1 Cottingley Interviews: 2nd Edition I’ve put together this file in preparation for a source book and a book of essays (multiauthor) on Cottingley. The interviews with Frances and Elsie are absolutely crucial sources, but they have not been collated. A great deal of the transcript below comes from Joe Cooper’s work. Some of the rest has been quarried from scraps of video on Youtube, Facebook and other places. Then there are the missing interviews. I would be incredibly grateful with any help at getting any of these! (simonyoungfl AT gmail DOT com) 28 Dec 2023 First Edition 28 Dec 2023 Second Edition (added two more interviews: one with Elsie and one with Christine, Frances’ daughter). The Missing Interviews I suspect that there are a dozen interviews (particularly with Elsie) that have escaped attention. But here are missing interviews I know exist (but that so far I can’t find). a) Peter Chambers, Daily Express (24 May 1965), 31. This should be very easy to find for anyone with a half decent British university account. The Express has an excellent archive, but it is no longer open to the public. It is open to public libraries and educational foundations. Sigh. b) Walter Clapham, ‘There were fairies at the bottom of the garden’ (Woman, 25 Oct. 1975). This would need a British copyright library. I’ve scoured ebay… c) Richard Baker morning show 1978, November or very late October. This will be very difficult to find, but it is the crown jewels because they got Frances and Katharine Briggs on the same show and the two allegedly proceed to argue! It will be on the BBC, I think. I’m not clear whether radio or television, but I think the former. The partial interviews. All the interviews below are partial. It would be wonderful to try, particularly, to get a full recording of the crucial Nationwide interview; and the Yorkshire Television Video. Nationwide ‘early’ 1971 “After Edward Gardner’s death in 1970, at a hundred, Nationwide revived the fairy story in a programme in early 1971. Lynn Lewis, an energetic, forceful producer, interviewed Elsie in her home and Frances at Epsom College, where she was matron. Lewis had been to Kodak and had heard expen opinion pronounce that the outline of the fairies was far too sharp for a Midg camera using a lens with an exposure of l/50th of a second. One Kodak view was that dolls or models were used in the first two photographs, and some sort of double exposure in the last three. It was also suggested that the pictures had been devised by a person having a feeling for composition and that somebody other than the girls had perhaps been involved. A certain stylistic resemblance to photos taken by Elsie’s father from her album and the five famous fairy photos was pointed out a home for the elderly where Edward Gardner had passed his last years, highly respected to the end and writing and lecturing almost up to his death. His memory had been championed by many, notably his son Leslie Gardner, who died in 1982. However, Lewis implied that money had been made for the Theosophical 2 Society by Gardner’s book and that, perhaps, it had helped with the maintenance of homes such as the one in which Gardner had died. Shots were then shown of Elsie in her living-room, and she presented an amiable, if slightly uneasy figure. Then aged seventy, she was in excellent health and could still swim twenty lengths. Her replies were careful, and she paused often. Lewis must have thought that, indeed, she was on the edge of confessing all, but Elsie — as she was to do so often in the next few years - blandly turned aside any leading questions. The following dialogue comes from a tape made at the time.” Lewis: Now he [Gardner] is dead, can you speak up? Elsie: I didn’t want to upset Mr Gardner ... I don’t mind talking now. .. Lewis then mentions that others think Elsie’s father might have had a hand in the matter. Elsie: I would swear on the Bible Father didn't know what was going on. Lewis: Could you equally swear on the Bible that you didn’t play any tricks? Elsie: (after a pause) I took the photographs ... I took two of them . . . no, three. .. Frances took two . . . Lewis: Are they trick photographs? Could you swear on the Bible about that? Elsie: (after a pause) I’d rather leave that open if you don't mind . . . but my father had nothing to do with it, I can promise you that . . . Lewis: Have you had your fun with the world for forty years? Have you been kidding us for ten days? Elsie laughs. Elsie: (gently) I think we’ll close it on that if you don’t mind. Lewis was, as with Elsie, forthright in his questioning: Lewis: Did you have a crush on her [i.e. Elsie]? Frances: (laughs) No. Not at all. She was young for her age. She used to play with my dolls. Notts Guardian Interview, 1971 A Nottinghamshire housewife broke 50- a year silence last night on the fairies she made world famous. by by TWICE photographing them at the bottom of her garden. Mrs. Elsie Hill, now of Bunny, took her controversial pictures about 1916 in the rambling garden of her family home in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley. Her cousin, Frances, up on a visit, was the only other person present. Two girls playing with a second-hand box camera... But the two plates developed by her incredulous father showed. unmistakably, two winged little people, about nine inches high, gambolling about in the traditional fairy garb. Subsequently, though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creator of Sherlock Holmes and the camera. manufacturers investigated most diligently those two plates have never been disproved. Indeed, reproductions can be seen in certain copies of Sir Arthur's book The Coming of the Fairies in which he sets down this and similar sightings in great detail. At the village stop conductors on packed weekend trams out of Bradford would shout: ‘Fairy Town!’ 3 All that, and so much more was 50 years ago when Mrs. Hill was 15-year-old Elsie Wright. Since when she has emigrated to America, married, lived in India and is now happily retired in Nottinghamshire. However, now the magical past has caught up with Mrs. Hill. And tonight she is to appear on the BBC’s Nationwide television programme where she intends to attempt to deny it all away. Only last night sitting in the lounge of her Loughborough Road, Bunny, home with husband Frank, Mrs. Hill twinkled: ‘I shall say it was all a figment of our imaginations but really, it is true all of it.’ ‘We did see and photograph fairies. I’d be about 15 years old and my cousin Frances six years younger. We had seen them before, I can’t remember how many times, and we both did believe in them. We still do.’ There is one further factor There is one further nobody can explain away. Said Mrs. Hill: ‘I have never seen fairies anywhere else – and I have never seen them without being alone with Frances.’ ‘We were offered money but never took it. If we had people: would have said it was a hoax.’ So why deny it now? ‘Because we all became so fed up with the publicity, the letters and the visitors. I have since sworn a few friends to secrecy but, when I went to America, I always promised myself that, if ever I returned to England, I would one day say I believed the photographs were figments of our imagination.’ Jack Statham, ‘Elsie’s Fib Over Fairy Story’, Nottingham Guardian (17 Feb 1971), 1 Yorkshire Television with Austin Mitchell, September 1976 (at Cottingley Beck) Austin: Who actually developed the negatives? Elsie: My father. Austin: And you were with him. Elsie: Yes. (to Frances) And where were you? Frances: I was waiting outside… dancing… on the tip of my toes… breathless… Austin: Why? Frances: Wondering whether anything would come up… we’d never taken a photograph before… we were never allowed with a camera, were we? Elsie: No. That's right. Then I said, Frances… the fairies are coming up on the plate… she was dancing outside, weren’t you. Frances: Yes. Both laugh at the memory. Austin: Er, did you believe you'd got a fairy on the photograph? Frances: We hoped. Elsie: Yes, we hoped . . . 4 Frances: We did believe it because we’d taken a photograph… what you take comes out on film, if it’s done right… Austin: How did your father react? Elsie: Everybody laughed… they all thought we'd played a big joke on them… A.M.: You came down here with a Mr Hodson, a medium . . . Frances: That's right. A.M.: You told him you saw fairies. Were you pulling his leg or not? Frances: No. We saw them. Elsie: We saw them. (Sustained and sudden laughter from both Elsie and Frances.) Frances: Well, he was a phoney, we knew he was... Elsie: Yes. Frances: We set off straightforward and we were told if we saw anything to say… and we did… and we’d say can you see that over by the willow tree and Elsie would look and say yes… and then it would get bigger and bigger and Elsie would add a bit and I’d add a bit… and eventually we said we saw lots of things and we never saw fairies again after that… we were… we got so that we saw fairies chained to oak trees - we saw all sorts of things… A.M.: But that indicates that you’re both practical jokers. Frances: We were. Elsie: Yes. The Gnome Elsie: When it became clear Frances pressed the trigger on the box camera… the gnome began to look very clear… Austin: Do gnomes come and go? Elsie: Yes. Austin: I mean, why didn’t you sort of make a grab for it, or… Elsie: You couldn’t… it’s like grabbing for… for a ghost or something… Austin: What… what did the gnome do then, when you’d finished? Elsie: It just used to come… then… it just used to come because they were curious… and then fade off again. Austin: If… if you could see them, you and Frances when you were both together… you’re both together now… Elsie: Yes Austin: Must presumably still be here, if they were here in the first place, why can’t, can’t you see them now? 5 Elsie: I think it’s really because we were only children — we were very young then… So the afternoon moves along, with Austin eventually coming to the Big Question: Austin: Did you in any way fabricate those photographs? Frances: Of course not. Nationwide 1976 Nationwide visited Elsie Wright, nearly 60 years after her encounter with the Cottingley fairies in 1917. What did you see here, all those years ago? Elsie: Well this was the place where I saw the gnome. And I was sat, I'm sure it was just around here, and Frances was there with the camera. And the gnome came from round that tree there. And came up to me, and I thought it was going to touch me and I put my hand out, but it sort of gradually melted and that was it. They were like that, they sort of came and then sort of disappeared. You've been through a lot of investigations, one way or another haven't you, yet nobody's ever been able to prove it. Elsie: No, no, no, the thing they can’t understand is that they were all taken on rather dull days and yet the fairies were lit up, they're sort of glowing. They said that they were luminous.1 Belfast News-Letter 1977 (daughter Christine) [After a detailed overview of the Cottingley Story] Not surprisingly, then, the omnipresent BBC eventually revived interest in the Cottingley fairies story seven years ago, after the 50 years copyright on the famous photographs had terminated. Young Frances Griffiths was now an elderly Frances Way, resident of Ramsgate, but she still refused to be identified in the programme, preferring to be interviewed with her back to the camera. During the Twenties she had suffered so much ridicule and righteous criticism for recounting her experiences, that she soon wanted to forget hem unique childhood and concentrate on raising a family as normally as she could Also, in her maturity she had had no more psychic experiences, of fairies or other phenomena. But lately and gradually she came to realise that the nuclear society were more openminded and level headed and was surprised to find many people still keenly interested in her tale. So she decided to come out into the open herself and consented to a half-hour programme on Yorkshire TV which required her to revisit the scenes of the sightings in Cottingley Glen. Towards the end of last year, BBC's Nationwide retold the story, which proves that interest in fairy phenomena is growing with new generations. At this point, we move to Bel- fast for the next chapter in this fascinating story... TOMORROW I will be talking to Mrs. Chris Lynch, of Belfast, the daughter of Frances Way about her and her mother's idea to demonstrate to the rest of the country that you can get more out of ‘fairy liquid’ than you think! Bob Willox, ‘The Fairy Story they Can’t Ignore’, Belfast News-Letter (16 Feb 1977), 4 *** 1 I found this video online and could not iden fy the presenter. Presumably it came a er the YTV interview? 6 Have you ever heard the port na bpucai? The fairy music? Legend says the tune, like the soft sighing of the night wind, is the funeral song of spirits gone to bury one of their own. Ireland's fairies are not immortal. They weep and mourn and die as humans do. Without having ever heard of the whispering port, Mrs. Chris Lynch, a Belfast housewife and mother, believes fairies belong to another plane of life co-existent with our own on this world, which a few of us mortals have the luck or the ability to penetrate at odd times. That is her first serious theory on the subject, and she admits she knows comparatively little about fairy folklore in Ireland or anywhere. Yet, Mrs. Lynch - not the flighty, eccentric, impressionable type is just beginning intense research into fairy phenomena. Why? Well, Mrs. Lynch has one excellent reference she is the daughter of Frances Way (nee Griffiths), probably the best friend the fairies have ever had. Frances and her cousin Elsie Wright played with the fairies during their summer holidays in Yorkshire and they have an explicit album of snapshots to prove it. Inspired by her daughter, Frances now in- tends to tour the country giving lectures on her experiences in the fairy world and their con- sequences, hopefully supported by the publication of a book or two, in the same way psychic researcher Edward L. Gardner and author Arthur Conan Doyle did 60 years ago when they investigated her claims and told the rest of the world of the 'coming of the fairies. Mrs. Lynch will start the ball rolling for her mother in Ulster: ‘I want to start giving talks to a few of the societies I know here just to get used to the experience and to gain some confidence before arranging national tours and promotion.’ But why now, after so long? ‘I never heard about my mother's childhood experiences with the fairies until I was 16 years old’, she told me from her home in Malone Road, ‘and even then, it was, purely by accident. My brother and I were very interested in science fiction at the time, and were reading about the possible co-existence of two complete worlds. We questioned mother and she told us to go up and fetch a book from her room. It was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies about mother's and Elsie's meetings with the fairies at Cottingley Glen and the photographs they took. She described everything to us and said ‘Now I’ve told you, I never want to hear anything about it again. Nothing was spoken on the subject until 1969 when the BBC did their first programme. Until then mother had always been afraid of people laughing at her. She now realises that was probably just jealousy, from her friends in particular. And it’s only since she did the programme for Yorkshire Television that she’s come completely out into the open. She enjoyed doing that programme. So now I’m quizzing her about her encounters with the fairies, trying to get her to remember every detail...the colours, the clothes, the noises they made. For instance, she mentions that she could not look directly at the fairies, but could only see them out of the corner of her eye (this may explain why Frances is looking into the camera on one picture and not at the fairies dancing in front of her. It is also said that she was more fascinated by the camera than the creatures at the time!). At first, mother wanted to write an autobiography and tell of her own story instead of leaving it to other writers. Then she was planning writing a book on fairies for children. That's when I started taking an active interest, looking for fairy stories here in Ireland to help her. Now we’ve decided to try and arrange a lecture tour.’ Mrs. Lynch came up with a scoop story right at the start of her investigations. It concerned a local shopkeeper whose son had built a bungalow for his family out in Letterkenny, Donegal. The new untidy garden contained a big old bush, reputed to be a 'fairy thorn' by the locals. 7 His wife wanted it removed so she could cultivate the ground, but she failed to hire the services of any of the local men. She got an outsider to cut the bush down. Shortly after the deed, she received a visitation! Who or what she saw nobody knows except her immediate family, but it was terrifying enough for her to persuade her husband to desert the new house that night and take refuge in the local hotel. The next day, the couple made arrangements to sell the bungalow. A seemingly attractive offer, it was soon sold, but the second owners have since left, again for reasons unknown, and the house stands empty and notorious. When she questioned the first family on the ordeal, they denied any knowledge of fairy sightings or hot goblins, and refused to discuss the matter. This inspired rather than disillusioned Mrs. Lynch, to her it was a mid-summer’s night dream coming true as she discovered her mother's experiences were not so unique after all. Gardner had found the same thing after he had revealed her story to the world... People had written from all over Britain, with accounts of their own experiences of fairies, usually when children. Mrs. Lynch hopes she can stimulate a similar response but she is not con- tent to sit back and wait. I put her in contact with local psychic researcher Sheila St. Clair, subject of ‘Psycho’, for an up-to-date report on fairy phenomena in Ulster. Sheila was familiar with the fancies and frolics of fairies the ‘lone thorn’, the ‘hungry grass’ and the ‘disappearing gate’ having included the like in a book she wrote on Ulster folklore and having created the character ‘Sean the Leprechaun’. But the last sighting she heard of here took place three years ago. Three young people were making their way home from a late-night disco in Carrickfergus. Walking along the dark road, they spied a strange arrangement of lights around a tree in a desolate adjoining field, and on closer examination, they detected about 15 tiny glowing figures dancing around it. After 10 minutes the merry apparitions faded away into the night. One of the perplexed youngsters later telephoned Sheila seeking an explanation She only told them it could have been worse if they had stepped onto a certain patch of grass, they may have been seized by terrible pangs of hunger that would have reduced them to their hands and knees before reaching food. ‘I’ve had an awful lot of reports of the ‘hungry grass’, from the Mournes area and parts of Co Tyrone in particular’ Sheila declared. These are distinct patches of grass that are said to have been ‘protected’ by fairies ever since the great famine in Ireland. So, judging by the wealth and health of fairy phenomena in Ulster and Ireland, Mrs. Frances Way and her daughter will never be short of food for thought and talk- unless they step on the ‘hungry grass’! After the adventures of little Frances Griffiths, that’s not so funny anymore. Have you an experience to relate? Why not writes us about it? Bob Willox, ‘Keeping ahead of those fairy tales’, Belfast News-Letter (17 Feb 1977), 4 Manchester Daily Express 1983 8 “For Elsie, in 1983 at least, there were no fairies. On 15 April, a few days after The Times disclosures, a reporter from the Manchester Daily Express somewhat cosily reported an interview with her and seemingly put a stopper on the Cottingley bottle once and for all”: ‘Mind you,’ said Elsie, ‘Frances is allergic to the word fairies. But she’s a little devil, you know.’ And Elsie herself . . . surely . . . well, just once in a while ,. . . didn’t she believe in ... ? ‘Fairies?’ she said laughing. ‘No. I don’t believe in fairies. Never have and never will.’ A smiling photograph of radiant 81-year-old Elsie accompanied the article, under the headline ‘The Biggest Fairy Story Of Them All!’2 Confession Interview 1983 Frances: Elsie said one night, we’re getting ready for bed, she said, I’ve been thinking, kid, she said, a real cinema girl was Elsie. She says, what about if I draw some fairies and cut them out in cardboard and we'll stick them up in the grass and see if uncle and dad will have this camera and we’ll take a photograph. So that, if they see them, they'll have to believe it, they'll stop all this joking. to stand them upright.3 Apart Elsie: What we did, and I said, we, the long hatpin, we put it down the back like that and stuck the tape at the back like that, and then gradually wormed that down. They were longer than that though. They were about that then, 18 inches at least, and then wormed that down into there. And they said that the thing was that they could see them, that the fairies were moving when the photographs was taken, but that was because they dithered in the breeze. I never even thought of it being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. And I can’t understand that to this day, why people were taken in. They wanted to be taken in. But people keep often say to me, don’t you feel ashamed that you’ve made all these poor people look fools? They believed in you. But I don’t because they wanted to believe. Look at this photograph. That fairy’s all out of drawing. That leg doesn’t belong to that fairy. And somebody pointed it out in the newspaper. And one of our dear believers said, Well fairies aren’t like humans. They haven’t got bodies like we have. The skeleton and the arms and legs. They sort of put it together with thought. And sometimes it doesn’t come out right. We didn't have to tell a lie about it at all, because always somebody came out to justify it. It was very embarrassing because, I mean, two village kids with a brilliant man like Conan Doyle. But we could only just keep quiet.4 With Joe Cooper: late 1970s and early 1980s Me (Purposefully): Can you remember the first time you saw fairies? Elsie: No. Me: Who saw them first? You or Frances? Elsie: I think we both saw them together… Me: You weren’t surprised at all? Elsie: No. I don’t think so. No. 2 Recorded in Cooper 190-191. Don’t know original but repeated on Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers! 4 Taken from Arthur Clarke and another online video. 3 9 Me: What did they look like? Elsie: They were sort of…. smudgy through the grass… you know, you’re not quite sure and then they'd gradually take shape… Me: Yeah. Elsie: There’s a sort of feeling then it’s like that. [Laughs] You had a feeling of them standing and staring and moving away… Me: How far away were they? Did they keep at a distance? Elsie: For a while. Then they gradually got brave… they were about fifteen feet away for a start… each time we went up, we'd see them nearer and nearer until they were as in the picture you see with Frances…5 Questions to Elsie on how it began She cried bitterly. I know I said, ‘Let’s go up the beck’. I was trying to think of something to get her mind off the troubles. And then I said: ‘Well, these fairies we see. Well, let’s take a picture’. I didn't think we’d go on with it. It was just to take her mind off things. But she got this into her mind. She kept on about it. She livened up and said: ‘Oh yes, let’s try and take one.’ And so after being nattered a bit I said we’d do it.6 5 6 Recorded in Cooper, 110 Cooper, 26-27.