Arthur Conan Doyle And The Cottingley Fairy Photographs With Merrick Burrow

Michelle: Before we dive into the eerie tales of the past, I have some electrifying news to share with you. I'm excited to announce that the Haunted History Chronicles podcast now has its very own small shop of the macabre and mysterious. Picture this exclusive merchandise, hauntingly beautiful artwork, spine tingling stickers, s, mugs that will make your morning coffee seem positively paranormal, and prints that capture the ghostly essence of days gone by. Whether you're a longtime listener of the show or a newcomer drawn to the enigmatic allure of Haunted history, the shop is your gateway to the supernatural. Imagine decorating your space with a piece of history, a connection to the spectral past. The merchandise is designed to evoke the very essence of the stories I share, making it an essential addition to your collection of all things eerie. You can find all these hair raising treasures on the website, or simply follow the links conveniently placed in the podcast description notes it's so easy, even a ghost could do it. So whether you're searching for the perfect addition to your Haunted memorabilia collection or just wanting to immerse yourself in the world of the supernatural, the shop is here to provide. Dive into the past, embrace the spook, and let the stories of history's ghosts haunt your space. So why not visit the shop today and remember, the spirits of the past are waiting for you. The Haunted History chronicles exclusive merchandise is just a click away. Happy shopping, and may the spirits be with you. Hi everyone, and welcome back to Haunted History Chronicles. First of all, thank you for taking a listen to this episode. Before we begin, I just want to throw out a few ways you can get involved and help support the show. We have a Patreon page as well as an Amazon link, so hopefully if you're interested in supporting, you can find a way that best suits you. All of the links for those can either be found in the show notes or over on the website. Of course, just continuing to help spread the word of the show on social media, leaving reviews and sharing with friends and family is also a huge help. So thank you for all that you do. And now let's get started by introducing today's podcast or guest in the quiet Yorkshire village of Cottingley, during the summer of 1917, the innocence of childhood collided with the supernatural. When Francis Griffiths, aged nine, and Elsie Wright, aged 14, took photographs of fairies. They meant this simply to play a practical joke on their parents. But when three years later, prints of the photographs found their way into the hands of Saratha Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, they ignited a controversy that led to the most enduring photographic hoax of all time. Many have since wondered how the creator of the supremely rational great detective could have been so deceived, and why he would have risked irreparable damage to his reputation by giving his endorsement to the photographs. Some point to Conan Doyle's public conversion to spiritualism as a sign that he had turned his back on facts and reason in later life. Others have suggested that his judgment was impaired by the impact of personal tragedies during the Great War. But neither of these explanations fully explains the facts of the case, and neither gets to the heart of the accidental conspiracy at the heart of the mystery. Joining me today is Dr. Merrick Burrow, head of English and history at the University of Huddersfield and an expert on Conan Doyle. He will be exploring the details of this fascinating story and attempt to answer the puzzling questions it poses to us. He is a literary and cultural historian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His publications include book chapters and journal articles on detective fiction, Conan Doyle and spiritualism. So, how did the rational creator of the Great detective Fall prey to a spectral illusion? Was it the haunting whispers of spiritualism or the ghosts of wartime tragedy that clouded his judgment? Join us on an exploration as we peel back the layers of history.

Michelle: Hi, Merrick. Thank you so much for joining me this afternoon.

Merrick Burrows: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Michelle: Do you want to start by just introducing yourself and giving the listeners a little bit of an introduction to yourself and your background?

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, sure. So, I'm Merrick Burrow. I'm a lecturer and head of English and history at the University of Huddersfield, and my area of research is mainly around late Victorian and early 20th century literature and culture. So, my interest in the cottonly fairies began with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I'm interested in Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as Conan Doyle's science fiction and other things. And so that's the route, really. Then I came to the cottingly fairies. So, yeah, I'm an academic, but I'm interested in the cottingly fairies, partly for academic reasons, but partly because it's such a resonant part of popular culture that people remain interested in today, even though it's over 100 years since the photographs were first taken.

Michelle: And I think part of that is because it dominated all kinds of media, whether it was print, through articles, reports, newspaper reports, books. But then, like you mentioned, through the images themselves, through the print versions of seeing them, and seeing something like that for the very first time, really resonated, and still does today. It's fascinating.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah. I think a big part of the story is absolutely about media and about mass media. And the impact of images when they can be circulated around the globe. It's really a big part of. I mean, there were newspaper hoaxes and things like that. Going back to the early 19th century. But I think the cotton leaf areas has got a particular significance in that respect. And it's partly to do with celebrity, obviously, Conan Door's involvement. But it is also partly to do with just a global reach of things like the Strand magazine. That hadn't necessarily existed that long before.

Michelle: So do you want to take us back to the beginning. And almost take us through, step by step, the timeline of the events. And how this really transpired and exploded onto the worldwide stage, if you like?

Merrick Burrows: Sure. It's an interesting story in all kinds of ways. And I think one of the things that really appeals to me about it is how much of a layered story it is. So everybody knows the images. They're very familiar images in any case. And I think most people are aware of Conan Doyle's involvement in them. And in many ways, that's the kind of entry point for a lot of people, as, indeed, in some ways it was for me. And the idea, I guess, that we have that what happened was that two fairly young girls from a kind of rural backwater. Managed to deceive the creator of Sherlock Holmes. And kind of perpetrate this hoax over him. And there's something very appealing about that. But the story itself is more layered and more complicated than that. So it begins in the spring of 1917. So Francis Griffith, who was the younger of the two girls, was living in South Africa with her parents. Her mother had tuberculosis, and so they were living in South Africa because the climate was better for her health. Her father was in the army based in South Africa. But they came back to England in the spring of 1917. So that her father could join the Western Front in the war effort. And so they returned to England. They went to live, that is to say, Francis and her mother went to live with Francis'aunts and her family. In the village of Cottingley. In West Riding of Yorkshire. So there was Francis, her mother Annie, her aunt Polly. And her husband, Arthur. And their daughter, Elsie Wright. So Elsie and Francis were cousins. Francis, at this point, was age nine. Elsie was age 16. So it was quite a small house, kind of two up, two down sort of arrangement with two families living together. And although the two mothers were sisters, in many respects, the families had lived apart. Frances had grown up in South Africa. She had a South African accent. So it was a small house, two families living together, and a time of great stress as well, with Arthur Griffiths having gone to the war. So it's quite a pressured environment, I think. And one of the ways that the family seemed to have dealt with the pressure is through humor and practical jokes. Now, Elsie Wright's father, I think, was probably on the outside of some of this. He doesn't seem to have been a particularly humorous individual. But the rest of the family were fairly prone to practical jokes. One example of this was that Francis Griffiths'mother, Annie, I beg your pardon. Annie was so overcome by stress, I guess, with various circumstances, her health, her husband going to fight on the Western Front, that she lost all of her hair. And so she was wearing a wig, and she used to sit when visitors came round and then suddenly take a wig off in order to kind of get a reaction from the visitors. And this was done for humorous intent. So there is this kind of general sort of background of practical jokes. At the same time, Frances was fairly think. You know, as I mentioned, she'd arrived from South Africa. She had a South African accent, her cousin, although she was sharing a bedroom with think, you know, there was a significant age gap between them. And Elsie was often working, as she did in Bradford. And so Frances was spending quite a bit of time on her own. And she used to go down to the stream, the beck that was at the bottom of the garden, and she would play down there and was often coming back with her shoes wet from the stream and getting scolded by her aunts and her mother for this. And one day she came back in the summer with wet shoes, and her mother was furious with her yet again, coming home with her shoes ruined and demanded to know what it was that was so interesting down at the beck. And Frances said that she went to see the fairies. And this produced kind of hilarity amongst the various adults there. But for whatever reason, her cousin Elsie decided that she would back up the story, probably as an idea of a joke, but perhaps out of a sense of feeling sorry for her cousin. So she said that she saw fairies too. And the family obviously didn't take this seriously. And they kept on joking and mocking them for this for some time, until Frances cooked up the idea that they would borrow her father's camera and take a photograph of the fairies. So she asked one day if she could borrow her father's camera. So her father was a keen amateur photographer. He'd set up a dark room in, I think, the former pantry downstairs, and he reluctantly agreed. After the two mums had egged him on and lending the camera. So he gave them one unexposed negative and his camera, his midge camera, to take off. And the girls, Julie, went down to the beck and came back a little while later with an exposed negative. And when he developed it, to his and everybody else's surprise, the picture emerged of Frances with her elbows leaning on the bank of the river and this group of fairies in the foreground in front of her. So parents demanded to know what had happened and how they'd produced this photograph. They didn't believe that these were fairies, I guess, is the first thing to say. They assumed that it was some kind of trick. But the girls had agreed and made a pact that they were under no circumstances going to admit that they'd faked it. They were going to stick to their story, which they did resolutely. And so the jokes continued and they then asked to borrow the camera again. So this was a month or so later, and they asked to borrow the camera a second time, and they said they're going to take another photograph of fairies. So they went off, same kind of arrangement. They disappeared off down to the beck, came back a short while later with another exposed negative. And when that was developed, the picture that emerged was of Elsie Wright sitting on the grass, wearing a kind of closure hat with the figure of a dancing gnome in front of her. And again, the family didn't believe this, but they couldn't explain it. They didn't understand how the photographs had been taken. If they were faked, they couldn't understand how it been done. But it sort of rested there for a while. Jokes continued for a while, but nothing much happened about it until about three years later. So in 1920, Elsie Wright's mother went to the Bradford Theosophical Institute. The Theosophical Society was a society that was interested in kind of occult and kind of mystical approaches to nature, a kind of new Agey sort of philosophy, really combining elements of Eastern religion with kind of Western interest in spiritualism and seances and that kind of thing. And they went to the Theosophical Institute and went to hear a talk about fairy life that somebody was giving. And at the end of the talk happened to mention these two photographs that the girls had taken three years before. And the people at Theosophical Institute were very interested in this. They asked to see the photographs, and this created a little bit of a sensation amongst the people in the Theosophical Institute. This then came to the attention of a man called Edward L Gardner. Who was leading the London branch of the Theosophical Institute. And so he then asked if he could see the photographs, if he could have a copy of the negatives so that he could make his own copies of these to use in his lectures about fairies and theosophy and so forth. And then it came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who happened to be writing a series of articles for the Strand magazine about various occult phenomenon, ghosts, poltergeists, and so forth. And he had one planned to write about fairies. And someone who knew Edward Gardner, who knew Conan Doyle, happened to mention that Gardner had got these negatives. And so Conan Doyle then got in touch with Gardner and asked if he could see them. And that was really the beginning of Conan Doyle's involvement. And then after that, it kind of snowballed into a whole series of investigations and so forth, which I guess we can talk about, but that's the basic background to how it came about.

Michelle: To me, it kind of feels like the perfect melting storm of people, individuals coming together, but also situation of the period just coming out of the First World War, the rise of spiritualism. You have all of these kind of aspects combining together to make for what was a very interesting story, and then throw into that mix people very much influential for different reasons, but part of groups and organizations that would avidly take this in, and you have something then that becomes this very rich story that just continues to roll and go and go and go and go and go and just gather momentum, really?

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's absolutely right. So, yeah, the First World War as a context is a really important one. I think it's one of the things that obviously is a reason why Francis Griffiths and Elsie Wright are in the household together in the first place, why the whole kind of setting is there, the tension of the situation. When Francis Griffiths talked, she wrote memoirs about her experiences and kind of what really happened, or began to write memoirs. And one of the things that she talks about in these memoirs is the fairies. Although the girls, as they were at the time, older women, admitted in the 1980s that the photographs had been faked. Francis Griffiths did maintain that she saw fairies, or not necessarily fairies, certainly not the dancing figures that appear in the photographs. But she said that she saw little men down at the Beck. And the way she describes them as like a platoon of soldiers or like railway porters on some occasions. Her descriptions of the little men that she sees as she's sort of sitting on her own kind of daydreaming, I guess, by the Beck, it seems very sort of redolent of the kind of things that she was witnessing when she traveled on a troopship from South Africa to England whilst her father was coming back to join the war effort. These squadrons of soldiers marching up and down railway porters and so forth. So I think as a context and as a sort of experience of trauma, I guess, as well, for Francis, that seems a really important context. But for other people, too, as you mentioned, the rising interest in spiritualism, the obvious stimulus for that with the losses of loved ones during the war and a desire to connect to these people who went off to war and in many cases, never came back. There was no body, there was no funeral. Just somebody went and disappeared and never returned. So the desire to reconnect through spiritualism and seances, there's a huge surge of interest in that. And I think also there are other kind of interesting contexts of the First World War in this as well. I think Conan Doyle's personal loss is a part of that. His son died in the influenza pandemic just after the war. He lost his brother in law during the war as well, and a brother. So he experienced lots of personal losses, which intensified his own kind of interest and commitment to spiritualism. But I think also there's another side of this which we can maybe get into, which is the kind of polemics that Conan Door got involved in as he increasingly committed himself to the spiritualist cause. And during the war, Conan Dor was a war correspondent, and I think he also increasingly saw himself as a kind of involved in a campaign of battle and strategy with his opponents. So there's an element of that involved in all of this as well, thinking strategically in terms of campaigns.

Michelle: Well, I think you raise a really valid point, which is that some of the key individuals, Conan Doyle being one of them, are really very much central to this story. Really. It's not just about what was happening in terms of the family and the girls, specifically what they were doing. It's the people that then get involved and their background, if you like that help then take this story to the next level. And again, I don't know if you want to go into that in a little bit further detail in terms of these other key figures and really the level of involvement and personal experience and background, et cetera, that very much played into this story taking off, as we've mentioned, the way that it did.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, yoU're absolutely right. The girl's initial involvement was to create these photographs, which were intended essentially as a sort of private joke. It was a hoax, but it was a hoax intended just to be played out on the family, a kind of revenge on the parents for the mockery and so forth that they'd been teasing the girls with. But it becomes something quite different, obviously, as other people get hold of it. And the way that I tend to think about this is what I call an accidental conspiracy. So everybody's contributing something to this, and everybody's involved in some level of deception, or saying one thing, doing something slightly different. And they all have their own motivations, and it's the cumulative effect of all these things that produces this kind of global phenomenon of the cottonly fairies as this sort of grand photographic hoax. So the first person involved in this, in terms of bringing it to a wider audience, is Edward L. Gardner. So Gardner, as I mentioned before, was a leading figure in the London Theosophical Society. He had his own kind of motivations for getting involved in theosophy and having particular commitment to it. He'd been bereaved and was deeply affected by his bereavement, and found a great deal of solace in Theosophy and in the beliefs that it promoted relating to otherworldly levels of existence and so forth. When Gardner got hold of the negatives, he found that they were poorly exposed, rather underexposed. And so he wanted to do two things, really. First of all, wanted to verify the images, to check whether they were fakes before he started going around showing them to people. But he also wanted to have them improved so that they would be more effective in the lectures that he was giving. And he gave them to a man called Harold Snelling, who was a photographic expert that he'd worked with before. Snelling was involved in producing all kinds of special effects photography, as well as just being a very adept technician. And so Gardner gave him the negatives and asked him, first of all, to determine whether he thought it was something that had been mocked up in a studio, and secondly, to ask him to make it, the image clearer and generally improve it. Now, the first thing to note about that is that that's actually quite a sort of a conflicting brief. On the one hand, he's establishing that it's genuine and hasn't been interfered with in any way, and on the other hand, he's being asked to kind of gussy it up and make it look more impressive and so forth. Snelling looked at the photograph and said, well, it's not been done in a studio. There's no kind of trick photography, there's no double exposure or anything like that involved in it. It's been taken outdoors, it's been taken with a single shutter and so forth. But then he went to work on this process of special improvement, which involved enlarging the image, refotographing it, touching up the details on the wings with an airbrush, removing certain things from it, reducing the exposure in various places, and generally making it into something which looked like a professional photograph. So he did this. One of the things that's significant about that is that it makes the photograph so much more impressive than the actual original was. And one of the reasons why that first image, that one of Francis and the ferries, is so incredibly striking is it has been subjected to these processes. Gardner shares this image with Conan Doyle once Conan Doyle asks for it. But he tells Conan Doyle that whilst he's done some had the image cleared up, that he's got the originals, and the originals haven't been interfered with in any way. But he's slightly misrepresenting this to Conan Doyle. When you look at the Strand Magazine article, it gives the impression that these are the original photographs, whereas, in fact, they have been touched up quite significantly in terms of Conan Doyle's involvement and his own sort of motivation, in addition to that sense of personal loss. CoNaN Doyle, when he finally publicly committed to spiritualism in 1917, it was after pretty much a lifetime of interest in seances and spiritualism and the occult and psychical research and so forth. His interest in that began around the same time he started writing the Sherlock Holmes stories in the 1880s. So he'd been interested in this for a long time, but he finally publicly endorsed it and became a sort of a proselytizer for spiritualism in 1917. And as part of that, he entered into a series of public debates with people who were skeptics about this. So that particularly a number of people from the rationalist Press association who he entered into public debates with in good faith, it has to be said, he was going in with the idea that they would have an open minded debate and they would come out of it and hopefully he would be able to persuade people. But what actually transpired was that the rationalist Press association were very aggressive, and they saw Conan Dorle as a great threat, not because they felt that his arguments were particularly compelling, but because of his celebrity. They felt that he would win people over simply by virtue of the force of his existing celebrity and the fact that Sherlock Holmes had the reputation for being the arch rationalist and so forth, the great demystifier. So they set about attacking Conan Doyle quite vociferously, and not exactly in terms of dirty tricks, but I think fairly quickly, Conan Doyle shifted from the idea that this was an open minded, good natured debate to something where he had to be much more strategic, and where he saw the people from the Rationalist Press association, people like Edward Clod, as essentially as kind of enemies that he had to campaign strategically to beat. And so when he came across the fairy photographs, they investigated them mainly with a view to the things that they saw as vulnerabilities in terms of attack from the Rationalist Press Association. But he also commissioned a second group of photographs. He gave new cameras to Francis and Elsie, and this is three years later, of course. So he established a connection with them and then gave them the new cameras with some plates that they'd had secretly marked with X rays. This was all part of their plans. If their proof was challenged, that they'd be able to sort of show that these hadn't been substituted in some kind of way, that they were the original blank negative plates that they'd given them. And then they kept them up their sleeve for a second round of publications. So they would publish the first group of photographs, draw the fire of their enemies, as Conan Dor put it, and then they will be able to know, and here's your second group of photographs to kind of reinforce a point. So they were thinking about it very strategically as a way of outflanking their opponents. But because I think of Conan Door's approach to it from that point of view, from the outset, there's this sort of bias that runs through the whole thing. He's presenting himself as someone who is looking it all objectively and rationally, but in fact, at all times, he's just thinking strategically. He's driven throughout by this sense of bias and wanting to kind of beat his enemies rather than establish the truth of what's really taken place.

Michelle: Well, I think the discussion has gone out of the window. Like you mentioned, it's simply now just about almost defending the position that you've taken and that being the presiding thing that comes out as the kind of the victory over others that doubt it. And so you are trying to stay one step ahead, then, of the narrative rather than actually really analyzing what's happening in the situation and being part of that discourse and that discussion about the validity of the events. You've become part of the event, in essence, haven't.

Merrick Burrows: Absolutely. Conan Doyle did, in fairness to him, he did ask people for their opinions. So we went to Kodak and asked them to look at the photographs, they pretty much said the same thing that Snelling had said, which was that they weren't double exposures. And of course they weren't double exposures. That's not how the girls faked the photographs. But they weren't prepared to say, these are photographs of fairies, obviously, because all they could say is that what the qualities of the image were. He also went to other people and asked their opinions. But the people that he went to because he's so entrenched at this point and because he's only really kind of trusting people within the community of like minded people who are members of the Society for Psychical Research or are spiritualists or theosophists. He goes to people who are, in some cases, members of the scientific establishment, like Sir Oliver Lodge, for example, who's one of the leading physicists of the age. And showed the photographs and asked his opinion. But he only really listened to the opinions of people who were confirming what he already thought. And where there were voices of doubt and skepticism, as indeed there were coming from Oliver Lodge and from one of Oliver Lodge's associates who urged Conan Dal not to publish the photographs because he thought the whole thing was a hoax with the setup. Conan Dal just dismissed this as kind of windiness and that they'd lost their nerve. So he kind of eggs himself on. He builds himself up to almost kind of seeing himself as a sort of heroic figure, I think, in risking his reputation. Unlike other people who were worried about the consequences of this being shown to be a hoax, Conan Doyle felt that what was needed was boldness, this sort of sense of kind of almost rushing across the battle lines, that kind of idea. And so there's a kind of recklessness about it. So he did speak to other people, but his confirmation bias was such that he only really listened to people who were telling him things that he wanted to hear.

Michelle: It's needing that endorsement, isn't it? And confirmational bias is something that I think is very important here because it's this tribe mentality, isn't it? This tribal mind of how something like this, the phenomena of something like this, then continues to grow because you're only hearing the same type of rhetoric. You're only endorsing and taking in one perspective. You might be hearing other things, but you're not necessarily registering. You're not wanting to take in what someone else might think or believe. You're only wanting to put out and continue to put out the same kind of mindlike thinking that you've already established. And so it's just something then that just continues to.

Merrick Burrows: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that's really fascinating when you look at the correspondence between people that's in the archive of Cosmology fairies at the Brotherton Library in Leeds is the kind of fascinating way that scientific and mystical ideas are kind of mixed up with each other. So Conan Doyle asked for opinion from a man called Kenneth Stiles, who he described as a fairy authority. And Kenneth Stiles, I don't really know much about him apart from this reference in this letter, but he obviously had some photographic expertise. So Conor Doyle asked him for his opinion on the photograph, and he goes into considerable detail about what f stop he thought it was taken on. He says that he would love to see the camera that had a lens that could take a photograph like this. And I think this is, again, going back to the improvement work that Harold Snelling had done on the photographs. But he goes into some really quite technical detail about photography in order to really sort of be slightly skeptical about the whole thing, because he seems to be of the opinion that it was done in a studio. The other reason he thinks it was done in the studio is because his spirit medium had told him so and he'd seen it in a dream. In the same breath, he's talking about f stops, and on the other hand, he's talking about what he'd been told in a dream by his spirit guide as to what has really happened with these things.

Michelle: But again, I think that's really indicative of this time frame, because you've got one world entering into a new world, trying to cling to some of these older beliefs, and then very much this new world, new technologies, the advancement taking place in terms of technology just steamrolling ahead, and people very much trying to grapple between these two worlds, if you like. And I think that you see that coming through in so much of the material of that time frame and the few decades beforehand with just people trying to grapple between old faiths and new things.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, there's a lovely bit in the coming of the Fairies, which is the book that Conan Doyle published in 1922 about all of this. And he tries to explain what he thinks is happening with these fairy photographs in terms of theories of physics that were prevalent at the time in terms of wavelengths of visible light. And he talks about how when you move from one medium to another, when describes a tortoise moving from a riverbank into a river and kind of disappearing under the water because of the way that wavelengths of light are bent when you go into water. So you see it kind of emerge and then disappear. And he talks about fairies kind of moving between different wavelengths of perception. So that's why sometimes they can be seen and sometimes they can't be seen, and why children can see them, because their eyes are more perceptive to a wider spectrum of wavelengths of light. And it says that one day there'll be psychic spectacles, and then we'll all be able to see fairies and spirits and so forth, because it's almost a kind of physical thing. So, absolutely, you say this desire to kind of merge cutting edge scientific theories with these sort of ancient folkloric beliefs about fairies and goblins and elves and.

Michelle: So forth, it's really fascinating that he, like you mentioned, it almost becomes the figurehead for campaigning for that, and puts himself in that mantle of almost the expert, which is fascinating. And again, I think, speaks very much to what you've already touched upon of his own background and his own bias, and how things changed for him and what he felt he needed to do. That marching across the battlefield metaphor is really appropriate, I think.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah. He went on a lecture tour to Australia around the time that he was writing the article for the Strand magazine. So he met up with Edward Gardner just briefly beforehand, and essentially left Gardner in charge of doing all the kind of liaison with the family. So a lot of the time, he wasn't really sort of dealing with things very much firsthand. And he went over to Australia and he was communicating with Gardner by telegram. But when the Strand Magazine article came out in Christmas 1920 issue, he wrote to Gardner and said that, I feel like I've left a time delay mine with you sitting on top of it, and I can hear the explosion from here and these metaphors of Battle of time delay mines. And he talks about outflanking their opponents and so forth. He's thinking in terms of military strategy and using that kind of language in the way that he talks to Gardner about it, as this kind of man on the ground, as it were.

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Michelle: You when obviously this did start to go to publication to print for the common everyday person to start reading and finding out about this, how did it kind of explode, if you like, onto that stage of public awareness and the perception from that in terms of response, but then also response to people like Gardner and Conan Doyle themselves and their involvement?

Merrick Burrows: Well, I mean, there was certainly a lot of skepticism and a fair amount of ridicule. There's a famous cartoon from Punch magazine from a little while later that depicts Conan Doyle sitting on a chair with his head in the clouds, and Sherlock Holmes is standing by his side looking rather grumpy and sort of manacled to him by the ankle. There's a poem that goes with it that talks about how Conan Doyle's kind of lost his grip, essentially, and sort of turned his back on the laws of science and so forth. So there's this sense that Conan Doyle is in many respects abandoning all the sort of things that people thought he represented in terms of rationalism and skepticism. And so know, Punch magazine publishing that cartoon, obviously, it was sort of two or three years later that came out. So it clearly cast a long shadow, and it affected Conan Dor's reputation in many respects for a lot of people. I don't think Conan Dor's reputation ever recovered from it. But at the same time, there were obviously people who were captivated by the idea of the fairies, and we're still talking about it a century later, over a century later. So it resonated in all sorts of interesting ways. And I guess, again, that context of the post war period is going to be a big part of that as well. Why people turn to ideas of fairies, why particularly these relatively young girls communing with fairies in this, what looks like quite an idyllic kind of rural environment, and it kind of looks like it's harking back to a much more kind of innocent time, all the appeal of a return to nature, of a more kind of authentic engagement with nature, all that kind of thing. You can see why that would appeal in the context of the early 1920s, but certainly from the point of view of Conador's reputation and more broadly public opinion about it, I think in many respects it did do a lot of damage to the cause of psychical research, its credibility, and certainly to spiritualism. I think that never really sort of entirely recovered from the damage that this did. And although the girls maintained the story and maintained that they'd seen fairies until the 1980s, I think there were probably very few people who really believed that.

Michelle: I think another element is how it so easily could move around the globe. I mean, this is really when communication was so much quicker in terms of getting that news around the world, and it just circulated so very quickly. And again, with someone like Conan Doyle behind it, you've got that reputation, that elite status, that celebrity status that he had very much helping to drive that forward, really. And so, yeah, again, all of these elements coming in that just really catapulted this views onto a whole other stratosphere, I think, at a time when people were really needing and grappling and wanting commentary, things of that nature, like you mentioned, to romanticize the past, to have something that reminds them of something more pleasant, more palatable.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the context of media history in this is. I think you're right, is really important. It's not even like in the 19th century, where you'd publish something in Britain and then a pirated version would be done in the United States, that by this point, you've got kind of international kind of licensing and copyright agreements and so forth. So early on in the conversations that Conador is having with Gardner and with the Wright family, they're talking about the copyrights for the photographs for American publication as well as for publication in Britain. Obviously, you've got the British Empire, so you've got that kind of global reach as well in terms of sort of the connections between sort of legal and media structures around the world. So it really is something that kind of explodes into a kind of global media framework. And, yeah, conodols, he's traveling by ship to Australia. His journey is being sort of telegraphed from the ship, the photographs and so forth of him sitting on board the ship as well. So we really are in this kind of age of global telecommunications. And, yeah, it very quickly comes with Conan Dahl's backing to be a global phenomenon. And Conan Dahl, of course, was also not just the author that really kind of made the reputation of the Strand magazine with Sherlock Holmes, but he was also a major shareholder. So he had an immense amount of license to publish what he wanted to publish and to drive the agenda of.

Michelle: The magazine, which, again, I think, is also part of what plays into this account, really, because his presence and the kind of authority that he had for so many different reasons is just really very telling, I think.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, absolutely. And I think at this point in his career, when he was very much. He'd been fellow of Wright and Shell at home stories for a long time, and was doing it partly because people were urging him to do it, partly because it was very lucrative. But he didn't really. I think at this point, Phil, he had anything much to prove. He was a very wealthy man. He was widely celebrated. And his commitment at this point was entirely to spiritualist. Cause. I don't think he was particularly interested in fairies. If the truth be told, what he was interested in was finding a chink in the armor of kind of rational skepticism. Because if people could believe that these photographs were empirical proof of otherworldly beings, then that was then a stepping stone on the way to people believing in communication with spirits through spiritualism. And that's where he wanted to lead people. He was an evangelist. And the message that he wanted to communicate to people was that there is a life after death, that you will be reunited with your loved ones in this kind of idyllic paradise. And so not to feel this tremendous sense of loss in the wake of the First World War, but instead to feel reassurance that you'll be reunited with your lost loved ones. So the fairies are really a kind of a bridge in that strategy, that campaign. That's really where he's headed with all of this, is to sort of draw people towards spiritualism and using whatever means are at his disposal to do so.

Michelle: And it's something that he very much took with him until his passing. He was resolute in his beliefs that these were genuine. And there were other things that he was also very much advocating as real that were only proved to be fake and hoaxes after his death. And you can really see that real desire to advocate something else, something beyond, and just really very much getting caught up in that, like you've mentioned, that need to validate what else could be out there.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, I mean, he's so deeply sincere. I think he's a very honorable man, and he's a very sincere person as well. So one of the reasons why I think he was so, I guess, gullible is one way of thinking about it, was that he couldn't bring himself to believe that these two young girls would have perpetrated a hoax. I mean, it's partly just old fashioned chauvinism that he couldn't believe that two young girls could have deceived photographic experts in know these two Yorkshire kind of village girls. So partly it's just kind of chauvinism, but I think also he just had this sort of rather kind of, again, old fashioned sense that these young girls just wouldn't have done that sort of thing. He sort of intrinsically felt that they were trustworthy, and he saw himself as a tremendous judge of character as well. So the combination of his confirmation bias and kind of misplaced trust in his own ability to spot a deception, kind of, I guess, were a large part of his undoing here. And the almost untrammeled authority that he had as a result of his celebrity and the clout that he had at the Strand magazine and within the spiritualist movement as well, because he was the leading exponent of spiritualism in the world at this time. There was nobody who had a bigger voice than him.

Michelle: Absolutely not. And it's fascinating to me that obviously, we had, in the 80s, people like Jeffrey Crawley kind of weighing into the efforts of trying to debunk or prove or whatever else, obviously becoming involved in investigating these. And even when things like that then still happen, it is still something that polarizes people, even today in terms of whether they believe there is some merit to it, in terms of what the girls continue to report, even though they said that, obviously the images themselves were staged, but there was still some truth in it. There are still those who want to believe it and believe in it, and then others who sit completely on the opposite side and have that undeniable disbelief in it, because here there's proof. It's been proven to be faked, and so therefore, there can't be anything to it. And so it does kind of still create these two camps of those that believe and those that don't. And that's part of the fascination that it still has that same capacity to do that.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, that's a really good point. Jeffrey Corley's articles in the. Jeffrey Corley was writing in the British Journal of Photography and wrote multiple articles about the hikotomy fairies photographs, and did this incredibly meticulous scientific examination of the materials in order to establish, without doubt, that, for example, the negative that's in the Brotherton Library of Francis and the Fairies was not a negative that was taken in the camera that it's supposed to have taken. In other words, it's a reproduction that's been made at the end of a long process. It's not the original negative. And he goes into all the detail as to how it's possible to be certain about that. In a way, it's a little bit like the debates that one hears now about climate change and climate change denial, where on the one hand you've got this tremendous scientific expertise and weighted scientific expertise, and on the other hand you've got the kind of. The thing that kind of captures the populist imagination, which is not scientific detail and kind of patiently working through the material, but is just kind of like a slogan or an idea, something that has got that immediate traction. And to some extent, I think you can see that in the cottony fairies, that regardless of this sort of. I think it's eight articles that Jeffrey Crawley sort of mapped out all the information evidence in. In the British journalist Photography. In the end, the thing that captures people's imagination is just that simple idea of the photographs are really compelling, and maybe they really were fairies at the bottom of the garden, as you mentioned, it's partly because Francis Griffiths maintained right to the end that she did really see fairies. And although four of the photographs were faked, she maintains that the last one wasn't faked and that it genuinely is fairies. It's interesting to speculate why she might have said that, I think. I mean, one can never know. But one of the things that she did, well, that's very clear, is that the relationships between her and Elsie Wright towards the end of their lives were strained and quite bitter. In the end, I think Frances Griffiths felt considerable resentment towards the end of her life, towards her cousin. And one of the reasons for that seems to have been that although they'd agreed that they would maintain their story, that the fairy photographs were genuine and would never reveal how the photographs had been made, Elsie Wright had told her children and told her grandchildren all about it, and she saw them secrecy. But she told them because, as she said, she didn't want them thinking that their grandmother was cranky, or however you might think about it. But Frances Griffiths had never told her children, hadn't told her grandchildren. And when the story eventually came out, when Jeffrey Crawley published those articles in the British Journal of Photography, but also when Joe Cooper published his articles and sort of expose 1983, exposing the truth of how the photographs had been faked up, Frances hadn't had the opportunity to tell her, her own children and her grandchildren about it. So she was kind of caught out in a lie, really. Her children were, I think, quite shocked that she told them insofar she told them about it at all. She told them that they genuinely had taken his fairy photographs and then finally to have it revealed by somebody else in an in a manner over which she had no control, that the photographs had been faked. You can understand why you might try to sort of retrieve something from that and say, well, I really did see fairies. And although they were mocked up, the photographs were mocked up, I really did see fairies. So in that sense, it was true what she'd said.

Michelle: She was trying to take control of the situation in the only way that I think she could, like you, kind of touched upon it, was that sense of it very much imploded in her face and she was just trying to pick up the pieces.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah. I mean, one can only speculate, of course, and you can never really know what she saw, what she believed that she saw. But it certainly makes sense that when she found herself in that situation, that one way of maintaining and rationalizing her situation was to say that whilst the photographs were faked, she did really see fairies. I still find the way that she talks about that and the fact that she doesn't talk about kind of balletic figures, but talks about these sort of squadrons of troops marching up and down and railway porters. Very suggestive. It would be odd to make something like that up that's so different from what's in the photographs. But as I say, this was in the 1980s, when she was writing that remembering back to when she was a child in 1917, and all the trauma of that time, there's an awful lot of scope for kind of projecting memories back onto things, I guess.

Michelle: And I was just going to say precisely that. There's also the huge gap in time frame. I mean, memory fading, becoming something else. It's really difficult to know exactly what she saw and experienced, given just that sense of time moving forward, and how, when we all recollect and try and look back at our own memories from when we were younger, how we think something, we believe something, and it may not necessarily be the complete, full, clear picture. Things tend to bleed and merge, don't they, over time.

Merrick Burrows: Absolutely. And I think, particularly in relation to anything traumatic, I mean, from what we understand of people's experiences of trauma, a lot of what ends up as memories are things which are kind of overlaid on whatever the traumatic events might be that you can't necessarily fully bring back to recollection, but you've found ways of kind of representing it otherwise. Absolutely. It's impossible to really kind of know anything very definite about any of that.

Michelle: And I think it comes back to something you said right at the very beginning, which is this was an unintentional hoax. There's so many layers to this account that you kind of do have to tease apart the details to truly understand the narrative and what happened and how it transpired and the personal motivations, but also the backgrounds and the experiences of those involved and how it all just kind of shaped what was happening.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, I think that's true. And I think one of the things that really strikes me about it is that it's a very melancholy story, really. I mean, its superficial appeal is, in a sense, the fun of it, the fun of hijinks and kind of putting together this prank, the appeal of the idea of these two village girls pulling the wool over someone like Conan Doyle's eyes and so forth, all of that has a lot of appeal. But I think for the people involved, for Conan Doyle, for Gardner, for. I mean, Elsie Wright seems to have kind of, as far as I can make out, seems to have kind of rather enjoyed it all. But I think for the others, there's a lot of tragedy wrapped up in the people's experiences that led them to this. And I think for Frances Griffiths, I think she was haunted by it. She was, in a sense, at the age of nine, drawn into this lie that was somebody else's idea. This joke, this prank, had his hopes there was somebody else's idea, and it very, very quickly got away from them. She was never really in control. She wasn't consulted when Gardner and Conan Doyle were communicating with the family. That was all done with Elsie or with Elsie's parents. And Frances was just kind of dragged along with this thing, and it's a juggernaut. Once Conan Door is involved, once they've given permission to print the photographs, there's no stopping it, really. And how would you back out of a lie and say, well, actually, it's been published in the Strand magazine around the world. How at that point do you then say, well, actually, it's not true? So she had led to live with it, and periodically it would come up in the press. But also Conan Doyle published in 1920, the first article, 1921, then a book in 1922. Gardner kept on publishing things into her sort of 1940s, so she couldn't escape from it. And I think then the cruelty at the end, where she was going to publish her memoirs and finally get the truth out, but on her own terms, and to have been scooped on that by the person that she was working with, Joe Cooper to sort of help her get her story out, and to have been scooped on that by a collaborator, I think, must have been incredibly difficult for her.

Michelle: One of the aspects that I think is really important to kind of also note is how we obviously look at the images and we can look at them with this modern eye of, well, they just look a certain way. But yet, if we kind of think about a modern example where we might be duped or might have difficulty understanding the image, we only have to think about the advancements when it comes to AI, imagery, images, and the difficulty that we have sometimes. And it's very much in the press at the moment, isn't it, as to whether people can recognize if they are believable, if they're true, or if they are something that has been generated and put out for whatever purpose. And I think that is a good way to think about these images and when they were circulated, that, again, it was a time when photography, understanding of photography, advancements in photography, how many people had cameras and really understood the mechanics of it? I mean, there's so many complexities to it that, again, just add more and more layers. And I think we can be very critical of the people involved. We can be very judgmental as to how they could believe something the way that they did. But yet we weren't in that situation. And I think we almost have to try and make those connections with modern day experiences to be a little bit more forgiving, if that makes sense.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, I have sympathy with that way of looking at it. I think the comparison with AI is an interesting one. I mean, the deep fakes and that kind of things is a sort of striking comparison to make with these photographs in terms of the technology that's available now to kind of create very convincing deceptions. But I guess the thing that strikes me about it all is that particularly with Cohen and Doyle, it does seem to come down to where you place your trust, where you place your faith in know. That's another thing with AI, that question of not just in terms of images, but also in terms of the way that AI is increasingly making decisions about things in the world that we live in and the extent to which we know what it is we're placing our trust in when we, you know, it's not even possible to kind of look inside, know how the code works with AI and understand how it's making decisions. It's a complete sort of black box. And in that respect, it is a little bit like Conan Doyle and know, like minded people kind of asking the spirits know whether these photographs are genuine and kind of like trusting what your spirit guide tells you. One of the things that's quite striking is that in the coming of the fairies in the book, that Conan Doyle wrote at one point, he asks the question about how Elsie might have faked up the photographs. And if I just read out what he says, what is really striking is he gets it exactly right. He says, Elsie could only have done it by cutout images, which must have been of exquisite beautY, of many different models, fashioned and kept without the knowledge of her parents, and capable of giving the impression of motion when carefully examined by an expert. Surely this is a large order. It was surely impossible that a little village with an amateur photographer could have the plant and the skill to turn out a fake which could not be detected by the best experts in London. So Conan Doyle spots exactly how it's been done. I mean, he doesn't, because he doesn't believe it, but he's able to say, this is the only way it could have been done. But I don't believe it. So it's absolutely down to this question of what you trust, what you're prepared to put your faith in. And Conan Dol is not prepared to trust and put his faith in what's staring him in the face, that that's how the photographs were done.

Michelle: I think it comes down to the power of belief and what you personally believe. And again, this is where those personal motivations and factors come so heavily into play. When you want to believe something, it's like anything. You sometimes ignore the logical things that are right there in front of you. It's easier to push those aside because you have such strong faith in what you're believing in. And that's a very driving motivator, I think, sometimes. And I think this is a good example of.

Merrick Burrows: Yeah, absolutely. And what's so striking about this, for know, as someone who doesn't have any belief in the things that Conan Doyle believed in, is know. Conan Doyle has this choice of two alternatives. He can either believe that Elsie made these paper cutouts, took photographs of them, and then sort of managed to hide the whole thing, or you can believe that there were really fairies there that they took photographs on. And those are the options that he's got to weigh up. And to his mind, the one where he has made these paper cutouts and then hidden them is less probable, is less plausible than the one where there genuinely are fairies that appear to them and have photographs taken. And it is absolutely only something which you can understand on the basis of an overarching belief that drives everything else.

Michelle: Absolutely honestly. This has been such a fascinating conversation with you. I mean, it's such an interesting account, but I think it's really important sometimes to take a very much a closer look at it to really understand the detail like you've been teasing out for people. So I really very much appreciate the time you've given for people to understand the layers and the complexity of this account a little better. So thank you so much for your time for giving that to the people listening today.

Merrick Burrows: My pleasure.

Michelle: Honestly, it was an absolute joy. And I will make sure to put links to you in the podcast description notes and on the website so people could come and find you. Obviously you've written many books, see the kind of publications that you've got out and yeah, just if they're interested in following this up, being able to find you to do that easily, really. So I'll make sure to put that all out there for people in the podcast description notes and on the website and I will say goodbye to everybody listening.

Michelle: Bye everyone.

Merrick Burrows: Thanks very much.