Geoffrey Crawley, 83; proved Cottingley fairy photos a hoax

That, for six decades, was the central question behind the Cottingley fairies mystery, the story of two English schoolgirls who claimed to have taken five pictures of fairy folk in 1917 and afterward. Set awhirl by the international news media, the girls’ account won the support of many powerful people, including one of the most famous literary men in Britain. It inspired books and films, including “Fairy Tale: A True Story,’’ starring Peter O’Toole, and “Photographing Fairies,’’ starring Ben Kingsley.

From the start, there were doubters. But there was no conclusive proof of deception until the 1980s, when a series of articles by the English photographic scientist Geoffrey Crawley helped reveal the story for what it was: one of the most enduring, if inadvertent, photographic hoaxes of the 20th century.

A polymath who was variously a skilled pianist, linguist, chemist, inventor, and editor, Mr. Crawley died Oct. 29, at 83, at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England. His death followed a long illness, said Chris Cheesman, news editor of the British magazine Amateur Photographer. At his death, Mr. Crawley was the magazine’s photo science consultant. Mr. Crawley leaves his wife, Carolyn, and son, Thomas.

The mystery began innocently enough on a summer day in 1917, in Cottingley, a West Yorkshire village. Cousins Elsie Wright, then about 16, and Frances Griffiths, about 10, decided to fool their parents by producing pictures of fairies they claimed to see in the glen near their house. They borrowed a glass-plate camera and returned in triumph. Developed, the photograph showed Frances surrounded by whitish forms that resembled stray bits of paper or swans. Their families dismissed the images as childish trickery.

The girls stuck to their story, and later that summer took a second photo, this time of Elsie confronting what appeared to be a gnome. The families remained skeptical but kept the images as private curiosities. They would probably have remained so had it not been for the intervention of two influential men.

The first was Edward L. Gardner, a leader of the Theosophical Society in Britain, who got wind of the photos in 1920. If they were genuine, he knew, it would advance the cause of theosophy, which believed in the existence of spirit life.

After examining the photos, Gardner concluded that they were real. Wanting to use them to illustrate his public lectures, he had a darkroom technician produce better-quality negatives. New prints made from them showed the fairies clear as day.

The second man was Arthur Conan Doyle. If anyone should have known better, it was he: A trained physician, he had created the single most rational figure in Western literature and was a skilled amateur photographer.

But Conan Doyle was also an ardent spiritualist, an interest amplified by his son’s death in World War I. Recruited by Gardner, Conan Doyle soon became an impassioned champion of the photos.

For the girls, there was no turning back. In 1920, using cameras supplied by Gardner and Conan Doyle, they “took’’ three more fairy photographs.

That December, Conan Doyle used two of their photos to illustrate an article in The Strand magazine, “Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event Described by A. Conan Doyle.’’ He later wrote a book, “The Coming of the Fairies,’’ defending the images.

For the next 60 years, public interest in the Cottingley fairies waxed and waned. Over the decades, Elsie and Frances gave interviews in the British press and on television. Each time they were asked whether they had faked the photos, and each time they gave similar answers: coy, charming, and wittily evasive.

After acquiring the original cameras, Mr. Crawley painstakingly tested whether they were capable of producing images as crisp and recognizable as those popularized by Gardner and Conan Doyle. In the end he determined that they were not, and that the darkroom alchemy ordered by Gardner had transformed the girls’ amateurish blurs into marketable fairies.

In the early 1980s, amid the renewed attention, the cousins came clean.

The girls’ plan had been absurdly simple: They used fairy illustrations from a book, which Elsie, a gifted artist, copied onto cardboard, cut out and stuck into the ground with hatpins. They had never set out to deceive anyone beyond their own families.

“Elsie gave us a myth which has never harmed anyone,’’ Mr. Crawley wrote in the British Journal of Photography in 2000.

“How many professed photographers,’’ he added, “can claim to have equaled her achievement with the first photograph they ever took?’’