Gardner, Gerald B.

Gerald Brosseau Gardner (author and amateur archaeologist and anthropologist) was born in 1884, at Blundellsands, Lancashire, to an upper middle class family. Much of his childhood was spent abroad in Madeira, (a Portuguese archipelago). In 1900 he moved to colonial Ceylon, (now Sri Lanka), and in 1911 to Malaya where he worked as a civil servant. While there he developed an interest in the native peoples and wrote papers and a book about their magical practices. After retiring in 1936, he settled in New Forest, (the south of England) and joined the occult group, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona