Fake News!

Looking out of my window at a 'Fairy Ring' which appeared on the lawn this week my thoughts turned to other fairies I have known (!)

First among these were the images produced in July 1917 by two schoolgirl cousins with a borrowed camera, claiming to show fairies dancing on the rockery at the end of their garden. They were widely believed in those early (pre-Photoshop) days of photography, and commended as genuine by such celebrities of the age as Arthur Conan Doyle, who had an interest in spiritualism and fairies and whose fictional detective Sherlock Holmes was also believed by many to be a real person living at 221B Baker Street, London, where a blue plaque still marks the office building now standing on that site.

The 'fake news' photographs taken almost exactly a century ago , received such public acclaim that the girls were too embarrassed to confess their deception, although they can be recognised today as printed images cut out from pages of a children's story book and mounted on hat pins.

The late Geoffrey Crawley, editor of The British Journal of Photography, with whom I had many enjoyable discussions in the 1970s when I was writing for the journal, carried out a major scientific investigation of the photographs over several years, and published a detailed description of the equipment and processing and the events surrounding them, removing any lingering doubt that the story was anything but a joke which had inadvertently got out of hand, but I am sure he would have appreciated my real scoop photograph taken this week, when I spotted Frances Griffiths, elder of the two cousins (sadly now both long deceased), sitting on my lawn, surrounded by some of their original fairies