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 Distribution dragged on even beyond the Armistice in 1918. The final number of boxes produced was over 2.6 million. A treasured gift 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.

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 ANT-LION

My copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book once belonged to my Great Great-Aunt Ida and is dated December 12 th, 1914. I found it in an attic when I was a child and I’m delighted to have it. The Princess, under the aegis of her formidable mother, Queen Mary, wrote a personal introduction to Princess Mary’s Gift Book: all profits from the sale of the book would go to Queen Mary’s ‘Work for Women Fund’ which was set up to assist working women who found themselves in financial difficulties because of the war. For example, women working in the textile and clothing industries lost their jobs after their export markets closed. Queen Mary brought their case to the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, which resulted in contracts for women textile workers to supply clothing and other items for the Army Supply Department. Charles Napier Hemy. R.A. (1841-1917). Illustration for bestselling novelist Hall Caine’s story, ‘Charlie the Cox’ Princess Mary, the Princess Royal (1897-1965) was seventeen when World War I broke out in 1914. In normal circumstances, Mary would have been kept under wraps until she was eighteen and come out in Society, but, the outbreak of war changed everything. The House of Saxe-Coburg began to be accused of being far too German, and King George V and Queen Mary found themselves with an image problem.

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.

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. Perhaps the timing had something to do with the way the images were so readily accepted. The horrific reality of the 1914-1918 war would leave people desperate for a different world, a world in which there might still be the possibility of magic. Conan Doyle’s own son was a victim of the war. Some had a considerable wait to receive their boxes, with difficulties distributing them, and with sourcing both the brass and the contents during the ongoing war. Supplies of 45 tons of brass strip, destined to make more boxes, was lost in May 1915 when RMS Lusitania was sunk off Ireland on passage from the USA.

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.

Elsie’s father Arthur was a keen amateur photographer with his own darkroom and all the equipment required to develop the plate the girls had taken. The image, now a very famous one, shows Frances, head slightly tilted, gazing off just to the right of the photographer. In front of her several winged fairy figures dressed in diaphanous clothing are dancing. Frances looks as though she is trying hard not to laugh. 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. 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. Elsie’s mother Polly, who was interested in the Theosophical movement, took the photographs along to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in nearby Bradford. Appropriately, the subject of the evening lecture was “fairy life”, and the images appear to have caught the imagination and the enthusiasm of the society’s supporters, and of one of its leading members, Edward Gardner. I want you now to help me to send a Christmas present from the whole of the nation to every sailor afloat and every soldier at the front. I am sure that we should all be happier to feel that we had helped to send our little token of love and sympathy on Christmas morning, something that would be useful and of permanent value, and the making of which may be the means of providing employment in trades adversely affected by the war. Could there be anything more likely to hearten them in their struggle than a present received straight from home on Christmas Day?