In the summer of 1917, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her mother returned from South Africa to stay with the Wright family in Cottingley. Next door lived sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her parents. The beck—Cottingley Beck—ran through a small, tree-shaded glen beside their house. Frances and Elsie were immediate companions and spent every free moment exploring the beck’s mossy banks and overhanging rocks—much to their mothers’ despair. They habitually returned home drenched and muddied.
When scolded for their soggy return, the girls offered a whimsical defence: they had been looking for fairies. The adults, unsurprisingly, didn’t believe them. In response, Elsie borrowed her father Arthur’s Midg quarter-plate camera, determined to capture proof. Incredibly, within the hour they were back, triumphant.
Arthur developed the plate in his darkroom. The photograph revealed Frances, head turned in a shy smile, gazing skyward as diaphanous fairy figures danced before her. The image seemed impossibly delicate—fairies dancing among the ferns. Yet Arthur, a shrewd amateur photographer aware of Elsie’s artistic talent and experience in retouching, was unconvinced. When the girls returned with a second photo—this time showing Elsie communing with a gnome-like fairy—he suspected trickery: cardboard figures posed with hat-pins seemed most plausible.
Fast forward to July 2025. Two of these iconic photographs—Alice and the Fairies and Elsie and the Gnome—resurfaced at John Taylors Auction Rooms in Louth, Lincolnshire. They had been held for decades by Mary Anderson, Frances’s childhood best friend, who’d received them in school—unaware they were a fabrication.
The lot also included a photograph of Mary and Frances from the early 1920s, plus an archive of related materials.
The auction on 29 July exceeded expectations. Estimated to be worth in the low thousands, the lot closed at £2,600—almost double pre-sale forecasts—selling within two minutes to a private London collector. David Whittaker, Mary’s son, reflected on his mother’s lifelong belief in fairies and her heartbreak following the confession: “She spent her life believing in fairies… she was completely shocked. Because of them she had spent her life believing in fairies!”
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