on E. L. Gardner, gone in search of the Cottingley girls. Elsie, by then
in her seventies, was tracked down to the Yorkshire Midlands, living
comfortably in a semidetached house with a front garden, in excellent
health, but reluctant to reopen the story about the fairies.While still in
her twenties she had left Cottingley for America to marry a Scottish
engineer, Frank Hill, with whom she had then lived in India for a
quarter century before returning to England to retire.
She said she did not wish to revive the subject, afraid it might lead
people to dabble further into occult phenomena, especially into such
unhealthy aspects as spiritualism, Ouija boards, and amateur seances.
"As for the photographs," Elsie added,"let9s say they are pictures of fig-
ments of our imagination, Frances's and mine, and leave it at that."
Elsie's remarks prompted Stewart Sanderson, president of the
British Folklore Society-a spirited group of amateurs more interested
in recording stories about fairy folk than in supporting a belief in
fairies-to conclude, quite arbitrarily, that Elsie had given Lewis
enough clues to deduce that the photos had been faked. Sanderson, a
professor of English at Leeds University, then launched an establish-
mental attempt to debunk the whole affair by digging up a copy of a
wartime advertisement with an illustration of fairies that he claimed
suspiciously resembled the fairy in the first Cottingley photo.
In his 1973 presidential address to the folklore society, Sanderson
pointed out that in 1916, the year before the snaps were taken, Elsie had
been employed in a photographer's studio in Bradford where she had ac-
quired sufficient skdl to do simple retouching and that as a schoolgirl she
had shown considerable talent in drawing and painting fairies.
Next it was Frances's turn to face the media. She, too, had married,
in her case a soldier, Sidney Way, who, like her father, had risen to war-
rant officer in the course of many postings in England and abroad, in-
cluding a long spell in Egypt.They too had retired to the Midlands.
Interviewed by a reporter from the magazine Woman, Frances, then
in her late sixties, the mother of two children, made no attempt to
deny the authenticity of the fairies: "They were part of our everyday
1ife.We didn't go looking for them, as if on a great adventure.We knew
they were there and if the light was right and the weather was right it
was just a matter of taking pictures of them as you'd take a view... ."
joyce
(Joyce)
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