Princess Mary's Gift Book

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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. The cousins were both still alive in the 1980s, and finally Elsie confessed to the hoax, probably with some relief, in 1983. What had undoubtedly started out as a cleverly stage-managed bit of fun, suggested by Frances, had got seriously out of hand. The cousins themselves were astonished at how readily people of the calibre of Conan-Doyle had accepted the images. Perhaps not wholly wanting to relinquish the story, Frances maintained all her life that “Fairies and their Sunbath”, the fifth and last image, showed real fairies, not fakes.

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. 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 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.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. 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. According to Wikipedia, in later life Lady Sybil Grant became an eccentric, spending much of her time in a caravan or up a tree, communicating with her butler through a megaphone. 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. Charles Napier Hemy. R.A. (1841-1917). Illustration for bestselling novelist Hall Caine’s story, ‘Charlie the Cox’

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

CANADA'S WORD

A Princess Mary Gift Fund Box was a treasured possession of many veteran soldiers of the First World War, even when the original contents – usually cigarettes and rolling tobacco – had long been used. The embossed brass box was air-tight, and made a useful container for money, tobacco, papers and photographs, so was often carried through subsequent service. 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.

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. Copies of all these books can be freely consulted from open shelves at the Explore History Centre at IWM London.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. 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.

Princess Mary’s Gift Book. Strap line: All Profits on Sale Given to the Queen’s ‘Work for Women Fund’ 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? 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!

AN ANGEL OF GOD