By Paul Calderwood
The media campaign against Freemasons that raged in the 1980s and 1990s is a subject which intrigued me at the time and prompted me to undertake a doctoral thesis at London University in order to study the relationship between Freemasonry and the Press in the 20th century.
In the book on this subject that resulted from that study (published by Lewis Masonic) much space was devoted to the many attempts by critics of Freemasonry to create a register of Masons.
These attempts drew support from many leading members of Society, including bishops and archbishops, Police Chief Constables and many politicians including the Home Secretary.
Fortunately, a ruling by a European Court of justice - which condemned such attempts as illegal - took much of the steam out of this clamour. Sadly, however it is a notion that has not completely disappeared - as recent moves by the Metropolitan Police have shown.
In my book “Freemasonry and the Press” I said that such attempts were in fact simply a return to a state of affairs that had already existed for 170 years from 1799 to 1967, during which time Lodge secretaries were required to submit to the Court of Quarter Sessions a return, listing all of its members and providing details of their addresses and occupations among other things, every year.
Having completed that book, my curiosity led me on to explore in more detail the legislation that had imposed this duty upon Lodge secretaries and, more importantly, to find out what had happened to those annual returns that had been submitted.
Because they tell us an enormous amount about the kind of men who belonged to the fraternity and the important role which they played in society - as well as information about the state of their Lodges - I was very pleased to discover that many of these returns have survived.
Providing a yearly detailed record about these subjects, the wealth of information that they offer us is not available anywhere else.When a person applies to become a Freemason he is asked for details of his occupation and address - but any change in that address or occupation after the day of his initiation was not normally or routinely noted in Masonic records. As a result, the annual returns made in compliance with the Unlawful Societies Act during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fill an important gap in our knowledge and chart each Mason’s life within and outside of the lodge year by year.
Besides providing historians with a rich new source of information I believe that it will be of considerable interest to those engaged in the research of family and lodge history as well.
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