ThP Biggest Fai y Story
The first I heard of the Cottingley fairies was at Findhorn in 1973.
E. L. Gardner had died in 1970, a centenarian, but I was directed to his
son Leslie, then in his sixties, whom I found in a flower-surrounded
cottage in the village of Hastings-on-Thames northeast of London.
From Leslie Gardner's cheerful greeting it was immediately clear
that he believed implicitly in the authenticity of the photos taken by
Elsie and Frances, and he promptly produced the original glass plates
bequeathed to him by his father. A correspondence followed in which
Gardner was meticulously helpful, providing me with further informa-
tion, data that I planned to incorporate into The Secret Liji fe PPnts
along with interviews with Ogylvie Crombie, Dorothy McLean, and
others who could describe the world of nature spirits from personal
sensitive insight.When, to Gardner's distress, this material was excluded
by the publisher, partly because of length and partly because it stretched
the imagination, I received a long reprimand from Gardner with which
he terminated our exchange.
Curious to tap Geoffrey Hodson's encyclopedic knowledge about
nature spirits as well as to validate his insight into the astronomic and
geodetic expertise of the ancient Aztecs and the Maya, about which I
was writing another book, I traveled to New Zealand for a remarkable
interview with Hodson, then living in Auckland. There was no ques-
tion in his mind about the authenticity of the photographs taken by the
girls at Cottingley.
And there the whole episode might have ended, fading peacefully
into the mist of time, had not an enterprising English television pro-
ducer, Lynn Lewis, alerted to the old fairy story by an obituary article