The affluent coastal area of Blundellsands might seem like the last place to be associated with one of Britain's most notorious occult figures.
Gerald Bosseau Gardner was born on Friday, June 13, 1884 at The Glen, an imposing house overlooking Crosby Beach. He would go on to be credited as the father of modern witchcraft and the fanatic behind a religion that is now counted among the world's fastest growing faith groups.
All trace of the house has now gone, although it stood on its commanding position until well into the 1980s. Gardner's family background was a wealthy one: the family business, Joseph Gardner & Sons, was the world's oldest and largest importer of hardwood. Perhaps even more tellingly, his grandfather, Joseph, was a well know eccentric, taken to strolling around naked in public.
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The family was said to descend from a Scottish woman, Grissell Gairdner, who was burned as a witch in Newburgh in 1610.
Gerald Gardner's childhood saw him shipped around the world to the likes of Ghana and the Canary Islands as his parents attempted to combat his debilitating asthma with a warmer climate. As a result he never attended school or received a formal education and instead the teenage Gardner began to develop a fascination with mysticism and primitive weapons.
When his nurse married a man with business interests in Ceylon, Gardner moved there too where he worked on a tea plantation. Going on to live in Borneo and Singapore, he became interested by the practices of local natives, spending time with various tribes, witnessing ancient rituals and getting tattooed.
During a period working for the British government in the Far East as an inspector of illegal opium dens, Gardner's interest in the occult developed further and he was confirmed into several orders, including the Rosicrucian Fellowship of Crotona, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Circle of the Universal Bond.
In 1936, after years living in South East Asia, during which time he published several studies on the ancient weaponry of the Far East and took part in a number of archaeological digs, Gardner retired and moved back to England, where he became convinced he was reincarnated and had lived a previous life on Cyprus in 1450BC.
He wrote a novel, A Goddess Arrives, about his visions and after moving to Highcliffe in Hampshire's New Forest, he became involved in a coven of witches who initiated him during a naked ritual at one of their member's houses.
The activities of the New Forest coven are shrouded in mystery, but in 1940, Gardner described how they performed a ritual known as "operation cone of power", which they hoped would influence the high command of Nazi Germany and prevent them from invading Britain.
This magical ritual, Gardner claimed, took place inside the forest, and involved the Witches raising a "cone of power" which they directed toward Germany and focused on sending the message into the minds of the German leaders that they would not be able to cross the English channel.
Gardner also noted that several of the older and frailer practising witches died after the ritual due to the fact they had performed naked, without goose grease on the skin to keep them warm, and had as a result contracted pneumonia.
Believing the coven to be a survival of the pre-Christian witch-cult, Gardner decided to revive the faith, supplementing the coven's rituals with ideas borrowed from freemasonry, ceremonial magic and the writings of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley to form the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca.
Years later Gardner visited Crowley on his deathbed, where the man dubbed by the press as "the wickedest man in the world", initiated the younger man into Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis, the core belief of which was "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
Moving to London in 1945, following the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1736, Gardner became intent on propagating the "Wicca" religion, attracting media attention and writing about it in High Magic's Aid (1949), Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).
In Witchcraft Today, Gardner spoke openly of his worship of "the horned God" and the "moon goddess." He also wrote the Book of Shadows which became known as the bible of the new "Wiccan" religion.
Founding a Wiccan group known as the Bricket Wood coven, he introduced a string of high priestesses into the religion, including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, through which the Gardnerian community spread throughout Britain and subsequently into Australia and America in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In 1953, Gardner set up the world’s first Museum of Magic and Witchcraft at the Witches' Mill in Castletown on the Isle of Man, which he filled with the biggest collection of witchcraft and Wiccan artefacts in the world. The museum was later moved to a new location in Boscastle in Cornwall.
By now, Gardner was internationally known as the "Father of modern witchcraft" and "Britain's chief witch", with his continued courting of newspaper and TV, chiming with his belief that only through publicity could more people become interested in witchcraft. Among his pronouncements around this time were the assertion that fairies were really a persecuted race of pygmy-witches and that the Royal Family were descended from a long-line of witches.
Gardner's appearance was, by now, as strange as his beliefs: He had several tattoos on his body, depicting magical symbols such as a snake, dragon, anchor and dagger and in his later life he wore a heavy bronze bracelet denoting the three degrees of witchcraft as well as a large silver ring with signs on it which represented his witch-name 'Scire', in the letters of the magical Theban alphabet.
He also used to comb his beard into a narrow goatee and his hair into two horn like peaks.
In 1964, Gardner's long life came to an end when he suffered a heart attack on board a ship, SS Scottish Prince, while returning to the UK from the Lebanon. The following day he was buried on the shore of a Tunisian beach with only a ship's officer present. He was 79.
Today, Gardner's legacy continues with the religion he helped resurrect claiming one million adherents in at least 66 countries across the world.
Commenting on Gardner, pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White said: "There are few figures in esoteric history who can rival him for his dominating place in the pantheon of pagan pioneers."
Several years after Gardner's death, the Wiccan high priestess Eleanor Bone visited North Africa and went looking for Gardner's grave. She discovered that the cemetery he was interred in was to be redeveloped, and so she raised enough money for his body to be moved to another cemetery in Tunis, where it currently remains.
In 2007, a new plaque was attached to Gardner's grave, describing him as being "Father of Modern Wicca. Beloved of the Great Goddess."
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