On Thursday October 4th we all have a golden opportunity to buy two of the
Cottingley Fairies photographs. There are two photos being sold at auction, each estimated to fetch £700 to £1000. Not my taste but they are certainly a strange reminder
of their times.
The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs
taken by Elsie Wright (1901–1988) and Frances Griffiths (1907–1986), two young cousins
who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford
in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years
old and Frances was 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate
an article on fairies
he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine.
Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic
about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic
phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, others
believed that they had been faked.
I’ll admit to being baffled by this. The idea of any sane adult thinking
the photographs might be genuine is beyond strange. Presumably hardly anyone would accept
similar photos as genuine today, but then we are familiar with faked photos and the
digital age has made us even more cautious.
Yet who could possibly believe in
fairies anyway? Has human nature changed so much over the past century or so?
Maybe we should see the Cottingley Fairies as a suggestion that we are just as gullible but in our own way. Perhaps it is one of the ways we make progress - building new modes of gullibility so we can laugh at the old ones. It's how we always manage to amuse our descendants.
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5 comments:
I know someone who claims to have seen, as an adult, fairies feasting and dancing in a field. She doesn't come across as insane, and otherwise is quite dull. She has no other strange beliefs other than a vague and amorphous religiosity. She held down a responsible job in a bank and then as a nurse.
The detail of the Cottingley story that really amuses me is that one of the girls admitted the fraud in old age, but the other one maintained the story until her death. If you're going to do something, do it properly...
Way back when I was a child we had the Fairy aircraft factory not far away. So I was always seeing Fairies. My problem then was when I told people in other places about how many Fairies I had seen was explaining to them that I meant aircraft and was not somewhere else in my mind. There were many who did not know much about aircraft. Then there was the very special time I went up in one from a local airfield. So I can truthfully say I have been away with the Fairies.
Sam - crikey - fairies feasting and dancing in a field? I wouldn't know what to make of that but as you say, one of the girls maintaining the story until her death is fascinating.
Demetrius - my scanty knowledge of the aircraft manufacturer came from building an Airfix model of the Fairey Swordfish. Just recently I read an interesting technical summary of why the Swordfish was effective against Bismarck, one reason being its lack of speed oddly enough.
I read an interesting technical summary of why the Swordfish was effective against Bismarck, one reason being its lack of speed oddly enough.
Yes, the guns on the ship were designed for faster aircraft, so missed the Swordfish.
Longrider - yes, apparently there was gunnery automation which couldn't handle the slow speed of the Swordfish - it wasn't where it should have been.
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