Ionic Lodge

As delivered by Padraig Belton to Euclid Lodge of Installed Masters, 7 November 2024, as a charity lecture for Amnesty UK

I'm absurdly grateful for the chance to explore together with you wonderful bunch of my brothers some of the connections between journalism and Freemasonry, because, and just purely by happenstance, I am "in" both.

Just speaking personally, I joined Freemasonry as a student at Oxford – where I was inspired to do this by Oscar Wilde, who had an early career as a journalist, and once quipped that “the difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read”.

I then got into journalism somewhat by accident, when I started one of the UK's earlier blogs with two other students, which turned into writing stories for Prospect, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, and ultimately about a decade now of work for the BBC.

So I'm grateful for the chance to think together about connections between two things that I personally do. There are, I think, at least three paths we might take here.

One path is exploring how both journalism and Freemasonry are essentially creatures of the Enlightenment. The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702 ("Courant" being Scots dialect for a newspaper), and was published at Fleet Bridge, beside the King's Arm tavern, in the premises of one Elizabeth Mallet, and lasted until 1735. The Premier Grand Lodge was formed in 1717, so our speculative ancestors might well have read it on the way to the Goose and Gridiron, which was only half a mile away from Fleet Bridge.

Both taverns sat in the vicinity of St Paul's Cathedral, with the church providing a natural first set of customers for printers through Bibles and other devotional books. The nearby streets then afterward became a home for the buzzing discussion of ideas that had appeared in print, in coffeehouses like the ones that spread along Change Alley, also only a half mile from the Goose and Gridiron, with names like Jonathan's and Garraway's, which our early Brethren will have passed as they scurried late to Lodge.

A second perambulation we can explore is – while now it might be reckoned very unusual to be both a Mason and a journalist – that the annals of both provide many examples of prominent ink-stained hacks who were also extremely involved members of our Craft. Did these professional writers, many with broad international connections, in the early days of modern Freemasonry, contribute to the words in our ritual and play a role in the spread of ideas and symbols from place to place?

A third direction, and the one on which I'll concentrate most here, is to look at the more formal interactions between Freemasonry and journalism, on the newspaper page, and how each institution has approached the other.

We all know that recent Grand Secretaries have pursued an intentional public relations strategy of openness and light to dispel the prejudices that often appear about Masonry in the popular press. We probably know that from the 1930s to the 1980s, Masonry in the main avoided publicity. But it wasn't always so: a search through digitised UK newspapers throughout the twentieth century shows that both in broadsheet and more popular papers, Masonry appeared abundantly in news stories until about 1905, with this rising strongly after the end of the Great War, then dropping off again in the late 1930s – and then a paucity of news stories about Freemasonry in the UK continuing until the 1980s. So first:

Journalism and Freemasonry, twin children of the Enlightenment.

Both these cultural phenomena arose side by side, from social structures of an 18th century Britain that was newly wealthy amid the first British empire, and stable under post-Glorious Revolution and Act of Union Hanoverian rule. This wealth was reflected in the exploding population of London: 200,000 in 1600, but 650,000 by 1750. Increased trade and the rise of “big city Britain” created new urban bourgeoisies with leisure time and the inclination to join Lodges and read broadsheets. Even more, their comfort unleashed ideals praising casting the light of reason and tolerance on the darknesses of superstition and less than worthy motives.

Some of this became part of the permanent DNA of both institutions. A somewhat scurrilous tour through newspaper mottos offers us a set of symbols that wouldn't be out of place in our own Temples. The Washington Post's motto is, after all, Democracy Dies in Darkness, echoing the Scripps newspaper chain’s 1902 motto, “Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way”. Here we see on the mastheads the same appeals to metaphors of light and darkness that we know from our ritual, and there are, too, similar appeals to reason: The Independent's 2002 motto was “The individual. The intelligent. The inexpensive”, of which at least two of the three apply also to Freemasonry! Sky (in 1998) gave us "They'll just love learning". The Guardian (in 2000) said: “Free Thinkers Welcome”, rather copying the Sunday Independent's “Free Thinking with Every Issue” from 1993.

Both the Craft and the press have sometimes appealed to the desires of those in strange new big cities to expand the circle of our acquaintances, and even admit to occasionally attracting people of rank and opulence: “Top People Read the Times”, we were told in 1961.

I won't go too far with this particular perambulation through newspaper slogans, because I don't quite have a Masonic equivalent to the 2003 motto “Have the best sex ever with the News of the World”, or indeed the Sun's pointed 1980 exhortation, “Are you getting it every day?”. Masonic ritual has few puns, and no innuendo.

But if you were standing here, right here in Covent Garden, 300 years ago, Freemasonry and newspapers would have been two extremely noticeable physical manifestations of a new mental worldview, promoting rationalism, individual liberty, and religious tolerance.  In France, by 1789, there were perhaps as many as 100,000 Masons, argues the Enlightenment historian Daniel Roche, making Freemasonry easily the most popular of all Enlightenment associations. A list of leaders of the Enlightenment includes such Freemasons as Alexander Pope and Sir Robert Walpole and his son Horace in England; Denis Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire in France; Gotthold Lessing, Goethe, Mozart, and Frederick the Great in the German-speaking continent; and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington in Britain's American colonies.

Franklin, as it happens, at the age of 23 became a newspaper editor and printer, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he jointly purchased in 1729 and which quickly became the most famous newspaper in colonial America. Later, he published Poor Richard's Almanack, in the age counting as a bestseller with an annual circulation of 10,000.

As Britain's first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole was well aware of the potential of the press to shape opinion, and attempted to use newspapers such as the government paper, the London Journal, and indeed the London Daily Courant, during the Excise Crisis of 1733-4, to sway public opinion when he attempted to abolish the Land Tax by increasing taxes on tobacco and wine. But newspapers turned out to be a double-edged Tyler's sword, and his critics William Pulteney and Lord Bolingbroke joined forces in an opposition newspaper called The Craftsman (no relation).

This mention of Benjamin Franklin, newspaper publisher and also Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania, leads us nicely to our second topic:

The Craft and the newsroom

In Britain, Leo Amery, a master Mason of Canada Lodge No 3527, began his working life as Times correspondent covering the Second Boer War from 1901 to 1903; in which he was the only correspondent to visit Boer forces. His reporting contributed to the sacking of the Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in South Africa, General Sir Redvers Buller. Amery later turned down the chance to edit The Observer in 1908, and The Times in 1912, to concentrate on standing for Parliament; and later saw war from another side as First Lord of the Admiralty, from 1922 to 1924.

Across the Atlantic, the very first newspaper syndicate was founded in 1885 by Irving Bacheller, a Master Mason of New York's Kane Lodge No 454. Bacheller later was a war correspondent in France during the First World War, and his syndicate first brought the work of British authors such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Arthur Conan Doyle to American readers. 

This brings us neatly back to Victorian Britain, as Conan Doyle and Kipling, as we know, were not only both Knights of the Realm but also both journalists and Freemasons. Kipling, along with his literary work, wrote at different points for newspapers including The Pioneer in Allahabad, and The Friend in Bloemfontein. Conan Doyle also covered the Great War as a correspondent, and at different points in his career wrote articles for the New York Times, The Critic, Strand Magazine, and a series of articles from Egypt for the Westminster Gazette.

Moving further into the twentieth century, in 1929 the very first White House press secretary was Minneapolis Freemason George Akerson, who before working for President Herbert Hoover, initially moved to Washington in 1921 as the Minneapolis Tribune's DC correspondent.

In more recent years, we have examples like sports journalist, Hugh Jones, who presented many major football occasions for ITV, including the 1966 World Cup, and was also an active Freemason in South Wales.

For most of these people, Masonry and journalism occupied distinctly different corners of their lives, though for Kipling, obviously, it was a major source of inspiration for his poems (like The Mother Lodge), and novels (like Kim).

Similarly, Scottish author Anthony O'Neal Haye, who became a Mason in 1859, produced both journalism and works of scholarship exploring the Knights Templar, a fascination he gained from Freemasonry, as well as poems for the Edinburgh Lodge where he was Poet Laureate.   

Clearly, Freemasonry's critics might see membership of the Craft, with its vows of secrecy, as somehow incompatible with reporting without fear or favour for a mass audience. In 2018, National Union of Journalists' General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet said “Trust in journalism is absolutely essential, and transparency of membership of the Freemasons is long overdue.” Totnes MP, Sarah Wollaston, chipped in "“Have to ask why anyone would bother with all that claptrap, if not for the chance to weasel an unfair advantage. "

In the late twentieth century, conspiracy culture gained renewed popularity, especially after events such as the assassination of John F Kennedy and the death of Princess Diana. Masonry was not the only institution to feature in conspiracy theories (the intelligence services, people of the Jewish faith, and the mob all feature regularly too). And it attracted perhaps a surprising number of defenders from newspaper columnists who were not Freemasons at all.

When MP and former journalist, Chris Mullin, introduced a bill which would have required UGLE to identify Freemasons in 1998, Daily Mail columnist Simon Heffer wrote “The Masons are right to tell him to get lost”.  A Guardian columnist wrote in 1996 “I am sceptical about the idea that Freemasonry is the great conspiracy which it is sometimes made out to be”, continuing, “it seems to me that Freemasonry is also a convenient whipping boy for the failures of the world to live up to the critics' expectations”.

Masonry was being defended here by journalists who likely had very little contact with the Craft, but felt it part of their calling to cast a light of reason on prejudice and tolerance on discrimination: here we see the legacy of the Enlightenment.

But the experience of people like Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Irvine Bachelor suggests, in their case at least, that it was possible – indeed happily – to be both. For each of them, one was a profession, and the other simply a pastime, and perhaps a source of moral inspiration.

This leads us neatly into the third part of this exploration:

Freemasonry's changing attitudes, throughout the 20th century, towards the press

In the early twentieth century, we can see a flurry of newspaper stories giving Freemasonry quite glowing coverage through descriptions of Lodges'  benevolent activities, the construction of impressive buildings across the country for use by the Craft, and also the enthusiastic involvement of members of the Royal Family and other leading national figures in the organisation's life.

Withdrawing from the public square from around 1930 for over 40 years largely had the effect of creating a vacuum of information and understanding, allowing suspicion and accusations about the Order to grow up, and to tarnish its public image. It is a case study, in retrospect, in how an organisation should not do public relations.

From 1936, the UGLE shunned comment, choosing to adopt a low profile. Playing into this were a few things: the circulation wars of the 1930s, giving pressure to give more space to material with general appeal to less differentiated audiences. Another was newspaper rationing from 1939 to 1949, reducing the size of newspapers to a third of their pre-war circulation, creating increased competition for editorial space and huge appetite for reports about the war squeezing out other coverage. After the war, the news values of editors shifted significantly: chronicling activities of Royals, the Establishment, and the middle and upper classes enjoyed less favour in the newsrooms of postwar Britain. The rulers, from 1945 on, saw no need to deal with the media, and little profit either. Those who filled offices in UGLE in the 1940s and 1950s also were senior military men, imbued with a “need to know” culture, and a tight-lipped attitude that came from a fear of espionage.

The communications strategies of Buckingham Palace and UGLE are strikingly parallel – each organisation was populated by an above-average number of members of the other, and after the position of Royal Press Secretary was abolished in 1931, with the abdication crisis the monarchy faced one of its greatest tests without press-facing support. Holding the restored press secretary role at Buckingham Palace for over 20 years, Commander Si Richard Colville, in the words of Tom Nairn, was a “clam-like figure” who “defended the Royal dignity by allowing as little as possible to be said about it”.

But from the 1980s, UGLE could actually be regarded as one of the pioneers of public relations practice in Britain's private sector.

An important figure in the change in Freemasonry's attitudes towards the press is undoubtedly John Hamill. In 1986, in a study of UGLE's relationship with the media with the title “Contemporary Anti-Masonry”, Hamill looked at recent criticism about Freemasonry's relationship with religion, the police, and local government.

There is, he argues, no foundation leading the conspiracy theories against Masonry: “it would be easy to fall into the conspiracy theory trap of seeking some hidden group masterminding the attack. No such group exists”, he writes.

At a deeper level, through, responsibility rested at our own door: he said, “The media were, and still are, able to get away with their outlandish claims in that the woefully ignorant non-Masonic world had very little factual evidence against which to gauge the reports they read”.

We see the results of this change of view in the decision of David Staples, in April 2021, to appear live on Sky News to discuss UGLE's first Annual Report, for example; or the “Enough is Enough” open letter in the Times, Telegraph, and Guardian three years before, where he said “The United Grand Lodge of England believes that the ongoing gross misrepresentation of its 200,000 plus members is discrimination. Pure and simple”. Freemasonry was back in the news, with a fervent engagement with the media, a proactive public relations strategy, and an energy that we will all have witnessed.

Journalism, in the words of the journalists' prayer adopted by the press’ Church, St Bride's Fleet Street, calls on its members to “be bold in confronting evil and injustice, and compassionate in our understanding of human weakness, rejecting alike the half-truth that deceives, and the slanted word that corrupts”. These are powerful sentiments, ones which sit closely to the stirring moral ideals all of us here have learnt in the Temple. I am, for one, extremely proud to be a member of both.

This article is part of the Arena Magazine Issue 58 – Summer 2025 edition.
Arena Magazine is the official online magazine of the London Freemasons – Metropolitan Grand Lodge and Metropolitan Grand Chapter of London.

Read more articles in Arena Issue 58 here.

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