Freemasonry, politics, the press and transparency | Letters
The existence of two Freemasons’ lodges associated with staff and journalists based at the Palace of Westminster, New Welcome Lodge No 5139 and Gallery Lodge No 1928, has been widely known for many years (Secret Freemasons’ lodges for MPs and journalists revealed, 5 February). Both lodges have Wikipedia entries and have published histories. They do not meet at Westminster, but at Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, and you can find the times of their meetings in the United Grand Lodge of England’s publicly available Directory of Lodges and Chapters.
While I was director of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry at the University of Sheffield in 2006, I published with John Hamill, formerly the curator and librarian at Grand Lodge, an article in the Labour History Review which gives a detailed account of the formation of New Welcome Lodge in 1929 (not 1926). New Welcome Lodge sought to widen the social basis of Freemasonry. Among the Labour MPs who joined the lodge were Arthur Greenwood, Ben Tillett and Lewis Silkin. Hugh Dalton suggested that the lodge was responsible for Attlee’s election as party leader, but the membership lists show this was not true. Since the second world war, it mostly consists of staff from the Palace of Westminster, with a handful of MPs, and is comparable to other clubs connected with Westminster. Gallery Lodge also found that it was not viable if it restricted its membership to journalists and so widened its membership.
Professor Andrew Prescott
University of Glasgow
from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2EodLF0
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