Subsequent hstory
Frances died in 1986, and Elsie in 1988. Prints of their
photographs of the fairies, along with a few other items including
a first edition of Doyle's book The Coming of the Fairies, were sold
at auction in London for £21,620 in 1998. That same year,
Geoffrey Crawley sold his Cottingley Fairy material to the National
Museum of Film, Photography and Television where it is still on
display. The glass photographic plates were bought for £6,000 by
an unnamed buyer at a London auction held in 2001.
The first edition of Frances' memoirs , published in 2009, under
the title Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies, contains
correspondence, sometimes "bitter", between Elsie and Frances.
In one letter, dated 1983, Frances wrote: “I hated those
photographs from the age of 16 when Mr Gardner presented me
with a bunch of flowers and wanted me to sit on the platform [at
a Theosophical Society meeting] with him. I realised what I was
in for if I did not keep myself hidden.”
Elsie and Frances and the original camera used in the photographs
23