Fate of the World
Interest generated by the fairy article was so great that Doyle and
Gardner decided to institute an even more thorough search for an-
swers. They wanted to see if they could establish just how the fairies
could appear on a photographic plate, how it was that fairies existed in
the glen, and how so extraordinary a phenomenon could be reconciled
with modern physics.
Gardner's first move was to contact a friend with the gift of clair-
voyance who claimed to be able to see fairies. Far from being a crack-
pot, the friend was a World War I officer in the British Tank Corps,
Major Geoffrey Hodson, whom Doyle considered to be "an honorable
gentleman with neither the will to deceive nor any conceivable object
in doing so."
It occurred to Gardner that Hodson might be able to check on the
statements about fairies made by the Cottingley girls and, with luck,
obtain a further set of photographs.
Like Gardner, Hodson was a member of the Theosophical Society, a
student of Buddhism, a practitioner of yoga, and a man who at first had
regarded fairies as merely the products of the imagination. He had come
to view them worthy of consideration thanks to an unexpected occult
experience that had obliged him to change not only his views, but the
tenor of his life. Hodson's first encounter with the world of fairy had
come about in an unusual way. Seelung employment after the war,
Hodson had settled in the industrial cotton-spinning town of Preston
in Lancashire to organize a boys' club for the rehabilitation of youths
discharged from correctional institutions.
Before buying a house in Preston, Hodson and his wife had rented
rooms in an old manor house with a pleasant open fireplace in its large,