Page "Gerald Gardner (Wiccan)" Paragraph 7

According to Gardner's first biographer, Jack Bracelin, Com was very flirtatious and " clearly looked on these trips as mainly manhunts ", viewing Gardner as a nuisance.

As a result, he was largely left to his own devices, which he spent going out, meeting new people and learning about foreign cultures.

In Madeira, he also began collecting weapons, many of which were remnants from the Napoleonic Wars, displaying them on the wall of his hotel room.

As a result of his illness and these foreign trips, Gardner ultimately never attended school, or gained any formal education.

He taught himself to read by looking at copies of The Strand Magazine but his writing betrayed his poor education all his life, with highly eccentric spelling and grammar.

A voracious reader, one of the books that most influenced him at the time was Florence Marryat's There Is No Death ( 1891 ), a discussion of spiritualism, and from which that he gained a firm belief in the existence of an afterlife.