STEPHEN KNIGHT

The Brotherhood

The Secret World of the Freemasons

With a new foreword by

MARTIN SHORT

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007

First published in Great Britain by Granada Publishing 1983

Copyright © Stephen Knight 1983

Foreword © Martin Short 2007

Stephen Knight asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007246298

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007370726

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Dedication

For Ma and Pa, with love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Martin Short

Prologue

PART ONE: WORKERS’ GUILD TO SECRET SOCIETY

1 Origins

2 Metamorphosis

3 Schism and Reunion

4 Across the Seas and Down the Centuries

5 The Thirty-Third Degree

PART TWO: THE POLICE

6 The Great Debate

7 The Men at the Top

8 Worshipful Masters of Conspiracy

9 Operation Countryman

10 The Brotherhood Misjudged

11 Birmingham City Police

12 Conclusion

PART THREE: INSIDE INFORMATION

13 The Rabbi’s Tale

14 Five Masters and a Lewis

15 Jobs For the Brethren?

16 The Dissidents

PART FOUR: THE LAW

17 The System

18 The Two-Edged Sword

19 The Mason Poisoner

20 Barristers and Judges

21 Solicitors

PART FIVE: POWERS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL

22 Government

23 The Highest in the Land

24 The City of London

25 The Devil in Disguise?

PART SIX: THE KGB CONNECTION

26 The Italian Crisis

27 The Chinaman Report

28 The Threat to Britain

Epilogue

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Appendix Three

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword by MARTIN SHORT

As the author of the sequel to The Brotherhood, I am proud to be mistaken sometimes for Stephen Knight. This honour has its drawbacks. Recently I came across a Masonic website revealing that in 2004 the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England (otherwise known as the Duke of Kent) received a letter from a non-Mason containing these words:

I admire your decision in 2003 not to ‘cut the throats’ of your members who disclose the Masonic secrets, although this did not help Martin Short (author of Inside the Brotherhood) who unfortunately died of a brain tumour as reported in the press, even though we both know ‘you’ authorised his murder as well as hundreds of other innocent people’s.

Reports of my death are exaggerated but for Stephen Knight they are true to this extent: he did die of a brain tumour in 1985, a little over a year after his explosive exposure of Freemasonry was published.

Four years later, in Inside the Brotherhood, I gave a detailed account of his death, so readers could decide for themselves if he had died from natural causes or a Masonic conspiracy, as was widely rumoured at the time. For some people this remains a matter of intense curiosity. I have learned nothing since to alter what I said then: His troubles began in 1977 when he had an epileptic fit. He had a brain scan which was interpreted as revealing a ‘cerebral infarct’: a small dead area of the brain which might have been caused many years earlier when he had been accidentally hit with a cricket bat. This condition is not necessarily dangerous but it might have been the cause of the epilepsy. In the next three years Stephen suffered many epileptic attacks until they were striking every six weeks.

He had been told to have another scan but did not have £100 to pay for it. However, in 1980 he spotted a newspaper advertisement for guinea-pigs to help with a BBC Horizon programme on epilepsy. He volunteered and was tested on a new brain-scan machine which revealed a cerebral tumour: a malignant cancer which, if untreated, would certainly kill him. Horizon captured this awful moment on film. With Stephen’s full accord his fight for survival now became the programme’s main theme. He promptly underwent a biopsy which removed 70 per cent of the tumour. He was told the rest could be treated with radiation and he had a good chance of full recovery. The epilepsy ceased. Stephen took this to mean the illness was over, and got on with the rest of his life. When I met him in 1981 he was recovering well physically and was in good mental form.

The Brotherhood was published in 1983, but by then the epilepsy had returned. Within six months the tumour also recurred but this time it was much more aggressive. With X-ray treatment and chemotherapy it regressed, but at this point Stephen decided to drop chemotherapy in favour of ‘alternative’, non-medical therapies. His specialist told him he thought this was unwise but the patient’s wish prevailed. A few months later another test showed that the tumour was out of control. Stephen was now walking with difficulty. His speech became hesitant and his ability to muster thoughts was seriously impaired. He tried to live life to the full but in Scotland in July 1985 Stephen died.

I went on to explain that the main proponents of the theory that Freemasons had conspired to kill Stephen were Freemasons themselves. When news had emerged that I was writing the sequel, anonymous members of the fraternity wrote to say they would finish me off just as they had done for Stephen. I interpreted these threats as hoaxes or wishful thinking. Either way they weren’t worth worrying about. And yet I wasn’t entirely satisfied that Stephen’s death was as natural as it seemed when it happened.

Why, for example, did his epilepsy first show itself while he was giving a public lecture in Australia about his equally scandalous book of 1976, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution) This alleged that the notorious murders of five prostitutes in London’s East End in 1888 were committed not by a crazed loner but by a cluster of scheming Freemasons. Their motive? To protect the royal family by preventing the revelation of a secret marriage between the Duke of Clarence - Queen Victoria’s grandson and Heir Presumptive - and a Catholic commoner. Even more shocking, that marriage had yielded a daughter. Some of the prostitutes knew the bride and the secret so, according to Stephen, they had to die.

Credible or not, this theory and the entire tone of Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution were far more ‘anti-Masonic’ than most of Stephen’s later revelations in The Brotherhood. Indeed Jack the Ripper is a brilliant conspiracy thriller, a far better read than The Da Vinci Code, and so good that it has inspired two gripping feature films: Murder by Decree (starring Christopher Plummer and James Mason) and From Hell (Johnny Depp). It also scooped by 26 years Patricia Cornwell’s much-hyped book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, in claiming that the artist Walter Sickert was involved in the killings. Cornwell went further by claiming Sickert was the Ripper himself but, despite spending an alleged $6 million to prove this, she came up with little evidence to convince anyone but herself. In stark contrast, Stephen worked on a shoestring budget and produced one of the classics in the vast canon of ‘Ripperology’.

I myself do not believe that Sickert had anything to do with the Ripper killings but, despite its factual chasms, Stephen’s book is such a page-turner that I am sure he would have turned out many more best-sellers, had he lived.

This brings me back to his death, an event which adds greatly to the lasting fascination of The Brotherhood. Though probably he died of natural causes, foul play cannot be ruled out. At a public appearance such as his Australian lecture, someone in the audience could have ‘zapped’ him into epilepsy by aiming ionizing- or X-rays or electromagnetic rays (laser-beams) at his head. Alternatively, as one Mason told me, he could have been implanted with a radioactive source or a slow-release capsule containing a cancer-inducing drug. This is not far-fetched. Remember the minute metal sphere, filled with poison and injected by umbrella-tip into Georgi Markov, a dissident Bulgarian exile in 1978.

Also, as Freemasonry was rife at that time in Britain’s armed forces, security services, medical professions and, notoriously, our police, such ways to kill would have been well known to many brethren in Britain as in Australia, and well within their capabilities.

But again I hesitate to endorse this theory. As I wrote in Inside the Brotherhood:

Stephen could have been injected with a cancer-inducing agent or carcinogen (as in the Markov case) but the cancer would probably have arisen in another part of the body, not the brain. The same applies to a carcinogen secreted in someone’s food or drink. Nor, I understand, is it odd that Stephen was first struck with epilepsy when speaking in public. His was a ‘classic left-frontal pole tumour’. In other words it occurred in that part of the brain which is greatly pressured during public lectures and speeches.

Overall, there seems little room for doubt that Stephen Knight’s brain cancer was anything other than natural. The tumour’s progress, histology, its response to X-ray and chemotherapy treatment were all normal. But can a natural brain cancer be induced by unnatural means which cause no visible side effects, cannot be noticed at the time, and are impossible to detect during later tests and examinations?

I still don’t know the answer to that question. And I cannot ignore menacing letters sent by Freemasons to Stephen following The Brotherhood’s publication. They reveal such intense bitterness, as well as a touch of madness, that the writers could have gone on to kill him:

You have been responsible for the persecution of many of our members, who have lost their jobs because of your book. This has caused great hardship to their wives and children, and writers like you ought to know better. I do not know if anyone has committed suicide yet, but it will be you and you alone who has murdered these unfortunate people …

So, what awaits readers in these pages is powerful stuff - enough to drive some Freemasons to distraction - but I believe the book’s continuing appeal lies partly in the fact that Stephen was a genuine seeker after spiritual enlightenment. In his researches he really did set out to discover if it was possible to reach a higher plane of consciousness through Freemasonry. He earnestly wanted to explore its ‘theology’ and its belief in the Great Architect of the Universe (abbreviated to ‘G.A.O.T.U.’ if you happen to find a book of encoded Masonic ceremonies in your grandfather’s attic).

In contrast, when I wrote Inside the Brotherhood I had no desire to go on a spiritual journey because I knew it would reach nowhere. To me the cult’s rituals are man-made mumbo-jumbo, shakily based on myths, fairy-tales and superstitions, some derived from orthodox religions which Freemasonry appropriated to give it a façade of acceptability and went on to distort. Stephen was far less cynical.

Again, I researched my book on Freemasonry already primed in its corrosive capacity to corrupt public life. In television programmes and a book which I had co-authored (The Fall of Scotland Yard), I had investigated Masonic scandals afflicting the police and local government - two areas in which I had also helped Stephen. For me, Freemasonry, whatever its grand claims to morality, had proved the perfect vehicle for grubby, mundane racketeering and back-scratching.

In contrast Stephen had been on a religious quest of his own, as his all too brief life story reveals.

He was born on 26 September 1951 in Hainault, Essex, and retained his roots in the area. He went to West Hatch Technical High School in Chigwell and in 1969 started a series of jobs on local newspapers, including the Horn-church Echo, East London Advertiser and Ilford Recorder where he worked as chief reporter and feature writer. In 1975 he switched to the Travel Trade Gazette but his break came in 1976 when he wrote Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution - a massive commercial success that still sells in substantial numbers today. He was just 25.

By now married and soon to be a father, he next wrote a novel about a series of murders committed in 1902 by the ‘Deptford Strangler’. This book, Requiem at Rogano, was published in 1979. But while his literary career was flourishing, his epilepsy attacks became more frequent. These led to the discovery of the brain tumour (as described above) and its removal by surgeons at the Maudsley Hospital, when all seemed well again. He threw his remarkable energies into researching the Freemasons. During this period he came to see me about my work on the brethren’s murky dealings in local government and the police.

Physically Stephen had a wispy frame and looked (to this tubby observer) in need of good solid meals. I did not know whether to put his debilitated look down to ill-health or if it was his natural build. In due course he published some of what I had told him in The Brotherhood (thanking me in his acknowledgments). I do not think that even he could have foreseen the huge stir that his book would create when it appeared in 1983. To date it has sold a staggering half a million copies.

Seemingly unstoppable, in 1984 he turned out another true-life mystery book: The Killing of Justice Godfrey. This offered a solution to one of the longest unsolved murder cases in British history: the killing of ‘the best JP in London’ in 1678 at a time of anti-Catholic hysteria, greatly inflamed by the poisonous lies of Titus Oates.

It may not be a coincidence that Stephen’s prolonged investigations into religious mania and secret societies overlapped with his decision to embrace the teachings of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the controversial Indian religious leader, whose authorized biography was subtitled, ‘The Most Dangerous Man Since Jesus Christ’. Stephen became his disciple or sannyasin and, for a short while, took to donning the orange robes of the cult in public.

When news of his conversion reached Freemasons’ Hall, the London HQ of the United Grand Lodge of England, the brotherhood used it to try and discredit him. In due course it called him ‘a devotee of the Sri Rajneesh Bagwan cult’ [sic]. Maybe this would convince some people to reject his view of Freemasonry but it struck me as laughable that members of one cult should demean someone else for belonging to another. Not just the pot calling the kettle black, but the men in blue aprons calling the orange people potty.

In fact Stephen followed the Bhagwan for only two years. By the time he died he had been received back into the Church of England. Maybe his death had been hastened by his decision to stop an 18-month course of chemotherapy. This had been prescribed to kill the 30 per cent of the new tumour which surgery could not remove because it was too close to the parts of the brain that control speech and movement. Certainly he knew he was going to die fairly soon so he switched to the natural therapy of a diet of fruit and vegetables to avoid the nausea and vomiting brought on by chemotherapy.

When he died in July 1985 Stephen was just 33 years old. For friends and foes of Freemasonry this fact had serious implications. It convinced some folk that he had indeed been sentenced to death by Masonic justice. To Freemasons the number 33 signifies the 33 degrees of the Rose Croix, an elect ‘Christian’ Masonic order which Stephen had attacked in The Brotherhood. Thirty-three was also Christ’s age when he ‘died’, a death which Rose Croix Masons re-enact in their 31st degree ritual.

To me such hocus-pocus meant nothing. I was just saddened by his death.

More than 20 years after The Brotherhood was first published, new readers may ask several questions. What is the book’s legacy? Has it had a lasting impact on public perceptions of Freemasonry? Has it affected Freemasonry itself?

The importance of The Brotherhood lies not so much in its revelations but in the fact that it brought Freemasonry back into public debate after a century when it had scarcely been discussed. This was not the fault of Freemasons alone. It lay as much with self-censorship by writers, editors and (latterly) radio and TV producers, who, if not Freemasons themselves, may have been scared stiff of retribution from Freemasons above and around them. For generations the brotherhood was spoken of rarely in public, and even then in whispers by bitter men who felt the brotherhood had ruined or victimized them, or by lonely wives wondering if that little case their husbands left home with once a month really did mean he was going to a lodge meeting or if it was just cover for a night out with another woman. The rest was silence.

The Brotherhood shattered that silence but Stephen wasn’t the only person throwing stones at Masonic temples at the time. At last a few newspapers and TV programmes were mocking the institution or raising allegations of corruption. When the book turned into a surprise bestseller, Stephen was invited on phone-in talk shows and defended his book against all-comers. He did well despite his faltering speech brought on by his illness and treatment.

I spent much of the years 1982 to 1984 in the USA, researching and producing a vast TV documentary series on an equally fascinating secret society, the Mafia or La Cosa Nostra, with which Freemasonry shares many characteristics. When Stephen died, I felt privileged to be asked to write a sequel to The Brotherhood. I based my book partly on a stack of 500 letters which had been sent to Stephen’s publisher and his steadfast agent, Andrew Hewson. Many came from disillusioned Freemasons, willing to act as informants or ‘whistle-blowers’ (as we now call purveyors of inside information). I called my book Inside the Brotherhood because it was based partly on what these renegade brothers were telling me. I also read a vast amount of Masonic literature which revealed many of the ludicrous, lunatic claims that the brotherhood has made for itself over the past 300 years. I added a lot of hard evidence from recent court cases that confirmed Masonic corruption in public life - notably among police detectives and especially in Scotland Yard’s elite units such as the Flying Squad and the Obscene Publications Squad.

Naturally I recommend readers of The Brotherhood to read the sequel which also became a best-seller, spending many weeks in the Sunday Times non-fiction charts. It even reached number one in Ireland where the Catholic majority opposes Freemasonry but where Masonic lodges survive, remnants of the old Protestant ascendancy. The book stirred up further controversy. In 1989 it was the basis for a documentary series which I produced and narrated. This went out at peak-time on ITV, then Britain’s most watched station.

By now there was hardly anyone in the country who did not know something about Freemasonry and its secret rituals, which we had enacted with the help of renegades. We also exposed the crimes and rackets of other Freemasons. The order perpetually claims it is the victim of conspiracy theories but refuses to admit that its own oaths of ‘mutual defence and support’ and its cell-like structure are ideal for concocting, perpetrating and covering up conspiratorial acts.

In the early 1990s the brotherhood struck back, in print at least. Suddenly books appeared, written by Freemasons who were breaking their sworn oath not to reveal the order’s secrets but seemed to have the go-ahead to do so. Their books were supportive of Freemasonry and extolled the less reprehensible side of its history.

In the meantime the United Grand Lodge of England, along with its parallel grand lodges in Scotland and Ireland, tried to give an impression of greater transparency, opening their temples to the public and stressing their generosity to non-Masonic charities, but at no point have they disclosed or performed their rituals to the public: no show of ropes or cabletows around necks, no daggers or poignards to the heart, no blindfolds or hoodwinks, no rolled-up trouser legs and no resurrection routines. So no real openness.

Despite these gestures, concern was growing that Freemasonry still had the covert malign influence exposed in our Brotherhood books and elsewhere. Many local authorities were now obliging elected councillors and full-time employees to fill in forms stating if they were Freemasons. Cries of discrimination were over-ruled or neutralized by requiring that the form-fillers declare membership of any other secret or would-be secret societies.

In 1996, for the first time in its history, Freemasonry was scrutinised by the highest authority in Britain: Parliament. The prime mover was Chris Mullin MP, the former investigative journalist renowned for his work on the miscarriage of justice done to the Birmingham Six (six men wrongly imprisoned for 16 years for the 1974 IRA bombing of two Birmingham pubs that killed 21 people).

Taking on this task was the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, of which Chris was then deputy chairman. A cross-party outfit, its chairman was the Conservative MP, Sir Ivan Lawrence. They agreed that the time had come to put the brotherhood under the microscope, and decided to focus on ‘Freemasonry in the Police and the Judiciary’. It fell to me to be the opening witness.

On Wednesday 18 December 1996 I was questioned for two hours by eleven Committee members. Ten were men. Eight said they were not Freemasons. One was a Freemason but said he had not attended any lodge for over 20 years.

The Committee’s official report shows that I answered 144 questions. It was a demanding experience though not unpleasant, the examination benign but rigorous and robust. I had only a few sharp words with one member - not the Freemason. Overall I felt the Committee was making a genuine effort to gather information, as impartially as possible, about the brotherhood’s influence not just in the police and judiciary but in British society as a whole.

In eight more hearings spread over two months, the Committee examined 14 further witnesses including the Lord Chancellor (Lord Mackay of Clashfern) and representatives of the Association of Chief Police Officers, other police organizations, the Magistrates Association and the Law Society. The Committee’s report prints the entire hearings and a welter of correspondence from other people with a personal or professional interest. Spokespersons for public institutions and professional bodies tended to give a know-nothing yet ‘best of all possible worlds’ response to the suggestion that Freemasonry was prevalent or powerful among their workforces or memberships, but other contributors gave accounts that wholly supported the negative views that Stephen Knight and I had voiced years before.

I strongly recommend that anyone who wishes to plunge deeper into this morass reads the entire report. It contains the testimony of the two final witnesses, the then Grand Secretary of the United Grand Lodge of England, Commander Michael Higham RN, and its librarian, John Hamill.

Their session was far more peppery than mine, for they were confronted by tricky questions about specific cases of wrongdoing that I had raised in my evidence. In particular Commander Higham did his best to rebut allegations that other Freemasons had committed misconduct so gross that, if true, amounted to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Here is an edited extract from my submission on what I called, ‘A Quintessential Masonic Scandal’ that proved ‘the Craft is still able to play a debilitating role in Britain’s police - to the detriment of innocent citizens who are not Masons and at a grotesque cost to public funds’:

In 1988 a Leicester store owner and his adult son were staying at a hotel in Blackburn. Before going to bed they felt like a drink but it was now around midnight and the main bar was closed. However, on the ground floor they discovered a cash bar was still serving drinks, so they bought two pints of bitter and stayed by the bar.

At this point several burly men in dinner jackets told them they had no right to be drinking there and ordered them out. The father and son had no idea what had provoked this outburst but they said they would just drink up and go. The other men said that if they did not leave immediately, they would call the police. The father responded, ‘Then call the police!’, to which some of the men responded, ‘We are the police!’, pulled out what they claimed were warrant cards and quickly proceeded to beat and kick the daylights out of them.

Neither visitor weighed much over ten stone, whereas two of their assailants each weighed at least fifteen stone. The four men who later claimed they had been restraining the father from chucking one of them over a balcony weighed a total of 54 stone. The father was convinced they were trying to throw him over the balcony.

The pair were shocked to discover that they were arrested, not their assailants. They were taken to Blackburn’s central police station, charged with actual bodily harm and assaulting police officers, and kept in the cells overnight. The following morning they were freed on bail and allowed to return to the hotel, only to discover their rooms had been cleared and all their property seized. The management said it was refusing to release the property until they had paid £500 for the damage they had allegedly caused to the hotel and to two of their assailants.

They agreed to pay £180 just to get their keys and property, then, battered and dishevelled, they made their way to the car park. When they got there they saw that their car had been entered by key, its contents disturbed, its hubcaps removed and all its tyres deflated. After spending hours inflating their tyres with no help from the hotel, they drove back to Leicester to notify their solicitors, get urgent medical attention, and get their widespread injuries photographed and recorded. These proved to be severe.

It was months before their solicitors received a bundle of witness statements from Lancashire telling an unrelenting account of how, without provocation, the pair had viciously attacked half a dozen men, including the hotel manager, merely because they had been asked to leave a private function. The father and son knew the entire case was a farrago of lies. Even so, it constituted a very serious case which, if it were to succeed, could put them in jail for eighteen months.

Their solicitors were bemused not only by stark contradictions in the evidence but by the fact that, even at committal, none of the statements named the function which the witnesses had been attending. Such an omission was extraordinary, especially as the alleged cause of the affray was the visitors’ violent refusal to leave the function. It took six months before the CPS’s Burnley office disgorged the information that it had been a Masonic affair ‘organized by wives of some of the members’.

When the case came to court in February 1989 the prosecution evidence repeatedly caused the jury to laugh out loud. The witnesses contradicted themselves, and each other, about where they were when they saw what, and they wholly failed to explain how two slight and weak men could have inflicted so many injuries on so many huge and fit physiques. What is more, all the injuries alleged by the Victims’ were medically unproved. One who had been threatening to sue the father and son for losing an eye came up with nothing better than a hospital casualty report written several hours after the affray, saying he had a slight abrasion of his eye but still had perfect vision.

The prosecution conceded that almost all the ‘victims’ were police officers (most still serving) and that the lodge to which they all belonged was essentially a police lodge: the Victory. The function was indeed a private ‘Ladies’ Night’, but there were no signs to that effect at the entrance to the function room, so how could the visitors have been expected to know? The investigating police officer had made no attempt to find anyone who might support the visitors’ account. Only during his cross-examination did it emerge that this officer was himself a Mason. So was the hotel manager who was a member of the same Victory Lodge. The jury rejected the idea that the two skinny Leicester men, who had demonstrably suffered severe beatings, had attacked so many huge policemen. It found the father and son not guilty. The verdict’s obvious implication was that their Masonic accusers had been lying and should have been in the dock instead: for perjury and conspiracy, as well as GBH. The judge awarded costs to the defendants.

While they tried to recover from this ordeal, their solicitors began to seek civil redress against seven individual Victory Lodge members, the hotel group and the Chief Constable of Lancashire. Their final statement of claim would allege wrongful arrest, assault, malicious prosecution, conspiracy to injure and libel.

As they developed the case for damages, they naturally looked for assistance to an investigation which had been carried out by the Police Complaints Authority. For years they had no idea what it had found out, but eventually got wind of testimony the PCA had gathered from the hotel’s night porter which wholly supported the father and son’s account. Despite its clear and fundamental relevance to the civil case, the PCA stubbornly refused to part with it or to divulge the porter’s whereabouts. It also cited ‘public interest immunity’. When the civil judge considered this argument, he threw it out. But this was in 1995, five years after the PCA inquiry had interviewed the porter.

During those five years the solicitors had pursued every route to gather evidence to support their case, so not having had early access to the porter had cost them tens of thousands of pounds in wasted time and effort. Back in 1989 their private detective had discovered a woman who had also been on the staff and saw the entire affair. She also confirmed the victims’ account of unprovoked assault by members of Victory Lodge, but was said to be too scared to get involved.

The action was eventually settled out of court. The father and son received a total of some £170,000, the bulk of which was paid not by the Masons themselves but by the Chief Constable of Lancashire on the technical grounds that, when they were perpetrating their assault and falsely accusing their victims of assaulting them, they had been acting as police officers - rather than as Masons!

In my view it is outrageous that the public should be expected to pay anything towards righting what appears to be a thoroughly Masonic wrong, and that, until now, the citizens of Lancashire have not even been made aware of the decision.

Grand Secretary Higham defended the conduct of the Victory Lodge, its members and guests. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Barbara Mills, and the Lancashire Constabulary also chose to defend the role of their respective organizations in writing. This obliged me to refute each of their contributions. If you are gripped by the story so far, you will find the exchanges gripping too.

In March 1997 the Committee published its conclusions.

These dwelt at length on the Blackburn Victory Lodge case and appended the entire correspondence. Its dilemma over that scandal was typical of the conclusions as a whole: so hedged and ditched that it is impossible to shorten for the sake of easy reading:

Whilst accepting that it is difficult to establish direct lines of Masonic influence through common membership of lodges, it is even more difficult to establish the nature of connections between individuals, who, whether or not they were Freemasons, and/or present at a particular function, may have known each other anyway and whilst not directly involved may still have had a bearing on the conduct of the investigation or the prosecution. However, it can be established from this account that a perception of secrecy spawned a number of allegations and that may or may not prove to have been unfounded. If membership of the Freemasons were more openly known, and lists of lodges were publicly available, it would have facilitated any attempt to unravel any suspected Masonic network or enabled any suspicions to be allayed before they had taken root.

Overall the Committee concluded:

There is a large number of Freemasons within the criminal justice system, but the numbers themselves give no general cause for concern…

Where it is not entirely groundless, most or all of the evidence alleging Masonic corruption in the field of policing is largely circumstantial, in the sense that it involves assuming that steps taken by individuals who were Freemasons, in respect of others who were also Freemasons, were taken because both individuals were Freemasons rather than because the individuals knew each other or for some other reason …

There is a widespread public perception that Freemasonry can have an unhealthy influence on the criminal justice system, and we certainly believe that one of the main reasons for free-masonry’s poor public image is a perception that it is a secret society …

The Committee’s most important conclusion was reserved till the end:

We recommend that police officers, magistrates, judges, and crown court prosecutors should be required to register membership of any secret society and that the record should be available publicly. However, it is our firm belief that the better solution lies in the hand of Freemasonry itself. By openness and disclosure, all suspicion would be removed, and we would welcome the taking of such steps by the United Grand Lodge.

It is now ten years since these conclusions were reached. I’m sorry to have to say that while the United Grand Lodge has gone some way to improving its image (hiring an affable and effective public relations consultant who is not a Freemason), Parliament has notably failed to act as recommended.

There is still no national requirement that policemen, judges or prosecutors register membership of Freemasonry. Some police forces have set up arrangements so that officers can make a private declaration. Magistrates do have to declare Masonic membership. Judges are offered a similar opportunity but nothing is compulsory and not even their voluntary disclosures are made available to the public.

In short, almost all the MPs’ recommendations have been sidelined, ignored, blocked or just forgotten. In many ways a benchmark for how parliamentary committees should investigate issues of public concern, their findings deserve a better fate. It will probably take another sensational expose of Masonic criminality before those findings are resurrected.

If that ever happens, it will be due in no small measure to the pioneering work of Stephen Knight.

Martin Short

January 2007

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