Geoffrey Crawley obituary

Photographic scientist who played a key role in debunking the Cottingley fairies
  • The Guardian,
Alice and the Fairies, July 1917.
Frances 'Alice' Griffiths, aged 10, with the 'fairies' taken by her cousin Elsie Wright in 1917. Crawley proved that the photographs were fakes. Photograph: Glenn Hill/SSPL

The photographic scientist Geoffrey Crawley, who has died aged 83, played an instrumental role in the debunking of the world's longest-running photographic hoax. The unlikely deception was hatched in 1917 by two cousins, Elsie Wright, aged 15, and Frances Griffiths, 10, who claimed they had captured photographs of fairies near their home in Cottingley, west Yorkshire. The "Cottingley fairies" tale quickly caught the public imagination, rolling on until some six decades later, when Geoffrey's scientific analysis of the pictures led the cousins to confess that the fairies had been nothing more sensational than cut-outs kept in place using hatpins.

He may be best known for exposing a schoolgirl prank, but Geoffrey also had a far-reaching influence on photographic science. Yet he held no professional scientific qualifications nor had any formal training. He learned much from his father, Tom, who built microscopes and radios in his spare time. In a manner akin to a home-based inventor of the Victorian era, Geoffrey went on to create a black-and-white film developer called Acutol. First manufactured by the British firm Paterson in the 1960s, the range was used in darkrooms up and down the land.


During the second world war he was evacuated to Derbyshire, where, as a keen pianist, he persuaded the mining family he was living with to buy an upright piano so he could practise. Harbouring an ambition to turn his musical talent into a profession, Geoffrey gave recitals both at school and later at Cambridge University. There, in the mid-1940s, he studied languages at Selwyn College, specialising in German and French. However, his musical dreams were cut short when he became ill during his final year at Cambridge and was unable to pursue his chosen career or finish his degree.

Over the next few years Geoffrey gave piano lessons and honed his skills at inventing black-and-white film developers for Paterson. Three of Geoffrey's concoctions, Aculux, Acugrade and FX-39, are still made today. During the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Geoffrey found himself in demand, in a profession and pastime spiralling in popularity.

He tested newly developed lenses for Leica and wrote a series of books about photographic equipment, including The Nikon System (1969). Geoffrey became adept at communicating complex principles, using detailed graphs to display how sharpness and distortion differed from one lens to another. He influenced amateurs and professional photographers alike: as editor of the British Journal of Photography (BJP) from 1966 until 1987; and as photo-science consultant for Amateur Photographer magazine, where he was still reviewing cameras and lenses shortly before his death. Above all, Geoffrey relished the challenge of an investigation and was often called upon as an expert witness for photographers involved in court cases.

It was as editor of the BJP in 1982 that he applied a detective's eye to the five Cottingley fairies photographs, the authenticity of which had first been endorsed by Edward Gardner, a theosophist, in 1920. Gardner had heightened the allure of the story by having the glass plate negatives retouched for public show, in a way that Photoshop software might be used today. The tale snowballed further when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a spiritualist – endorsed the revelations in an article for the Strand Magazine.

Geoffrey brought an objective, in-depth, technical analysis to the case. He acquired two of the cameras used by the Cottingley cousins – a quarter-plate Cameo folding camera and a Midg box camera – to assess whether they could possibly have used them to take the pictures. "Of course there are fairies, just as there is Father Christmas," Geoffrey concluded. The story proved irresistible to Hollywood: the films FairyTale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies based on the case were both released in 1997.

Geoffrey's analytical mind also appealed to the producers of a 1988 TV programme about the shooting of President John F Kennedy. Geoffrey was dispatched to Dallas, Texas, to analyse claims that an unidentified figure (dubbed the "Badge Man") was visible in the background of a faded Polaroid photograph taken at the scene of JFK's assassination in 1963. However, Geoffrey felt his tests were unable to prove, one way or another, whether there was a previously unknown human figure on the grassy knoll.

Geoffrey was awarded honorary fellowships of the Royal Photographic Society and the British Institute of Professional Photography. Yet, a mild, modest man, he was shy of the spotlight, even reluctant for his full name to be used as a byline for his articles in Amateur Photographer. In his spare time he enjoyed boating, spending his summers off the south coast with friends in a motorcruiser called Kanita. He is survived by his wife Carolyn, whom he married in 1994, and his son Thomas.

Geoffrey Wakefield Crawley, photographic scientist, born 10 December 1926; died 29 October 2010

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