Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies

Sherlock Holmes fans will be delighted to know that there is a new play featuring the great man. In it Holmes, 72, bored silly by retirement and bee-keeping in the Sussex Downs, is back living at his old haunt of 221B Baker Street and reunited with the widowed Watson. The case that lands in Holmes’s lap concerns a reported outbreak of fairies in the Bradford area. Thus we are plunged into the Cottingley saga, a mystery that fascinated the public in the 1920s.

The play is by Fiona Maher, a fairy-lore expert, organiser of the Legendary Llangollen Faery Festival (she’s known as Tink) and author of a very well-researched book on the Cottingley affair that sheds much new light on the hoax. In the play, the great detective’s sleuthing mirrors her own detective work.

Holmes represented exactly the kind of person who condemned Doyle for his belief in fairies and spiritualism

But before we get on to Holmes, the fairy-photograph story goes like this. In 1917 nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright, 16, were living in a house their families shared in Cottingley, West Yorkshire. One day Frances’s shoes were soaked from playing in the stream at the bottom of the garden and when her angry mother demanded to know why, she replied, ‘I go to see the fairies’, thinking it would save her from the usual smack.

Elsie convinced her father Arthur Wright – an amateur photographer with a darkroom under the stairs – to lend her his Midg quarter-plate camera, saying she would bring back proof of the fairies. When the girls returned, he developed the plate and voilà!, it showed Frances surrounded by four sprites. They took a second photo of Elsie shaking hands with a prancing, winged gnome.