FREEMASONRY TODAY - Summer 1997 - Issue

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Summer 1997
Issue 01
Tobias Churton - Editor
The Eye
A Mason in Hamburg
In Those Days Masters Carried Swords
Perceptions and Realities
Mason About: Granville Angell
Why Ritual Excellence?
Making History
Minding Your Head
Mozart and Me
Review: First Rays of the New Rising Sun
Review: The Hiram Key
Old Fireglass
The Artist's Palate
Love's Ladder
Norman Stote
Letters to the Editor
Famous Masons

Copyright 1997-2008
Grand Lodge Publications Ltd
Designed and Maintained by: Cyberpoint Limited

FREEMASONRY TODAY

Summer 1997 - Issue 01 - Index

Tobias Churton - Editor
This is Freemasonry Today : the independent magazine for everyone with an interest in Freemasonry. We take the whole of Freemasonry for our province : its past, present and future - a kaleidoscopic tradition of quality, intelligence, generosity, mystery, wit and purpose. It was William Blake who, while gazing admiringly at the vision of a thriving new city arising from the furnace of love in his epic poem Jerusalem, asked the question : “What are those Golden Builders doing?” As Freemasonry Today unfolds, we shall discover : who has built, who is building; what has been made, who is making. While the edifice of the contemporary Craft is formed of moral ...

The Eye
Grand Lodge Surfs — Masonry Grows in Eastern Europe — Hearing Aids for Indian School — Initiation Filmed by Welsh TV — Sussex Fosters Understanding — Wells Cathedral Welcomes Masons — All Time High for Charities — Mark Masons' Hall gets New Chief — London Lodges to get Better Service — From Rome to Grand Lodge — Success for Ireland Leaflet

A Mason in Hamburg
The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, where I live, is known as the most English of German cities. There’s an English theatre where you can see Noël Coward plays. English slogans are ubiquitous (“business lunch”, “the Fitness Lady Studio”, “You must see Evita”). And there’s a certain reticence about the Hamburgers which has more in common with Albion than with their compatriots in, say, Bavaria or the Rhineland. There have been trading links with England for centuries, so it is not surprising that masonic links go back a long way as well. When I first moved to Hamburg just over three years ago, it was by great good luck that my first masonic encounter ...

In Those Days Masters Carried Swords
Scotland holds some of the most mysterious masonic and chivalric remnants in the world. Yet many of these residues remain enigmatic because much of Scotland’s history can never be recovered. In particular, that of the important thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when chivalry flourished and the Craft Guilds were organizing. The majority of Scotland’s historical documents for this period have vanished entirely : destroyed by war or fire; lost by incompetence or accident. The first great loss came in 1291 when English king Edward I gathered together all ...

Perceptions and Realities
It looked like the Court of Star Chamber. A horseshoe table behind which the eleven inquisitors sat, the open end bridged by a small table for the witnesses. Stark lighting, a forest of microphones and the all-seeing relentless eye of a television camera recording every twitch and tick of a body under stress. Add to that a sense of awe and history at being the representatives who were laying the case for Freemasonry before a senior committee of the mother of parliaments and you have some idea of the feelings running through the Grand Secretary and I when we spent an hour and fifty minutes being questioned by the Home Affairs Select Committee on 26th February 1997 ...

Mason About: Granville Angell
One sunny, Sunday afternoon in May, on the outskirts of Cannock Chase in south Staffordshire, I saw the Spirit of Ecstasy shining through a windscreen. The vision to be savoured is better known as the Silver Lady, and the windscreen belonged to a ‘baby Rolls’, ordered from its makers in August 1925 by Mr. J.Walker, a Yorkshire Mill owner, for a tidy £2000 : sufficient in those days for the purchase of ten semi-detached houses. This beautiful survivor from more spacious days, with its gleaming white body (from coach-builders Rippon Bros.), now resides ...

Why Ritual Excellence?
Often enough it is said that to be a good mason does not require a man to have a photographic memory or an ability to repeat long passages of dense ritual, parrot-fashion. Allied to this sentiment and often running parallel with it are the excuses, sincerely believed and expressed, for not learning the ritual. People say: “Oh, you’re so lucky being able to memorize all that. I could never do it.” That’s what they say. Little by little we become attuned to the view that it is somehow not too smart to be able to work the ritual accurately; that there are more important things in masonry, that we do not have the necessary skills, and that as long as the sense is there in essence, then that is all ...

Making History
For many centuries, Freemasonry has been woven into the deepest fabric of western history. But mythology has all too often overtaken the facts. This series aims to put the record straight, beginning with a two-part investigation into the first accepted record of initiation into a ‘speculative’ lodge of Free Masons. Elias Ashmole was initiated, in the midst of Civil War, into an apparently non-operative and possibly “occasional” lodge at Warrington ...

Minding Your Head
The Grand Lodge 250th. Anniversary Fund stands at over £3 million (depending on the Stock Market) thanks to careful husbandry by trustees who have nurtured the original £504, 891 16s 5d. Income now supports Freemasons’ Fellow Mr. Peter Hutchinson’s research. Two more Freemasons’ Fellows should be named soon. Peter Hutchinson, with head of department Professor John Pickard and others at Addenbrooke’s Hospital Neurosurgery Department, Cambridge, evaluate new techniques involving treatment of head injury and stroke patients. His research measures brain substances thought harmful following brain injury. Two very fine (0.5mm) probes are placed into the brain ...

Mozart and Me
I am a musician - at least that’s what I tell people. For about ten years I laboured in the pop-music industry as a song-writer, with varying degrees of success. I have now returned to it. Despite the fact that many of the technical skills of orchestration were beyond our reach, most of us admired those who had the traditional skills of arranging and orchestrating. My particular heroes are Richard Carpenter (all Carpenters songs are superbly orchestrated) and the young Elvis Presley : this is how a young genius uses his voice, almost as a synchopated instrument ...

Review: First Rays of the New Rising Sun
Review: The Hiram Key

Old Fireglass
Greetings Brothers, I feel privileged to have this opportunity to introduce you into my world of Real Ales. As a brother and a landlord with the girth of a 36 gallon barrel, I believe I have earned and, indeed, supped enough to lead you into the salivating, enjoyment-seeking realm of the Real Ale connoisseur. I would like us to take a look at Marstons ales. This brewery only uses yeast from the Burton Union Sets. They are unique in this practice, so the distinctive taste of their beers is common to no other. Pedigree is their best-selling bitter. If you have never tasted it, you are being deprived of a real ale sensation. At 4.5 gravity, it is not to be taken lightly. This nutty, strong, but very smooth ...

The Artist's Palate
If you can’t beat them, join them. Since the Single European Market started to “function”, British consumers have been able to travel to Europe and collect wine to bring home, on which the only tax they pay is French VAT (20.6%). The only condition is that the wine must not be for resale, which does not bother tourists, and is frequently ignored by cowboys who sell imported duty-free wines, spirits and beers at car-boot sales all over the country. The established wine trade in Britain is unhappy with this situation - as are the Customs of course - but the trade’s more pragmatic members have set up their wares just outside the French channel ports to profit from the tourists’ love of ...

Love's Ladder

Love poured out the faucet,
It boiled on the stove,
Wrapped itself inside a kiss,
Poured out of the sun like gold.
Like an angel with leaden wings,
Slowly, softly, it began to sing ...

Norman Stote
As you all know, we’ve now entered the Age of Aquarium. So I’ve fixed the wife up with a topical fish-tank in the lounge. She says it reminds ’er of me - ’specially the Japanese killer monk-fish which cost 300 nicker. That’s a lot for a Buddhist fish. So now when I nips out for lodge-meetings, she’s not left lonely. I can’t be all bad. The kids? Glad you asked. Kerry-Ann and Troy ’ve both reached that difficult age. I don’t know ’ow you deal with it. As for me, I think it’s best to ignore it and let ’em do what they like. You can’t stop ’em, can you? ’Gainst Nature. Specially when you know you’ve brought ’em up proper. Any’ow, to give this New Age thing a bit of a send-off, I got Kerry-Ann ...

Letters to the Editor
Affronted by Home Affairs Committee — Historical Knowledge of Masonry Required — Fraternally Yours

Famous Masons
Not every Prime Minister has been a Freemason. Winston Churchill KG was an exception. Building on his army career, Churchill blossomed as a war- correspondent in the Boer War, during which conflict he was captured and imprisoned. Executing a daring escape, he emerged from captivity a national hero. Young Winston entered Parliament as the Unionist representative for Oldham in 1900, but soon fell in with a dissident group of young Tories, whose members included Ian Malcolm, Lord Percy, Edward Stanley (later the seventh Earl Derby), all centred upon Lord Hugh Cecil, a younger son of the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. Critics dubbed them the Hughligans, or Hooligans ...

Issue 01, Summer 1997

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