Dr. David Harrison

Category: Freemasonry

The architecture & symbolism of Rodney Street, Liverpool

Rodney Street in Liverpool was constructed between 1783-1784 by the anti-slave trader MP William Roscoe, and is perhaps Liverpool’s most famous and architecturally beautiful street. The rows of Georgian terraced houses are not only appealing to look at, but they have recently been used as a backdrop for period dramas. The street was named after the 1st Baron Rodney who secured a vital naval victory in 1782 over the Comte de Grasse at the Battle of the Saintes.

With Liverpool being a centre for commerce and trade during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there have thus been many internationally famous writers, poets, politicians, merchants and professionals that have lived in Rodney Street, some, such as the lost poet Arthur H Clough, I have previously written about on this blog.

No. 62 Rodney Street is the birthplace of William Ewart Gladstone, who served as Liberal prime minister for the UK four times between the 1860s and 1890s. He was the son of John Gladstone, a prominent Liverpool merchant and slave owner who knew MP and Freemason George Canning and Liverpool Broker and Freemason William Ewart, who the future prime minister was named after. William Ewart Gladstone’s older brother Robertson was also a Freemason in a Liverpool lodge. For more information on Liverpool Freemasonry during the nineteenth century see my article here.

No. 9 Rodney Street was the birthplace of Liverpool poet Arthur H Clough in 1819 and his sister Anne J Clough in 1820, Anne being an early Suffragist and promoter for women’s education.

No. 54 Rodney Street was the residence of Dr William Henry Duncan who was the first Medical Officer of Health in 1847. Dr Duncan drew the authorities attention to the slums of Liverpool, Duncan attempting to warn of the impending rise of epidemics of disease amongst the poor if nothing was done to improve conditions.

Rodney Street has always attracted (and still does) many doctors and professionals from the medical profession, and is sometimes referred to as the ‘Harley Street’ of Liverpool. No. 43 was the residence of Mr C Thurston Holland FRCS, a pioneer of Radiology.

No. 42 was the residence of Liverpool surgeon Henry Greenwood Rawdon, who was the nephew of Liverpool merchant and philanthropist Christopher Rawdon, who I have previously written about in a number of articles on this blog. Henry Greenwood Rawdon became a renowned surgeon working at the Infirmary for Children, specialising in the repair of hair-lip and cleft-pallet. Like Thurston Holland, he was also a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

This was the doorway of a former bank on the corner of Rodney Street, revealing the symbol of the cornucopia above the entrance. The cornucopia is a symbol used within Freemasonry, meaning plenty, the symbol being used in the banking industry, especially during the nineteenth century. I have previously written about the use of the secret science of symbols in an article here.

A view of Rodney Street with the Anglican Cathedral in the background. Second doorway from the left is No. 59 which was the studio for the celebrated photographer E Chambre Hardman (1898-1988).

July 8, 2016
The Mystery of Coral Castle, Florida

This romantic and mysterious modern monument is situated in Miami Florida, and is said to have been carved from home-made tools by American-Latvian Edward Leedskalnin (1887-1951). Leedskalnin was an eccentric who, according to legend, moved the stones with supernatural abilities, harnessing the secret magnetic powers of the Earth (he even claimed that magnetism cured him of Tuberculosis). After constructing the ‘castle’ Leedskalnin gave guided tours around the site, saying that he built the castle for his ‘Sweet Sixteen’, a lost love who jilted him one day before the wedding. He then left for America, where he spent 28 years constructing the castle.

The ‘castle’ itself is more of a collection of stone ‘sculptures’ and include a castle tower (where Leedskalnin resided), planets, an obelisk, crescent moons, rocking chairs, and tables, all made out of limestone formed by coral. If it was in the UK, the site would be referred to as a ‘folly’, and possibly as a fine example of ‘outsider art’, but it can also be seen as an example of eccentric American architecture, with legends attached that conjure up ideas of a mystical movement of the stones and ancient secret knowledge of leverage. On some speculative websites, Leedskalnin is even referred to as being a Freemason. Whatever Leedskalnin’s methods were, his mysterious and beautiful monument is a testament to his dedication and beliefs.

June 11, 2016
Recent Talk and Book Signing at Noah Lodge & the Scottish Rite in Florida, USA

There’s nothing like Southern hospitality, and I experienced it first hand when I gave two talks while on a recent trip to the USA; one talk to Noah Lodge No. 357, which meets at Fort Myers, on the west coast of Florida, and another talk at the Scottish Rite at Tampa, just a few hours drive north on Interstate 75 from Fort Myers. Noah Lodge meets in its own building and is well known for its ‘fresco’ of King Solomon in the East of the lodge room; King Solomon sits in the centre flanked by two Knights Templar. It was interesting to see the members of the lodge wear their aprons underneath their jackets, which is similar to how Masons under the Grand Lodge of Ireland wear their aprons. My talk was part of an event that also included the raising of two brothers.

The Scottish Rite Temple at Tampa was the location of my second talk, the event featured my talk then a live TV link-up with the Scottish Rite in Washington DC which covered a charity fund raising event. Both talks were a success and it gave me a chance to meet with renowned Florida Masons such as Ed Ciofani from Noah Lodge who arranged the trip, George Brooks of the Scottish Rite in Tampa, and Masonic author John S Nagy. A future Masonic project with Brother Ciofani’s Wherever TV is planned so I will be posting information concerning this soon.

After the Florida leg of the trip, I then travelled to Atlanta, Georgia and squeezed in a visit to Bulloch Hall in Roswell, which was the residence of the Bulloch family in the nineteenth century. The hall was built around 1839, and has a connection with Liverpool, as a member of the family James Dunwoody Bulloch, was in Liverpool during the American Civil War acting on behalf of the Confederacy. Bulloch was arranging the financing and the construction of ships for the Confederate Navy, some of the ships being built at Lairds in Birkenhead, one of the most famous of these being the CSS Alabama. The hall also has a number of Masonic connections; the most famous concerning President Theodore Roosevelt, who was a member of the family and a Freemason.

May 25, 2016
The Georgia Guidestones

The Georgia Guidestones stand like giant ancient monoliths in Elbert County in Georgia USA; four granite stones that reveal ten written ‘guidelines’ or commandments in eight languages. There are in total five upright stones supporting a giant capstone. Their origin is a mystery, and there is only a record of a certain R.C. Christian who hired Elberton Granite Finishing Company to erect the stones in 1979. The monument was officially unveiled the following year. An inscription on an explanatory tablet set a few feet west of the monument reads ‘let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason’ – obviously referring to Thomas Paine’s work. The tablet also gives facts about the size, weight and astronomical features of the monument, the stones themselves being astronomically aligned, revealing the solstices and equinoxes, with the capstone having an aperture that allows a ray of sunlight through at noon each day indicating the particular day of the year. The stones have of course attracted the attention of conspiracy theorists and were vandalised with graffiti in 2008. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that they are messages from the New World Order or the Rosicricians, or that they may have been designed and erected by followers of the philosophy of Thomas Paine. They may of course be merely a modernist sculpture, but the mystery surrounding the stones certainly adds to their nature.

Here are the ten guidelines written on the stones in English, Spanish, Swahili, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.

3. Unite humanity with a living new language.

4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.

5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

8. Balance personal rights with social duties.

9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.

10. Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

April 20, 2016
The Mysticism of Richard Church – Lost Poet

Richard Church (1893-1972)
by Wm Shackleton / Dec 1923

Richard Church, born in London in 1893, is one of my favourite poets; for me, he captures the ways of an England long past, writing about ‘the deep hedgerows’ and the ‘showers of larksong’, he wrote of the English countryside, sunsets, waterfalls and ruined country cottages. There is something ethereal about his poetry, as in the poem Summer Night Music, which tells of shadows and ‘music descending over the dark heat’. There always seems to be something old and haunting in his poetry, a hidden mystical theme lurking behind the hawthorn.

Church certainly had a mystical side, and wrote poems entitled The Pagan and Solstices which hinted at his deeper interests. Indeed, in his autobiography Over the Bridge, he discusses his experiences of mysticism. In one particular account, after realising that time and space were deceivers, he wrote ‘my limbs and trunk were lighter than they seemed, and that I had only to reduce them by an act of will, perhaps by a mere change of physical mechanics, to command them off the ground, out of the tyranny of gravitation”. He then left the ground and glided ‘about the room’ some twelve or eighteen inches above the floor. He returned to the ground only to take off once more, and continued to levitate.

Church published many collections of his poetry, a three volume autobiography, and even wrote the foreword for Aldous Huxley’s Collected Poetry. He also published many novels, and was a highly successful author, being a respected journalist and reviewer. He was awarded a CBE in 1957 and died in 1972.

His poem Immortal may give an insight into his beliefs:

‘With dying fire and light,

With agony of birds

The day defers to the night,

And thought descends to words.

Immortal might become

The poet who could take

The rapture that is dumb,

And simple music make.’

April 9, 2016
Matthew Arnold – lost poet

by Elliott & Fry, published by Bickers & Son, woodburytype, circa 1883; published 1886

In writing about lost Liverpool poets, one particular poet came to mind that wasn’t actually from Liverpool, but who is remembered there due to his untimely death in the city. Matthew Arnold was born in 1822 in Middlesex, he went to Rugby then Oxford, and was close to another Liverpool poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Arnold is sometimes characterised as a ‘sage writer’, a writer who informs the reader on contemporary social issues, and this form of social comment certainly comes through in the themes of some of his poetry, a theme that can be found in Immortality:

‘And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn

The world’s poor, routed leavings? or will they,

Who fail’d under the heat of this life’s day,

Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?’

In A Dream, Arnold paints a more idyllic picture of the world, a dream filled, hazy image of Alpine streams and the warm scents of nature, stimulating his Muse like a Romantic poet adrift:

‘Was it a dream? We sail’d, I thought we sail’d,

Martin and I, down the green Alpine stream,

Border’d, each bank, with pines; the morning sun,

On the wet umbrage of their glossy tops,

On the red pinings of their forest-floor,

Drew a warm scent abroad; behind the pines

The mountain-skirts, with all their sylvan change

Of bright-leaf’d chestnuts and moss’d walnut-trees

And the frail scarlet-berried ash, began.’

There is a primary school named after Matthew Arnold in the Dingle, south Liverpool, which is certainly fitting as Arnold was an inspector of schools. He died in 1888 after suffering heart failure while running to catch a tram in Liverpool, he was due to meet his daughter at a landing stage on the river as she was returning from the United States. He is buried in Surrey. Arnold’s poetry is beautiful to behold, and in capturing the social issues of Victorian England, his poetry certainly deserves more attention from syllabuses in English schools and colleges.

March 3, 2016
Arthur Hugh Clough – the lost poet of Liverpool

Arthur Hugh Clough (1 January 1819 – 13 November 1861) resided in Rodney Street, a rather affluent area of Liverpool during the early nineteenth century, a street that also included such famous residents as the Gladstone’s and Dr Henry Duncan. His sister Anne J Clough, born in 1820, was an early English Suffragist, she promoted higher education for women, and became the first principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. Arthur’s father was a cotton merchant, and the family moved to South Carolina in the United States in 1822, though Arthur returned to Britain in 1828 for his education. He attended Oxford and became friends with another poet associated with Liverpool; Mathew Arnold.

Clough’s poetry is typically Victorian and in some of his poems he experimented with various types of meter, basing his verse on classical models. One of his most popular poems Through a Glass Darkly conveys religious themes and examines that darkness visible to us all:

What we, when face to face we see

The Father of our souls, shall be,

John tells us, doth not yet appear;

Ah! did he tell what we are here!’

In All is Well, Clough writes about dreams and the sea, with a ship sailing away on the ocean to a place unknown, imagery taken from his childhood in Liverpool perhaps, the port being filled with sailing ships unloading their goods and awaiting the wind to sail back over the sea. Or perhaps it was a memory of sailing to America as a child:

‘In spite of dreams, in spite of thought,

‘Tis not in vain, and not for nought,

The wind it blows, the ship it goes,

Though where and whither, no one knows.’

Clough died in Florence in 1861, and is very much a lost poet in the sense that many people today have not heard of him, as Julian Barnes commented in an article in The Guardian ‘Clough has often been treated as a marginal figure, both on the university English syllabus and in the English canon’. He is often overlooked, but perhaps his poetry is due for rediscovery.

February 29, 2016
The Beatles, Aleister Crowley and the Winged Beetle

Aleister Crowley appears on the cover of The Beatles’ 1967 masterpiece Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, situated on the back row of a crowd of people that the band admired. Crowley famously put forward in his works the practice of reverse speech – something that the Beatles also experimented with in their recordings at this time. Crowley had published a collection of poetry in 1910 entitled The Winged Beetle, a number of poems in the collection portraying themes that mirrored his Occultist interests, such as in the poems The Pentagram, The Sorceress and The Wizard Way. The title of the collection however has fascinated some Beatle fans for obvious reasons; Paul McCartney being in the Beatles, then, when they split, forming a new band called Wings, McCartney in effect being the Winged Beatle. This was the title of a recent and rather entertaining youtube documentary that discusses the ‘Paul id dead’ story and puts forward the Crowley influence.

Crowley was certainly a big influence on many musicians from the late 60s and early 70s; Jimmy Page being a famous example, and of course David Bowie who mentioned Crowley in his song Quicksand from his 1971 album Hunky Dory. Victorian dreamscapes of other worlds also captivated artists and musicians, John Lennon for example was inspired by the stories of Lewis Carroll, something which influenced the Beatles song I Am The Walrus, Lewis Carroll also appearing on the cover of Sergeant Pepper. Another poet and writer of humorous stories that appeared on the cover was Oscar Wilde; Wilde being a Freemason who conveyed certain esoteric themes in some of his writings, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Beatles, along with other musicians of the period, were more than aware of the work of writers like Crowley, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde, writers that, in their own way, wrote about hidden landscapes, the search for forbidden knowledge and who yearned to escape the restraints of Victorian society. Musicians, artists and writers of the late 60s and early 70s recognised these themes and became inspired by these writers to break free of their own restraints and create new boundaries, to create ground-breaking music like the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and The White Album, and Bowie’s Hunky Dory, and to continue the search for forbidden knowledge.

February 23, 2016
Robert Atherton – the lost poet of Kirkby

Robert Atherton (1861-1930) was referred to as the ploughboy poet, the wandering poet, and appeared under a number of pseudonyms, such as Rupert Upperton and Robin O’Bobs, the latter name conjuring up images of an English country poet who writes about the mysteries of nature and the lost rural past of a forgotten era. Indeed, many of his poems certainly reflect these themes, and his writing style mirrors many of the now forgotten poets of that period, poets such as Richard Church.

Atherton was born in Kirkby, Lancashire, when Kirkby was a farming village. The Kirkby of today is totally different to the Kirkby of Atherton’s time; today the area is a large housing estate to the north east of Liverpool. Atherton spent his early years as a ploughboy on a farm before becoming Rector of the parish church of Bolnhurst, a beautiful village in Bedfordshire, a post he kept for fifteen years. In 1904 he left the Church and became a wandering poet, having his verse published in various collections, such as Village Life and Feeling: Songs and Poems, which was published in 1901 as Rupert Upperton, Poems of Friendship and Sympathy, published in 1924, When the Robin Sings and other Verses, published in 1927 as Robin O’Bobs, and his self-printed life story From Plough to Parsonage.

His work received some excellent reviews and brought comparisons with the great Robert Burns; the Birmingham Post said how ‘Mr Upperton is a ploughboy as was Robert Burns. He is young and appears to be very much in earnest. He has the poetic heart and, if he can afford to labour and wait, may yet acquire fame. We shall keep an eye on ploughboy Upperton.’ His poetry told of a way of life that has now disappeared; the life of the English country village, with dashes of humour and eccentricity. One of his poems Titanic can be heard here on soundcloud – along with some reminiscences of the poet courtesy of the Knowsley Archives. Robert lived out his remaining years back at Kirkby, residing at Pear Tree Farm, where he died in 1930. He is buried at St Chad’s Church in Kirkby, and his haunting, rustic poems of a now forgotten way of life have taken on more poignancy as Kirkby is now effectively a busy built-up suburb of Liverpool. There may be reasons why one is forgotten, but the words left behind may one day be appreciated.

February 19, 2016
A loss of culture and heritage; the demolition of Britain’s pubs

Many old British pubs (and clubs) are disappearing at a worryingly fast rate, the loss not only of our architectural heritage, but also of our cultural heritage being alarmingly apparent. One particular case of a quick pub demolition that has captured the attention of the media is The Carlton Tavern in Maida Vale, London. Demolished swiftly without permission by developers in April 2015, the Tel Aviv based developers CLTX were then ordered to rebuild it brick-by-brick by the Council. So far, nothing has been done and the developers are appealing against the decision. The developers wanted the land to build flats; we are simply losing our heritage due to a combination of the current housing crisis and, so it has been claimed by reports in the media such as this article in The Guardian, that we just don’t drink enough in pubs as often as we once did. We can argue however that pubs are open longer than they were once were, that they are centers for the community, and that they symbolize our history and culture. And on the housing shortage, who hasn’t driven through an urban area and seen shops and terraced houses boarded up? There are many buildings in urban areas just crying out for redevelopment and regeneration.

Another example of this utter destruction of our heritage is The Alchemist pub in Battersea, an early-mid Victorian pub that was flattened by developer Udhyam Amim in May 2015. Like the developers behind the destruction of the Carlton Tavern, Amim was ordered to rebuild the famous landmark brick-by-brick, but, he is now seeking retrospective planning consent to turn the land into a block of flats. According to a report in the Standard, Amim was quoted as saying ‘I’m not really sure what all the fuss is about’. Indeed. There are many more historical pubs on the danger list; The Winchester in Highgate is under threat to be developed into flats by the same developer that demolished the Carlton Tavern, and The Magdala pub in Hampstead is also under threat.

In the north-west of England, pubs have been closing at an alarming rate, many of them disappearing overnight. The Bear’s Paw in Edge Hill, Liverpool has recently closed and is about to be turned into flats. The Bear’s Paw is as old as the Regency built tunnels of Joseph Williamson which can be accessed opposite the pub, and there is a possible opening to one of the tunnels in the cellar of the pub. The Ship Inn (which had been a restaurant for a number of years) in Walton, to the south of Warrington, was demolished recently and is now a building site for new homes. It was deemed structurally unsafe. Locals were angry at the demolition and the only reason they had not objected to the development was because they believed the pub would be restored. Clubs have also been abandoned and demolished in Warrington, the famous Legends nightclub was demolished in October 2014; as part of the old Rugby ground it was flattened to make way for a housing development. In April 2015 Mr. Smith’s nightclub was demolished quickly and unceremoniously after a fire the night before – a beautiful art-deco building lost forever. The site is currently a car park.

More needs to be done to stop this destruction of our heritage, we need to make a noise, sign petitions, contact MPs and local government, write about it and shout about it. We need to scrutinize plans, attend hearings and get involved in any way we can. If we don’t, more of our heritage will become car parks or blocks of flats.

February 15, 2016