3. The Biggest Fairy Story
This slight ambiguity between Elsie's and Frances's versions sparked, another producer at YTV (Yorkshire Television) into putting together a
twenty-minute updating of the Cottingley fairy story, arranging for
/ a day's filming of both women back in the originalyorkshire vdlage,
the first time in over half a century the two girls would be together
again at Cottingley.
To take care of the now matronly ladies, the producer recruited the
services of an enterprising journalist, Joe Cooper, who arrived in the vil-
lage September 10,1976, to act as chaperone and comment on camera
about the proceedings.
Cooper described Frances, just then a year shy of seventy, as a for-
midable character with an impressive air of authority acquired as a ma-
tron at Epsom College, a school for boys.Arriving from a nearby hotel,
Frances addressed Cooper, as he put it,"forthrightly and with flashes of
humor, speaking with a faint Midland accent."
Shortly thereafter Elsie, by then in her midseventies but looking ten
years younger, arrived wearing what Cooper described as "fashionable
slacks and a black Gatsby Billycock hat on her blonded gray curls."
Hers was a Scots accent, legacy of thirty years in India with her
Scottish husband.
Cooper described the telecast's interviewer,Austin Mitchell-later
a Labour Member of Parliament-as standing in front of the Cot-
tingley cottage and saying, "It was here, almost sixty years ago, that
Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances used to play in the beck... a
stream down there, just behind their house. And it was there they
claim they not only saw the fairies.. .but also photographed them in
July 1917."
Down by the beck, Frances led the group toward the waterfall, the
cameramen heavily handicapped in the slippery terrain, while Elsie
and Cooper moved along higher ground until Elsie found a spot
where one of the photos had been taken.
"Round about here the gnomes used to come out,'' she said to
Cooper as Cooper shouted for the crew.
Asked to describe how the picture of a materializing gnome could
have been taken, Elsie answered,"When it became clear, Frances pressed
the trigger on the box camera.The gnome began to look very clear."