The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Meet the modern Freemasons
Can the group cast off its shadowy reputation?
Can efforts to make Masonic groups more transparent and inclusive rid them of their shadowy, cult-like reputation?
David Staples was a first-year biochemistry student at the University of Oxford’s Magdalen College when he entered the world of Freemasonry. Born in south-east London to a working-class family, the young Staples was already trying to make sense of the archaic rituals of the university when he noticed a housemate slipping out twice a term for a clandestine appointment, and returning late in the evening.
Eventually Staples asked where he was going, and was invited to see for himself. A while later he was presented with a date and a time to arrive at the nearest Masonic lodge, with no further instructions.
The evening of his initiation, the weather was particularly foul. The now 46-year-old Staples recalls pulling on his suit and wondering if he could actually be bothered to cycle four miles away down the Banbury Road. ‘It’s funny,’ he says, stirring tea in an armchair in his grandly appointed office at Freemasons’ Hall, ‘how with those little decisions you take early on in your life, you have no idea how they will turn out.’
Fast-forward a few decades and he is now grand secretary and head of one of the UK’S most enigmatic organisations, and spearheading sweeping change within the notoriously conservative institution, formed in 1717 and long cloaked in secrecy and cultlike rumours.
In 2017, Staples – who is married with an 11-year-old daughter, and works one day a week as a consultant physician in acute internal medicine at Peterborough City Hospital – was announced as his organisation’s first ever chief executive officer. Ever since his appointment to what is a full-time and paid role, he has set about bringing Freemasonry into the modern era.
Most people’s idea of the Freemasons is that it is a closely guarded old boys’ network of secret handshakes, long robes, chanting and antiquated ceremonies – be they in grand Masonic halls or the back room of the local suburban golf club. Staples, however, has been busy chipping away at this.
He has rewritten the guiding principles to appeal to a younger audience, invited transgender members to join, and opened up the organisation to modern scrutiny. He has taken out adverts in national newspapers declaring ‘Enough is enough’ to address the ongoing rumours about Freemasonry, and written to the Equality and Human Rights Commission to make the case that Masons are stigmatised and face discrimination.
His mission is personal. When he was announced as CEO, he says he was asked to step down from the board of a charity he was a trustee of because of his Masonic connections. ‘If I was black or Irish or gay or any protected characteristics they wouldn’t have been able to do that,’ he says. ‘But because I’m a Freemason I didn’t have any recourse.’
In the spirit of greater transparency, United Grand Lodge of England (which encompasses the Freemason lodges of England and Wales, and is known as UGLE) has just published its first annual report. The report states that UGLE received an income of £10.6 million (£7.7 million from member dues) and raised more than £42 million for charitable causes in 2020.
According to its accounts, it currently holds more than £75 million in fixed assets, including a London property portfolio worth £58 million, which comprises a decent chunk of the Covent Garden street upon which stands its art deco headquarters, Freemasons’ Hall. The building was originally opened in 1776 and rebuilt after the Great War. A warren of snaking corridors and wood-panelled rooms frequented by men in dark suits carrying briefcases, its ornate Grand Temple sits within a courtyard hidden by its outer walls. Much like the Freemasons themselves, secrecy permeates the fabric of the building.
The UGLE has recently completed a £150,000 refurbishment, with a café and bar opening at Freemasons’ Hall this summer. It is hoped to become part of the London tourist map, trebling the 225,000 people who already visit each year. A new shop has also opened on the first floor of the building, where visitors can purchase Masonic regalia, Toby jugs, ritual books and branded cut-throat razors. The organisation of secret rituals and rolled-up trouser legs that once counted Winston Churchill and Arthur Conan Doyle as members (as well as centuries of royals) now boasts an Instagram account and a heady whiff of corporate polish in the air.
Staples admits it is a move born out of necessity. Following a post-war boom, with demobbed soldiers keen to recreate the camaraderie of life in the Armed Forces, in recent decades Masonic membership has been in steady, and some fear fatal, decline.
According to the UGLE 2020 report, current membership stands at around 193,000. It has been estimated that figure has declined by about 150,000 in the past 20 years. While there has been a notable rise in younger members, there are efforts underway to attract more. In fact, so keen is the organisation for new blood that talks are ongoing to establish an exclusively under-35 lodge for London-based millennials, focusing in particular on the environment and mental health. Its successful establishment of university lodges continues to expand, with more than 3,400 students currently members.
The modern-day version of Freemasonry that the UGLE wishes to present is ethnically diverse, split across genders and tolerant of all – one markedly different to its reputation as the preserve of middle-aged men busy lining each other’s pockets with business deals. Though of course the Freemasons themselves insist the organisation has always stood for much more noble aims: self-improvement, charity and brotherhood.
‘We are the antithesis of woke. We have a very proud history of respecting people’
The existential problem facing the Freemasons is presented starkly in the membership demographics. Nearly 50 per cent of members are aged between 61 and 80. There are twice as many aged 80 or over as there are between 31 and 40. Just 1.93 per cent of members are between 18 and 30.
Everyone agrees that something needs to be done. But in these divided times of culture wars and intergenerational conflict, as the organisation changes to attract young blood there is an obvious risk of alienating its base. Indeed, with all the moves to make it more inclusive and diverse, there have been criticisms among the old-school ‘party faithful’ that the organisation has gone woke.
‘We are at our core the antithesis of woke,’ Staples insists. ‘We have a very proud history of respecting people for being people and not worrying about how much money they have, the colour of their skin, or what religion they are. We did that 300 years ago. It is not a woke reaction. It is fundamentally who Freemasons are and have been for a very long time.’
At 31, Mitch Bryan is one of the millennial Freemasons and has encountered hostility
from older members at meetings. ‘They sit back and might do a bit of tutting and stuff but tradition has to change,’ he says. He likens the detractors to an ‘old guard’, and one which you ‘will get in any institution and any club’.
Bryan, operations manager for an on-demand grocery company, has been a Freemason for the past eight years. He says that when he joined a lodge in his native Wiltshire, he was the youngest member in the province. Since then, though, he has witnessed ever more younger people coming through the ranks.
Aside from an ex-partner’s dad and a friend he watches rugby matches with, he had no connection to what is termed ‘The Craft’. The charitable aspects particularly appealed – every lodge meeting will raise about £400 for charity (through a raffle and collection) – while he is also drawn into the Masonic ideal of self-improvement. ‘There is plenty of personal advantage but no business advantage,’ he says.
Bryan was attracted, too, to a search for wider meaning and belonging in Freemasonry, as well as a myth and mystery that resonates among a generation raised on Harry Potter.
About 18 months ago the Masonic core values of ‘brotherly love, relief and truth’ were updated to ‘integrity, respect, friendship and charity’, to appeal to modern minds. Last year it was announced the Grand Lodge of Scotland (a separate entity to UGLE) had amended a centuries-old tradition to allow vegan Masons to wear vinyl aprons rather than the traditional lambskin (the aprons are a key part of Masonic regalia).
Alan Borsbey, the owner of Scottish Masonic outfitter VSL Regalia, says wearing such an item would be a step too far. ‘For me there is a significance in it and we will always stick with tradition,’ says Borsbey, who has been a Freemason for 31 years and insists 99 per cent of the aprons he sells are still lambskin. ‘It is in the rituals about having a lambskin apron.’
That said, he admits he would happily sell a vinyl apron to anyone who wants one, and acknowledges a degree of flexibility is required to keep Freemasonry alive. ‘In the modern era, if they don’t change, some lodges will die,’ he says.
Other more senior members, such as 90-year-old
Cliff Halsall – who is master of Mold Lodge in North Wales, where the average age of members is in the mid-60s – are delighted to see the institutional changes taking place. ‘Something had to happen because we were clearly not appealing to the younger generation,’ he says.
Becoming a Mason is known as ‘being on the square’, a reference to the universally recognised symbols of Freemasonry: the square (which represents conduct) and compasses (a reminder to modify that conduct). It is, members say, a
The initiation ‘was very macabre. Like something out of an Indiana Jones movie’
journey of self-discovery, combining philanthropy, philosophy and social activities. Pre-pandemic, meetings were held about once a month. They are closely guarded affairs where members wear regalia and observe arcane rituals steeped in allegory. Traditions vary from lodge to lodge, but there may be lectures from members followed by an evening meal known as the festive board, at which songs are sung and toasts raised.
One ritual present in every lodge revolves around a rough stone next to a polished slab known as an ashlar, denoting the journey each Mason must take. Stonemasonry is the overall metaphor here, explains Professor Andrew Prescott, who was director of a centre for research into Freemasonry based at the University of Sheffield between 2000 and 2007. Ceremonial aprons represent those once used by old stonemasons, and the white gloves also worn symbolise the garments presented between tradesmen as gifts. Prof Prescott, who is not a Mason, describes it as a ‘structured form of sociability and moral education that uses myths associated with stonemasonry in order to impart moral essence and do good in society’. And also, he adds, to have fun.
While in recent years the Masons have permitted documentary crews to observe some meetings, the initiation itself remains sacrosanct. It revolves around three individual ceremonies relating to the biblical story of Solomon’s Temple. The first concerns birth, the second self-improvement and the third mortality, where initiates are said to be put blindfolded into a coffin-like box. Despite it being an avowedly secular affair, Masons describe their own initiations as if having undergone a form of religious conversion.
The actor Vasta Blackwood (best known for his role as Rory Breaker in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) has been a Freemason for more than two decades and recalls his initiation with glee, although he won’t reveal any details. ‘It was very macabre,’ says the 58-yearold. ‘Like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.’
Blackwood was first exposed to Freemasonry on a trip to his family’s native Jamaica (there are estimated to be six million Freemasons around the world) and was later recruited by a Lebanese restaurant owner in London’s Hampstead, where he lived. Did he become a member to help his acting career, I wonder? ‘Nah they were all accountants when I joined,’ he grins. Instead he says he pursued it in the hope of attaining some higher meaning and ‘balance’ in his life.
David Staples similarly demurs when I ask if Freemasonry has helped in his career. ‘You meet people with expertise but the concept you will get a job or leg up the ladder with someone because you are in a lodge together is just nonsense,’ he says.
What about the rumour Freemasons only employ others who are on the square? ‘I go with tradesmen who offer the best quote and who I trust,’ he says, before adding, ‘Now you can trust Freemasons…’