movement that some experts at the time saw was actually the cut outs moving slightly in the breeze.  Frances told the BBC: "I never even thought of it being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. I can't understand to this day why people were taken in. They wanted to be taken in.”  Never quite willing to let it go she did claim that a fifth photo was genuine. Though this was all revealed five years after Fairies was shown, the play does suggest a yearning for something good and positive after the first world war may have made more people willing to believe in this story.

After the fuss, Elsie moved to the United States where she married before returning to the UK in 1949. She died in 1988. Frances also lived abroad for long periods after marrying a soldier and died in 1986. Had the true story of the photos not been revealed before their deaths it is certain they would have been by now so it’s good that they got to tell the story in their own down to earth way. Frances' daughter eventually sold the original photos at auctions for about £65,000. The events were depicted somewhat more lavishly in a 1997 film that somehow managed to include Harry Houdini. It is amazing though that the photos were not discredited for over sixty years when they are only done for “a bit of fun.” And that in itself makes a great story anyway.