A CAMERA gifted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the girls behind the Cottingley Fairies hoax has been acquired by the National Science and Media Museum.

The museum is home to several objects relating to the fairy story that fooled the world, including original prints of the 1917-1920 photographs taken by cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, correspondence by the girls, Elsie’s fairy sketches and two other cameras they used. The latest camera to join the collection was the second given by Conan Doyle, thought to have taken the final fairy image - which Frances insisted was real until her death in 1986.

The folding quarter-plate Cameo camera is one of two gifted by Conan Doyle in 1920. The museum already has the other Cameo and also the original Midg camera belonging to Elsie’s father, used to take the first two fairy photographs.

In the summer of 1917 Frances, nine, and Elsie, 16, took a photograph they claimed was of fairies at Cottingley Beck. A second imaged was of a gnome with Elsie. In 1919 Elsie’s mother took the photos to Bradford Theosophical Society and photography experts confirmed them as real, sparking the interest of author and spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who asked the girls to produce more images.

The latest camera acquired by the museum was put up for auction by Frances Griffiths’ daughter, Christine Lynch, bought by the museum for £3,400. It was given to Frances by Edward L Gardner, an associate of Conan Doyle.

It wasn’t until the 1980s, when they were elderly women, that Elsie and Frances admitted the fairy images had been staged, using paper cut-outs. But Frances insisted the final photo, which she claimed she took, was genuine. It was taken in 1920 at Cottingley Beck. The girls took two hoax photos but a third image, of transparent fairies in a misty nest, was different to the others. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called it The Fairy Bower. Scientists called it ‘utterly unfakeable’.

In 2009 Christine Lynch told the T&A she never doubted her mother: “To her, fairies were part of nature. They lived in woods around the beck...no different from tadpoles or blackbirds.”

The Museum’s head curator Geoff Belknap said: “The Cottingley Fairies is one of the most enduring stories in photographic history. We are delighted to have acquired the final camera belonging to Frances and Elsie, especially because of the local significance. To this day the story is shrouded in mystery. The Cottingley Fairy objects remain some of the most enquired about in our collection and it seems these images continue to capture the public imagination as they did 100 years ago.”