Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week out of control from the 1950s

Jamaica's worst ever rail disaster. from the we realized that something wasn't quite right.

Plus the last use of the guillotine in France and a star is born at the London proms. I'd gone backstage and said I know the piece would you like me to go on he thought

I know the piece would you like me to go on he thought for a second and then

said yeah go on on I staggered That's coming up later in the podcast. But we begin by going down to the woods where in the early 20th century there really was something of a surprise.

Now when you listen to this item item do bear in mind that the events

described took place around the time of the end of the First World War.

Europe was in a state of physical, economic and emotional trauma. People were asking, how, if there were a God,

could that God have allowed slaughter and disruption

of such a terrifying scale?

Might there be an answer outside the realm

of traditional views of heaven and earth?

Well, against this background in 1920, two British girls made a claim that would astound the world.

They said they'd photographed fairies.

And what's more, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

a famous and respected author at the time, backed them up, saying the pictures proved the existence of fairies.

Here's Claire Bowes.

The story began at the bottom of a garden by a stream in the tiny village of Cottingly in the north of England.

Two girls, Elsie Wright nearly 16 and her cousin Francis Griffith's just nine,

spent the summer of 1917 playing by the stream, or the Beck as they called it,

with, they told their parents, the fairies.

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