Princess Mary's Gift Book

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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.

Fortunately, Princess Mary was just about grown-up enough to play her part in reinventing the Royal family as being both loyal and British. Princess Mary’s Gift Book brought the seventeen-year-old Princess right into public view and her portrait was painted for the frontispiece, by J. J. Shannon, R.A. one of the leading portrait painters in London.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.

The sum remaining, after all the Fund's liabilities had been discharged, was eventually transferred to Queen Mary's Maternity Home, founded by the Queen for the benefit of the wives and infants of sailors, soldiers and airmen of the newly formed Royal Air Force. 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 Fairy Conan-Doyle’s credulity in this and other matters still remains a mystery. He had been apparently fully taken in by the Piltdown Man fake, and since neither Piltdown Man nor the Cottingley fairies would be revealed as fakes until after his death, he presumably went on believing in the truth of them until the day he died. The Pildown Man, another famous fake! In 1922, Princess Mary, later the Princess Royal, married the 6 th Earl of Harewood. Throughout her life, she supported a number of charities, particularly to do with nursing (she herself had trained as a nurse during World War I) and the new Girl Guide movement. She became, like her mother, a formidable woman who chose her charities carefully and got a lot done.

THE LAND OF LET'SPRETEND

Shannon was a founder member of the Royal Societies of Portrait Painters and, in 1897, elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and R.A. in 1909 – a thoroughly respectable member of the British establishment. Note how he depicts the Princess as modest, simply dressed – she wears no jewellery – and unpretentious, no over-formal foreign clothes for her!

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. Princess Mary’s Gift Book. Strap line: All Profits on Sale Given to the Queen’s ‘Work for Women Fund’ The photographs were examined by photographic expert Harold Snelling, who confirmed them as authentic images of “what was in front of the camera”, thus avoiding having to validate them as images of fairies. Gardner used the images in his lectures and also had prints created to sell afterwards. The images appeared in a spiritualist magazine where they caught the eye of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, a believer in spiritualism himself. He was about to write a piece on fairies for the Christmas edition of the Strand magazine, and asked Arthur and Elsie for permission to use the images.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.