Can Freemasonry find a role in the woke world?

Freemasonry has insinuated itself into our language – the ‘holy of holies’, the ‘third degree’, ‘on the level’. Its customs and practices have evolved over many centuries, smothering us in wool, like an enormous piece of knitting. How the hell can we get rid of it?

 

There was something about the coronation of King Charles III that was awfully familiar – the white robes, the gloves, the anointing with oil brought from the Holy Land, that business with the sword. Now, what was it? Oh yes, Freemasonry.

 

It shouldn’t really be a surprise, Freemasonry, the Craft, has been entwined through the British establishment for centuries and it put down deep roots throughout the colonies. It was big, back in the day. It was one of the key cultural mechanisms of the British Empire,

 

Edward VII was Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England from 1874 to 1901, until he was crowned. George VI was an enthusiastic mason, as was his brother, who served as Edward VIII, before his abdication in 1937. The role of head of the United Grand Lodge is now occupied by the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Kent. His brother, Prince Michael of Kent, is also a senior mason. Prince Philip was a mason. King Charles never seems to have been one, breaking the recent link between serving monarchs and the masons that goes back to his great great grandfather. He’s not really into it.

 

The establishment will struggle to find a royal standard bearer for the craft, once the current Duke of Kent, who has the dismissive ‘you are a prole’ look of Martin Amis, pops his clogs. There just aren’t any suitably uptight royals in the next generation – Harry, no way Jose, William (nope, he’s sensitive, like his mum). Andrew? I don’t think so. He’s the public relations version of leprosy. They will have to find a more obscure, lower-tier royal to carry the banner and roll up the trouser leg. Hopefully one who isn’t a Nazi.

 

Does Freemasonry matter? Well, here are a couple of interesting facts. Fact one – Edward VIII was a fan of Adolf Hitler. They were photographed shaking hands, long after Hitler had begun rounding up and murdering Jews and Communists and euthanising disabled children. Fact two, so was the current Duke of Kent’s father, Prince George, who was the English grand master flash from 1939. He died when his RAF Short flying boat mysteriously crashed into a hillside in Scotland, on 25 August 1942, in broad daylight.

 

Was Prince George, an intelligent man who was rumoured to be Noel Coward’s lover and was a morphine and cocaine user, at the controls of the plane when it crashed?  Was he killed by MI5 on the orders of Winston Churchill (ironically, another Freemason) because it was feared that was about to do a deal with Hitler? We’ll probably never know, because the records have been destroyed, or sealed. The establishment is very good at covering its traces.

 

These two facts don’t mean that all Freemasons are extremely right wing – they’re not. But if you are you are right wing and a member of a uniformed service, like the police or the army, you are far more likely to be a mason, than if you are, say, a radical, left-wing layabout.

 

Jack Straw tries to clean up

 

There are believed to be about six million Freemasons in the world. The world’s largest masonic organization, the United Grand Lodge of England, which is a male only institution, has a combined membership estimated at around a quarter of a million,

 

Periodically, concerns are expressed in Britain that masons’ vows of brotherhood to their fellow craft members mean that they cannot exercise public duties dispassionately. High-profile scandals in the 1970s and 1980s, concerning the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad and the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Branch, appeared to bear out these fears. More recently, there were accusations of a masonic cover-up in the South Yorkshire police’s handling of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster.

 

How many members of UK police forces and how many judges and magistrates are masons? How many MPs and members of the House of Lords are funny handshake merchants? We don’t know. And we can’t know. A Freedom of Information request will, strangely, get you nowhere. Unofficial estimates suggests that 5% of judges may be masons.

 

In 1997, incoming home secretary, Jack Straw said that members of the police, judiciary and probation service should be required to disclose whether they are masons and that, if a voluntary register failed, he would bring in legislation. The United Grand Lodge of England defended membership secrecy, citing the case of an Italian judge who was a Freemason, whose appeal to the European Court of Human Rights had succeeded. In 2009, rules requiring declaration for judges were withdrawn.

 

Since 2018, when there was a furore over masons in the Met allegedly blocking diverse police membership, the UGLE has been on a charm offensive, publicising its charitable efforts and its open, but not female, membership criteria.

 

There are lodge websites all over the internet. You can easily find photos – a few black faces but mainly middle-aged white men wearing aprons. They look like the kind of people you would encounter at the bar of a golf club. With a couple of clicks, you can even take a virtual tour of the art deco Freemasons’ Hall which has a museum and looms spectacularly over London’s Great Queen Street, like a Babylonian ziggurat.

 

This is open-source, non-vanilla Freemasonry. The Met Police may be under attack for their racism, sexist and homophobia, but the masons are trying to find a niche in the culture wars, lying somewhere between me-too culture and wokery and a world of bizarre online conspiracy theories, in which alien lizard people abduct babies and hold meetings in secret underground bunkers, while flying saucers hover overhead.

 

The thing is, people love secret societies and funny handshakes. They just do. Freemasonry is the ultimate self-help group based on user-generated content. It has even insinuated itself in our language – the ‘holy of holies’, the ‘third degree’, ‘on the level’.

 

So don’t write of the masons just yet. The British establishment has the ability to place a rock band on the roof. it is malleable and adaptive. You know how you smiled when Charles, in his white robe, was being anointed with holy oil? That’s the smile that would land on your face at a village fete, at the dog with the waggliest tail competition, or when you discover a new Walkers crisp flavour. These customs and practices have rolled over us Brits over many centuries, like an enormous piece of knitting. You can’t easily unpick something like that. And maybe you shouldn’t.

 

Human beings are weird

 

Tbese are not just characteristics of Freemasonry. The mason’s apron is like the Catholic’s scapula. Revered texts, ceremonies, initiation rites and ranks of membership are common to all religions, clubs and sects. Humans are drawn to them because they confer order on a universe that may have no meaning or purpose. 

 

I'm a bit conflicted on this, because my grandad James L. Hatchett, who was the manager of Lloyd's bank in Droitwich, served as the mayor of that town and was a leading light in numerous local institutions, was a Freemason. He stood as an Independent. His campaign slogan in an election in 1956 was ‘Vote for Hatchett. He has no axe to grind’. There is something attractive about being an Independent, in a world of hectoring tub thumpers. In some ways, it's the spirit of middle England – which Droitwich, with its timbered buildings, its canal and its ugly ring road, physically represents. I never met him. He died just before I was born. When I think of my grandad, I remember the big leather chairs in his dining room and the neat garden, with its sweet willams and wallflowers. It's always summer. I refuse to believe that Jim Hatchett, mayor of Droitwich – who was a plump man with spectacles, somewhat bullied by his wife – was not a good person with only the best intentions. Of course, this could be entirely wrong.

 

Whether it's a cathedral or a scout hut, premises used for communal purposes embody, in their physical structures, narratives that correspond to a human journey. A Masonic lodge – they all have a black and white tiled floor, an altar and robing rooms – has the musty odours, tattered banners, stained glass and plangent organ music of a Christian Church – a strange English melancholy that makes you think of glorious deaths on foreign fields. Anyone who has been a mason would be entirely at home in the Houses of Parliament – which is not really surprising. Freemasonry is a church that was devised during the enlightenment, a period in which the cosmos could be interpreted as machine that had been set in motion by a divine maker – and measured.

 

Freemasonry’s functional roles – warden, deacon, chaplain, almoner, worshipful master, are filled by individuals who are architects, clerks, soldiers, engineers, judges, clerics and policemen in their other lives (no wonder there are conflicts of interest). It is an instrumental religion, rather than one of pious hope. Their goal is to climb Jacob’s ladder to heaven, or, in the case of the American founding fathers, several of whom were Freemasons, to build a successful country, in which an individual can become prosperous and drive around in a pick-up truck.

 

That is why Freemasonry, for all its protestations that is open, inclusive and gender non-discriminatory (I made that up) never can be. Secret societies are secret. That’s why we like them. English masonic iconography references the killing of infidels by the Knights Templar and of the dragon by St George, who slayed, symbolically, the pagan gods of nature. But it also has echoes of ancient Coptic and gnostic religions.

 

Animals were ritually sacrificed in the Temple of Solomon, which Masons profess to the physical prototype of their lodges. Their blood was spilled on the brazen alter. Freemasonry is a pre-medieval survival, as peculiar as King Charles’ accent. It can never be entirely normalised. There are masonic lodges for football, rugby and motor racing fans and women. There are Catholic lodges and black lodges. Freemasonry is big in Jamaica. Probably, somewhere in the world, there is a lodge of socialist Freemasons. Freemasonry is a synonym for an esoteric, self-protective form of secrecy. And human beings embrace that. They are just weird.

 

Will Hatchett has been a social policy journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.