Ingenious Hoax? B 5
It was a lovely summer afternoon when Gardner reached the town
of Bradford, where he took a tram to the village of Cottingley, a pic-
turesque Old World spot half concealed in a break in the upland. On
the outslurts of the village, Gardner found the Wright cottage at 31
LynwoodTerrace. Mrs.Wright, a cheerful woman in her forties, known
as Polly, greeted Gardner and introduced him to her daughter Elsie, a
pretty girl of sixteen, tall, slim, with a wealth of auburn hair clasped in
a narrow gold band.
Pending the return of Mr.Wright from work, mother and daughter
entertained Gardner with the story of how the photographs had been
taken.
Three years earlier, in July of 1917,just as Elsie was turning thirteen,
her ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, had come on a visit from
South Africa.Together the girls spent much of their time in the glen at
the back of the cottage where Elsie claimed to have seen and played
with, ever since she was a child, all sorts of fairies, elves, gnomes, and
other denizens of the woods.
Mrs. Wright admitted that she had taken little notice of what the
children had told her about fairies, attributing the stories to mere fancy
or imagination, but one Saturday at lunch Elsie had asked if she could
borrow her father's camera to prove that the fairies really existed.
At this point in Mrs. Wright's narrative, Mr. Wright came home
from his job as manager of a small nearby estate. Described by Gardner
as "a hearty Yorkshire type, of forthright speech and character with a
sense of humor and cheerful disposition," Mr. Wright sat down to tea
and laughingly explained that at first he had refused to let the girls have
the camera, a Midge quarter-plate given to him by a relative, because
he "didn't want the girls spoiling my plates." But the girls had been so
persistent he finally put a single plate in the box camera and showed
Elsie how to trigger a snapshot.
In less than an hour the girls had returned and begged him to de-
velop the plate because they "had taken a photograph."
Mr. Wright explained that he took the plate to the scullery cup-
board where he did his developing, and with Elsie wedged beside him
put the plate into a dish, fully expecting only a blur. Instead he was
startled to see, almost at once, dark figures that he took to be swans.