The year 1917 gave us both the birth of the Cottingly Fairies and the silly fake history known as the Bathtub Hoax.
Transciption
Cottingly Fairies
Perhaps the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sounds familiar to you. He was a writer, from England who was busy writing words for books and short stories during much of the late 1800s and early 1900s. A lot of people read his words – and still do! One of his stories, based on the true story of the Mary Celeste, helped make the story of that ghost ship pretty famous. You may have heard of the Mary Celeste on this very show. But if Mr. Sir Arthur or the Mary Celeste ring no bells for you, perhaps this name will: Sherlock Holmes. That’s right, he created Sherlock Holmes – the greatest detective in history. Okay, the greatest fictional detective in history. Okay, the greatest fictional detective in history that was probably stolen, at least as a concept, from another fictional story by Edgar Allan Poe.
I prefer inspired by!
Of course you do, Artie Conan!
Well anyway Mr. Sir Arthur, creator of Sherlock – whose powers of observation, reason, and deduction were legendary – was actually involved in one of the most impressive hoaxes in World History. But it didn’t really start out as hoax, exactly. And he definitely wasn’t the Hoaxer, he was the hoaxed. And he wasn’t alone. The people behind the hoax were two girls – cousins in England, who probably meant no harm.
It all began with a pair of wet shoes. Frances Griffiths was nine years old and her mother was fussing at her about wet shoes. But I ask, in the same situation, who wouldn’t have come home with wet shoes? A beautiful day, lush green grass, cool comforting shade from the trees above, and a small stream bubbling across the landscape. Frances was alone with her older cousin, having an adventure. Of course she waded through the water of the gentle stream. This left her with the wet shoes. When her mom demanded an explanation, she said she was playing with fairies.
Oh Frances. Really? Fairies?
Her mother seriously doubted it. Tiny little winged magical creatures? Not likely. But Frances’s cousin, Elsie was older. She was 16 – and she wasn’t gonna leave her little cousin hanging out to dry. I mean, sure, the shoes could use it, but you know what I mean – she had her cousin’s back. “It’s true” she told the family – and they could prove it. They would just require the use of one camera.
Luckily, her dad had recently acquired a new camera. This was not common in 1917 and while Elsie had certainly known about the camera – which is probably why she brought it up – she had never used it before. This camera took a negative image on a glass plate, which would then be developed and used to print photos. But it was a far cry from a camera of today – with a digital camera, or the camera on a smartphone, you can take in incredible number of pictures in a short stretch of time. As many as you want, really. Not this camera. One shot, that was all Elsie would get to capture the image of a magical fairy to prove to her parents and aunt that they weren’t pulling their legs. The first picture she ever took would have to be a good one. Her dad probably chuckled to himself as he loaded it up with a glass plate and then sent her on the way to their fairy hunt.
When they returned a few hours later, they returned the camera. He’d develop the photo later.
Now just so you know, Frances had lived most of her life in South Africa, but when WWI began, her father, who was in the British Military, was called to Europe. So the family moved to West Yorkshire England. They lived with Frances’s aunt and uncle, and their 16-year-old daughter. Despite a significant age gap, the cousins became best friends and as it would turn out, secret keepers for a secret they would share for decades to come.
As you can imagine World War I brought much stress and sadness to the lives of many. War has a way of doing that. And maybe that played a role in their story – people wanted to believe in beauty and magic in the face of such terrible events.
At least once word got out. When Elsie’s father developed the photo later that night, he found a picture of Frances, resting on the ground, looking content while four, small, winged fairies frolicked about in front of her. A few danced, one was playing a musical instrument. He laughed it off. Elsie was a good artist. These were surely drawings she had placed before she took the picture of her younger cousin. But the girls were insistent. Fairies, I tell ya!
Not long after, they borrowed the camera a second time and headed out alone into the beautiful landscape. Now, young Frances took the picture – the first she ever took in her entire life. When this one was developed it showed her older cousin, seated on the grass, reaching out to a little gnome. The family felt like they were getting pranked. The girls admitted nothing, and Elsie’s father stopped lending them the camera. Life went on.
By chance a few years later, Elsie’s mother attended a lecture – the speaker was wondering about the possibility of fairy life, about the chance that there were creatures in the world people weren’t aware of, or couldn’t see. This guy wasn’t alone, many people were looking into possibilities like this. Some believed that children might have a better chance of seeing magical creatures. So she showed the speaker the photos the two girls had taken a few years before.
Before long, the story blew up. People weren’t 100% convinced the pictures the girls had taken were real, but they weren’t 100% sure that they weren’t either. This was still a time period when many people were interested in spiritualism – trying to find a connection between the living world and what they imagine might be beyond. One person very interested in such things was Sherlock creator himself – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was actually writing an article about the possibility of fairy world. So when he saw the pictures he had a lot of feelings. First, he was aware they might be fake, and someone was trying to get him to react and embarrass himself – because not everyone believed it was possible to meet real-life fairies. But on the other hand, if they were real, oh boy this could be huge.
So when he got involved and declared his curiosity and desire to learn more about Frances and Elsie’s experience, well, let’s just say things got out of hand.
Mr. Sir Arthur believes us.
Yeah, Conie-Do himself hasn’t sherlocked it. What do we do?
Well, we can’t come clean now. He’s like the most famous writer in England. That’d be embarrassing for him.
So? That’s his problem.
Let’s just keep playing along, I guess…
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sent them each a new camera. The girls realized this meant he’d like them to take some more pictures. So they did. Ultimately they took 5 different photographs of fairies between 1917 and 1920. It was not easy to go viral in the 1920s with a handful of pictures you took with a glass plate camera, but Elsie and Frances sure did. After Mr. Sir Doyle published them in an article, those photos were seen all around the world.
About the Cottingly Fairies, he wrote: The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.
It’s a nice thought, and he was clearly eager to believe that there was more than meets the eye to the world around us.
For the next 60 years, the girls said nothing. Life went on, and no one saw any fairies. Many historians believe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle went to his grave believing it was true, but it’s hard to say for sure.
So were the fairy photos real? Well, the fairies weren’t real, no, but the creativity, clever use of art and technology, and commitment to a prank that got blown out of proportions certainly was.
Elsie was a good artist and she had a book with models from the time period – stylized fashionistas known as Gibson Girls. She traced a few of these, used her great skills with water color paint to alter them, added wings and other imaginative details, then cut them out, and used hat pins to position them in the English Country side.
Some people noticed the hat pins, some people pointed out that the figures clearly, looked flat – 2 dimensional. Others pointed out that the fairies had contemporary fashionable human hair styles. Would a timeless fairy really style her hair to match today’s popular fashion trends? But more than enough people were willing to overlook these details and believe.
In 1983 they came clean, and admitted that it was a prank. They never intended to fool the world, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They only wanted to prank their parents and have a bit of fun. But it got out of control. And they just went with it. It might never have happened if Frances’s mom hadn’t scolded her over wet shoes.
But it happened. And when asked if she felt bad about it, this is what Frances said:
People often say to me ‘Don’t you feel ashamed that you have made all these poor people look like fools? They believed in you.’ But I do not, because they wanted to believe.
At least the girls fooled people into believing something magical and beautiful, because it can sure go the other way too.
Bathtub Hoax
The Cottingly Fairies Hoax wasn’t the only hoax of 1917. There was another…and this other hoax didn’t center around the beauty of the countryside or the magic of mysterious life – it centered on something much more common; something far less magical – the bathroom.
This Hoax, remembered as the Bathtub Hoax, was a harmless, tongue-in-cheek-celebration of the fixture of bathrooms we know, love, and soak in today. Sure, they may not be as fantastic as fairies and gnomes – but bathtubs are great in their own way, and – hey – fairies and gnomes probably have to use the bathroom too, so… Maybe something about World War I put some people in the mood to have a little fun, and others to willingly be fooled. Maybe people were looking to escape, if you know what I mean. One famous, well-known writer, social critic, and journalist of the time was certainly feeling the need to lighten things up, so in Dec 1917 he published an essay about the history of the bathtub. He thought it would be obvious that it was fake, but it turns out, people couldn’t tell fact from fiction and took him at his word.
You probably hear a lot about media literacy today and how important it is to be able to recognize truth from lies when getting information about the world in print, audio, video and online sources. That’s nothing new. Hopefully you can spot something fake when you hear it or see it. Or think critically about why it’s being said. Americans in 1917 dealt with the same problems – but when it came to the bathtub hoax, many failed.
The well-known writer H.L. Mencken published the essay in question in in the New York Daily Mail. It was titled “A Neglected Anniversary.” Sounds sad right? Just you wait. In it, he claimed that 1917 was the 75th anniversary of the bathtub in the United States America. Yes that’s right, according to Mencken’s article, Americans had only been taking baths in tubs since 1842. And as terrible as that might sound (and smell) it seemed even more terrible to Mr. Mencken that his fellow Americans were not going to celebrate the momentous anniversary of tub time. Can you believe Americans would just let the opportunity to celebrate go down the drain?
The story of the tub began, according to Mencken’s fake article, in London in 1828 when Lord John Russell first introduced the bathtub to the world. John was a real person, and he probably took plenty of baths in his fancy aristocratic life. But he did not invent the bathtub. He was a politician who held as much interest in soapy water filled troughs as the next guy. At any rate, Mencken claimed that an American man from Cincinatti, Ohio visited England, saw this fictitious tub, fell in love and in 1842 returned to take the very first bath in America. This Cincinatti man’s new tub was gigantic – seven feet long, made of fine mahogany and enameled iron, and filled with cold water, or warm, as his piping was reportedly wound around the flue of the fireplace. The thing was so impressive that when he showed it off to seven friends at a Christmas Party, four of them couldn’t help themselves and took turns leaving the party to soak in the tub.
Say, I’d very much like to take one of those, a what do you call it again …a both? A beth?
A bath.
A bayath.
Bath.
Baath. Ba, ba , bath
You’ve got it!
Of course, when the public found out about it, they were angry. How could you not be! What a frivolous, wasteful, and downright weird thing baths could be. Plus, you’re probably gonna get sick from that tub, they thought! The backlash extended across the country – according to Mencken. As more people got tubs, rich people primarily, the poor and middle class fought back in shock with shamings, taxes, and mean articles written in papers about the blight of the bathtub.
According to Mencken, this backlash did not stop Vice-President Millard Fillmore. While visiting Cincy in 1850, he made a pilgrimage to the first bath in America and respectfully requested to have a soak. Later that year, Zachary Taylor got sick and died, putting Fillmore into the White House as president. Among his first orders of business was to install a bathtub in the Presidential mansion.
The article goes on and on with fabricated stories about the birth of the bathtub and its impact on American society. There were health concerns, legal cases – practically any kind of drama and unrest you can name – this article about bathtubs had it.
One thing the article really did do was make the people of Cincinatti feel pretty good about themselves. Quickly they went from not having a single drop of knowledge or care about the history of bathing to overflowing with pride, and perhaps a bit of smugness, about their city’s pivotal role on the frontiers of hygiene.
Who dey? That’s Cincinatti, baby! Birthplace of president William Howard Taft, Skyline chili, and the bathtub!
Sorry Cincinatti listeners, but 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. Remember Mencken’s article was intended as a joke. He thought it would be obvious. How could the first American bath have been taken in 1842? He figured people would get the joke. Was he right? He was worse than right – he was wrong. In the years since, much of what he wrote as a joke has been quoted, cited, reprinted, and referenced in other “histories” of the bathtub. So not only did he fool his contemporaries, but his hoax has made fools of people in the future. His future, at least. Let’s say it stops here. No more bathtub lies.
So how long have people been taking baths? Well, let’s just say a long time. Heck the ancient Greeks would get together and bathe in gigantic pools – it was totally a social thing – talk, play games, eat food, in a bathing pool, naked. But the Greeks were okay with that. They’d do exercise and train for competitions at the gymnasium together completely nude too. in fact, the word gymnasium actually means “place for naked exercising.” So think about that next time you’re in gym class. On second thought, maybe don’t do that. It wasn’t just the Greeks, the romans loved baths too. And though fashions and social practices came and went, most people bathed between now and then.
Though during eras of mass illness like the Great Plague, there was some belief that water, which opens up your pores, could allow sickness to get in. So many notable people, like Thomas of Becket did not bathe terribly often, and even might have taken pride in not being wet for years. When he died, people were a bit disgusted to find his underwear infested with lice. That’s better than the Marquis d’Argens, a friend of Frederic The Great. After taking his undershirt off for the first time in four years, it removed some of his skin too. So there’s no way that he was fresh and clean.
(so fresh and so clean clean)
But as for someone who was so fresh and so clean clean, and who probably said things like, I love when you stare at me, we should mention the Sun King himself, France’s Louis XIV. He had a very special tub installed at the Palace of Versailles way back in the 1600s. Made of fine marble and inset into the floor, this tub was not filled with something as boring as water. Bah! The sun King was like h20? More like h2NO. This lavish bathtub was filled with perfume. While the alternative of stinking from not bathing might have been worse, it’s still likely that Louis’s overpowering odour was offensive to other noses around him.
There were certainly public and private facilities for bathing in America in the 1700s, though the regular bathers did not bathe as much as we do today, in most cases. By the way, it would appear that the first bath in the White House was installed by Andrew Jackson. But I have heard stories of a bathtub in John Quincy Adams’s White House too. Those may not be true, because they usually are tied to the false story of him having a pet alligator in the tub. He never had a pet alligator, so I question the tub part of the story too. Furthermore, it’s also said that John Quincy Adams liked to swim naked each day in the nearby Potomac River, which might have been part of his bathing ritual – he probably would have fit in with the Ancient Greeks.
If any poor soul had further questions about baths by the time of the American Civil War, a helpful woman named Dr. Harriet Austin was there to help. She published a book in 1861 called Baths and How to Take Them. This riveting read was a manual with detailed advice on every step – from filling the tub to drying the body, and it offered several types of bath options, for those interested in variety.
Among the menu of bath choices, there was the Half Bath, “so called about half the person is immersed in water.”
The Dripping Sheet “It is an excellent bath”
The Plunge: “This is a very pleasant, and, if taken cold, a very exhilarating form of bath.”
In any case, her most important advice was as follows:
“As a rule, ten or eleven o’clock in the day is the best hour for bathing.
No bath should be taken immediately after or before a meal. Care should be taken to have the feet warm when coming for a bath. In cases where they are habitually cold, and cannot be warmed by exercise, it is often well to take a warm foot-bath, for a few minutes, before a general bath. Next, the patient lays aside all his clothing, and wets his forehead and top of the head in the bath or cool water ; and if the bath is continued beyond a few minutes, a wet towel or cap should be kept on the head.
Soap should never be used except for persons who bathe very seldom, or who are very dirty.”
So we’ve come a long way after all. Don’t take her advice. And don’t believe H.L. Mencken’s bathtub history – it was all a hoax!
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