JUST GOOD FRIENDS
The chief of a justice commission is a freemason. That's all right, says Paul Pickering (who isn't one)
PETER SELLERS was a freemason. So states the Grand Lodge in a recent pam- phlet, and this must be a comfort to poor Sir Frederick Crawford, under pressure to resign as chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission or hand in his apron as junior Grand Warden of the Grand Lodge.
The flaw in calls by Labour MPs Chris Mullin, Roy Hattersley and others for Sir Frederick's resignation on the grounds that his membership might influence his decisions is that the Craft has been in seri- ous decline for about a hundred years. Who on earth is going to be corrupted When attendance at some lodge meetings is in single figures? 'Much more business is done on the golf course or after a village cricket match, and those are strange ritu- als,' said a mason friend. 'We do have sev- eral policemen. But they tend to declaim a ritual like the murder of Hiram as if it were road traffic accident evidence, get sniggered at and leave early. There's more chance of sinister purpose at a christen- ing.>
I am not a mason, but my father was, and when he died I was educated by the Craft. Its charities are now a shadow of
their former selves. It has become unfash- ionable to celebrate so unashamedly the state of being middle-class. The boys' prep school and senior school at Bushey in Hertfordshire, whose neo-Gothic splen- dour Sir John Betjeman said rivalled Eton College, has been sold off, as has the Masonic Hospital. The girls' school at Rickmansworth remains, but pupils' fami- lies are now expected to contribute.
My father was active in Usdaw (the shop-workers' union), the treasurer of Rotherham Labour Party, head of the Co- op in South Yorkshire, and hoped one day to become a Labour MP. If he ever sup- posed that being a mason might help on the right wing of the Labour Party, this dream was exploded. According to my mother, the people with 'clout' never turned up to the lodge meetings.
The only mildly bad experience my father had with his fellow masons was on his death-bed in 1962. Several members of the local lodge came to ask him to rein- state a depot manager, also a mason, whom he had sacked for stealing hundreds of lorry tyres. My father's answer was unprintable and his decision had no reper- cussions. An honourable mason should
never put pressure on another member to help him or a third party. And masons set great story by honour. I still received a place at the school (Motto: Aude, Vide, Tace — Hear, See, Be Silent), where 50 per cent of pupils were drawn from a blue-col- lar background.
At the school itself masonic influence was merely architectural. The headmaster was profoundly anti-mason and referred to the Brotherhood contemptuously as 'brick- les'. The main thrust of the advice from the non-freemason masters was tfiat the Craft was at best a misguided attempt at express- ing human brotherhood in non-religious ritual, at worst a mafia of the mediocre. The message I took with me was that with a good education one did not need an arti-
sans' secret society, - Vestiges of masonic tradition remained. We had to show lodges round. I noticed that most members had spent a lifetime on the shop floor before taking early retire- ment and setting up a small business. They did not generally regard themselves as superior to others in any way, but saw the Craft as a way of 'putting something back' and of being part of a social world from which they had been excluded for most of their working lives. These men called each other 'brother' in the same spirit as trade unionists did, but their fraternal bond was was that of the newly arrived middle-class. Is this not the type of stakeholder think- ing the Labour Party now preaches? It is close, too, to the theories of empowerment being expounded by United States Repub- licans: the worker becoming part of society instead of just being paid by it.
In their heyday the masonic charities were probably the largest of the friendly societies. They provided institutions for health care, education, the aged and the mentally ill. The Craft found that many of these services were cheaper if bought from the private sector. The setting up of excel- lent old people's homes by the Masonic Benevolent Institution might well be used as a model for any group of people want- ing to supplement state care in this area but not pay private fees. The group would take regular contributions from members and supplement these with bequests and fund-raising events, though without the oaths, costumes and ritual. The aging Craft is expert in the care of the elderly and would probably be delighted to advise gov- ernment in assisting the establishment of such schemes.
To a paranoid left-winger, this is utter heresy, and the present shadow Cabinet appears tailor-made for the world of secret handshakes, with two names whispered as lodge members. But precisely who can be influenced? In the last century the Grand Master or Grand Mason was an extremely powerful figure, capable of making or breaking politicians. But what would a Labour Cabinet get from the present Duke of Kent except Wimbledon tickets?
Even in the 1850s one cannot quite believe in a Yorkshire mill-owner donning his apron and imagining he was a builder of a New Jerusalem. Masons went their separate ways. Cecil Rhodes, Sir Richard Burton, Garibaldi and Oscar Wilde were all celebrants of an optimistic brother- hood, although the handshake didn't save Wilde from Reading jail. The most surreal lodge meeting was the one attended by Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and Colonel Travis before the ill-fated Alamo. 'If masons always do things behind closed doors and are so damn sneaky and clever, how do you explain the Alamo?' asked my masonic solicitor. The freemason, General Haig, sent many brothers to their deaths on the Somme.
Most lodges have difficulty organising ladies' nights, let alone fixing court cases. But there have always been witch-hunts, often linked to anti-Semitism. Jews have been attracted to freemasonry because of the Judaistic tone of the ritual based on the building of Solomon's temple rather than because of the plotting or secrecy. Masons were condemned in the ante-bel- lum American South as mainly 'nigger-lov- ing Jews' because they ran the underground railroad taking freed slaves to the North. Hitler saw the masons as a Jewish cult.
All this is a world away from the 50- year-old building society manager in an anorak on his way to Lodge No. 144 won- dering if the heating will be on. The figure of 500,000 freemasons in Britain is often bandied about, but the active total is prob- ably less than 50,000. 'We are desperately short of members. Lodge buildings are being sold like C of E churches,' said one mason in the library at the Grand Lodge. 'We've even considered joining up with the British Legion or the Lions.' That might pay for the halls to be heated. But the Brotherhood would lose the very thing it celebrates and which sustains it: the power of tradition.
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