For the Cottingley fairies were fakes, beautifully drawn images of fairies probably created by Elsie and staged and photographed by both girls. They had been copied from images in “Princess Mary’s Gift Book”, published in 1914, and then had wings added to them. Held upright with hatpins, they were sufficiently plausible to be accepted by Conan-Doyle and many others. Three more fairy images were taken, the final one, “Fairies and their Sunbath”, in 1920.

Princess Mary, the Princess Royal (1897-1965) was seventeen when World War I broke out in 1914. In normal circumstances, Mary would have been kept under wraps until she was eighteen and come out in Society, but, the outbreak of war changed everything. The House of Saxe-Coburg began to be accused of being far too German, and King George V and Queen Mary found themselves with an image problem.

Modern reproductions are made of the boxes, though not to the same standard as the originals – typically the brass plate is thinner, and they are not airtight. My copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book once belonged to my Great Great-Aunt Ida and is dated December 12 th, 1914. I found it in an attic when I was a child and I’m delighted to have it. According to Wikipedia, in later life Lady Sybil Grant became an eccentric, spending much of her time in a caravan or up a tree, communicating with her butler through a megaphone. The cousins were both still alive in the 1980s, and finally Elsie confessed to the hoax, probably with some relief, in 1983. What had undoubtedly started out as a cleverly stage-managed bit of fun, suggested by Frances, had got seriously out of hand. The cousins themselves were astonished at how readily people of the calibre of Conan-Doyle had accepted the images. Perhaps not wholly wanting to relinquish the story, Frances maintained all her life that “Fairies and their Sunbath”, the fifth and last image, showed real fairies, not fakes. Hard though it is to believe now, debate on the authenticity of the Cottingley fairies continued until well into the 1960s. Television opened up even greater opportunities for investigative journalism in the following decade, and the images came under greater scrutiny. However, they were not entirely debunked until the 1980s, when Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the “British Journal of Photography”, undertook a major investigation, concluding they were fakes.

Seizing on an opportunity to promote the most important spiritual message of the Theosophists – that humankind was undergoing a process of transformation that would lead eventually to the perfection of the species – Gardner claimed the two images were supernatural proof that great metaphysical changes were happening. Elsie Wright and a Cottingley FairyCopies of all these books can be freely consulted from open shelves at the Explore History Centre at IWM London. Princess Mary’s Gift Book. Strap line: All Profits on Sale Given to the Queen’s ‘Work for Women Fund’ Baroness Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, contributed Out of the Jaws of Death: A Pimpernel Story, in which the intrepid hero, Sir Percy Blakeney, and five aristocratic English friends disguised as bloodthirsty French Revolutionaries, rescue an innocent French family from Madame Guillotine.