(Roughly) Daily

Swimming Lessons

circa 1910

seen at the 1939 World’s Fair

Many, many more arresting images at Black and WTF.

***

As we slip into sepia, we might send ethereal birthday greetings to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; he was born on this date in 1859.  While the Scottish physician and author is, of course, renown as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was also a prominent spiritualist, who devoted years of his life (and over 1 million pounds) to supporting belief in the existence of “little people,” or Fairies.

Conan Doyle was deeply moved by the “Cottingley Fairies Photographs,” a series of five pictures taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England– indeed, he used them to illustrate a 1920 article in The Strand.  (In the early 1980s, Elsie and Frances finally admitted that the photographs were faked [using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children’s book of the time], though Frances continued to claim that the fifth and final photograph was genuine.)

The first of the five photographs, taken by Elsie Wright in 1917, shows Frances Griffiths with the alleged fairies.

Your correspondent is off to visit the fairies, and thus out of radio contact for a few days.  Regular service should resume by the beginning of next week…  meantime, readers might amuse themselves, even as they improve themselves, with this informative interview and  this helpful how-to.