Rufford Lodge is a vibrant lodge that was consecrated in 1953, and after the talk they had their festive board in the Banqueting Hall which is attached to the Hotel, the pseudo-medieval setting adding a certain ambience to the festivities. The evening was a success and I look forward to visiting the lodge again in the not too distant future.
In recent years, a number of lodges that met at the Hall have sadly closed, but the Hall is being used for events such as weddings and conferences, so the Hall still feels vibrant and is still being used. There are many different lodge rooms, ante-rooms, and dining rooms, including an amazing dining room that was designed acoustically to convey the voice, probably to assist Masons giving speeches during the festive board, but also, according to legend, was designed so everyone’s voice could be heard – including gossiping Masons!
It was a pleasure to be given the opportunity to present a talk to Semper Fidelis Lodge, and it was an honour to have a guided tour around the Hall, which is one of most intriguing and architecturally beautiful buildings in Manchester.
I will be giving a talk to Dormer Lodge on the 8th of January, 2016 on the topic of famous Freemasons. This will be the second time I’ll be visiting Dormer, which is a great vibrant lodge and a pleasure to visit.
The lodge meets at the Masonic Hall in Birkenhead, and I particularly enjoy visiting as the lodge working is slightly different to my own; the opening and closing of the lodge is longer and their use of tracing boards is particularly interesting, the lodge using smaller versions, propping them against the Junior Warden’s pedistal instead of the centre of the lodge.
Baron Hill is a now ruinous estate near Beaumaris, Anglesey, North Wales, once owned by the Bulkeley family, and was originally built in 1618 by Sir Richard Bulkeley. The deserted, empty shell of the once beautiful house is now covered by foliage, nature having taken over the Bulkeley family seat. The site is eerily silent, with only the rustle of the breeze against the leaves and the occasional bird song breaking the dead quiet. The golden sunlight filters through the trees to reveal the remnants of the once glorious building.
During the English Civil War, Richard’s successor, Colonel Thomas Bulkeley, is said to have invited King Charles I to take control of the house and set up his court there. In the eighteenth century, the house became the seat of Lord Viscount Bulkeley, who held Jacobite sympathies. The Neo-Palladian style of the building is apparent from the curved facade of the house to the terraces, follies and the grandeur of the balconies; this was the style adopted during the 1776 reconstruction of the mansion by architect Samuel Wyatt. There is also an icehouse in the gardens, a lodge house, and other outhouses that are also now abandoned and overgrown. The gardens themselves are now totally overgrown. Edward VII, who was Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England, visited the house in the early years of the 1900s, and the accompanying picture shows the King sat outside the curved façade of the house.[1]
Another Masonic connection to the Bulkeley family was William Jones; Jones was a particularly gifted mathematician who was born on Anglesey in 1675, and he was so proficient at calculation that Bulkeley, his landlord, set him up in London, where he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Freemason, belonging to a London lodge.[2] A certain Richard Bulkeley Esq., was mentioned as a prominent Freemason in a lodge in Nova Scotia in the later eighteenth century,[3] though unlike the Watkins William Wynn family, the Bulkeley’s of Baron Hill did not take up prominent positions in North Welsh Freemasonry.
By the time we come to World War I, with the advent of death duties, the family (by then called Williams-Bulkeley) found it difficult to maintain the costs of running the house, and by World War II, the Royal Engineers were stationed there. It was later damaged by fire and has been abandoned ever since.
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[1] Many thanks to the Bulkeley Hotel in Beaumaris where the photograph is currently on display.
[2] Freemasons and the Royal Society, UGLE, (2010), p.57. A copy of the paper can be accessed via the website: <www.freemasonry.london.museum/…/frs_freemasons_complete_jan201> [accessed 23rd August 2015]
[3] A.T. Freed, ‘Early History of Freemasonry in Upper Canada’, Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, p.119. A copy of the paper can be accessed via the website: <www.freemasonry.bcy.ca/history/sheppard/history_052-127.pdf> [accessed 23rd August 2015]
In my first book ‘The Genesis of Freemasonry’ I discussed the importance of the Watkin Williams Wynn family to Freemasonry, a number of prominent members serving as Provincial Grand Masters in Wales during the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, 3rd Baronet was a Jacobite and resided at his estate at Wynnstay in Denbighshire in North Wales. His son, the 4th Baronet became a Freemason, founding his own lodge which met on the estate in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The main house is now demolished and the remaining buildings are now apartments, though the chapel still exists and reveals evidence of Masonic influences.
A branch of the same family – the Williams family – resided at Bodelwyddan Castle, which is situated near St. Asaph. This branch of the family also built the nearby ‘Marble Church’, and both the castle and the church are a celebration of Victorian Gothic architecture. The same branch of the family also constructed a magnificent Gothic Chateau overlooking the Menai Straits on Anglesey, a Chateau that I stumbled upon during a recent visit to the island. The Williams’ drew on the Chateau Chamord in the Loire region of France for its inspiration, the family having travelled there. Though this branch of the family have no apparent links to Masonry, the architectural splendour of the Chateau conveys a celebration of architecture and a rich heritage of building design in Wales, and of course, the importance of their extended family within Freemasonry in Wales is also important.
William Hesketh Lever – the 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925) – was an industrialist, philanthropist, Freemason and art collector, whose soap factory and model village for its workers at Port Sunlight, near Birkenhead, Cheshire, UK, became a symbol for the improvement of the living conditions for workers during the later period of the Industrial Revolution. Using the themes and ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Port Sunlight became a forerunner for the garden suburb, the landscape and architecture creating an aesthetic that, it was thought, would benefit the health and the overall lives of the workers.
Leverhulme was a very active Mason, founding a number of lodges that also conveyed the hierarchy of the workforce at Lever Brothers, the William Hesketh Lever Lodge No. 2916 and the Leverhulme Lodge 4438 being just two lodges he founded. Today the Lady Lever Art Gallery, situated in Port Sunlight and surrounded by the beautiful old workers houses, can be visited for free, and Leverhulme’s old lodge room can still be seen, a number of Masonic items still on display.
Woolton Hall now lies empty, a sad shell of its former self. Though it still reveals beautiful eighteenth century architecture, the fine restoration work of Robert Adam and the lost lodge rooms of Freemasons. It was originally built in 1704 for the Molyneux family, and redesigned and rebuilt by Robert Adam in 1772 after the Hall was acquired by Nicholas Ashton. Ashton’s father had been a financier for Britain’s first industrial canal – the Sankey Canal – which was opened in 1757, and ran from St. Helens to Widnes, supplying coal to the growing port of Liverpool.
After the Ashton’s, a number of families resided at the Hall, until it became a hotel at the beginning of the twentieth century. It fell into disrepair until John Hibbert purchased the Hall in 1980, and it was renovated and used for events. Local lodges began to be catered for by the Hall, and the Woolton Group of lodges in Liverpool used the Hall until 2006; the Hall having two lodge rooms, a Chapter Room, various ante-rooms and the lodges having use of the magnificent dining rooms and bar on the ground floor. Lodges such as the now closed Liberty Lodge No. 3888 once met in the lodge rooms and had their festive board in the dining room.
It was John Hibbert that allowed me to have a look in the Hall along with a local history group that I manage, and we had exclusive access to the building, which is now closed to the public and up for sale. The lodge rooms are now empty, the dining rooms quiet and abandoned, but the sense of architectural beauty still remains.
The tunnels of Joseph Williamson in Liverpool continue to fascinate and tantalise historians; the similarities to other tunnels and caves in England, such as the Hell Fire caves of West Wycombe, created by Sir Francis Dashwood in the mid eighteenth century, suggest they may have acted as an eccentric folly, and may been used as a secret meeting place for like-minded gentlemen.
Joseph Williamson was a self-made Liverpool businessman; born in Yorkshire in 1769, his family settled in Warrington, and the young Joseph eventually left for Liverpool, where he was apprenticed to a tobacco merchant. He rose through the ranks, married the boss’s daughter, and ended up running the business. He began to make connections in Liverpool Society, and became involved in building houses on what was then the edge of the port on Mason Street, near to the present day Edge Hill area of the city. It was underneath these properties, in an abandoned sandstone quarry, that Williamson began constructing his tunnels, sometime around 1816, giving employment to the returning soldiers of the Napoleonic wars. This reflects the origins of the West Wycombe caves; Dashwood employing the local farm workers to dig the caves after a period of drought and failed harvests during the 1740s, in an attempt to combat poverty. Williamson continued to construct the tunnels until his death in 1840, the labyrinth of tunnels revealing some excellent craftsmanship; with cobbled walkways and brick arches creating a cavernous architectural splendour. Some of the sandstone removed from the tunnels was donated for the building of a local church, and Williamson seemed to convey a philanthropic attitude, which has gained him affection in Liverpool even today.
It has certainly been speculated upon by many of the members of the ‘Joseph Williamson Society’ and the ‘Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels’ – two groups which look after different sections of the tunnels, that they may have indeed been used for Masonic meetings; a secret gathering place for like-minded gentlemen, not unlike the Hell Fire Club meetings of the West Wycombe caves, some of the erstwhile members of which, such as MP John Wilkes and American Revolutionary Benjamin Franklin, were known Freemasons.
Caves are still a common meeting place for lodges in various parts of the US, for example, in Kentucky, Masons met in Mammoth Cave. In Oregon, Malheur Cave has been the site of meetings of the Robert Burns Lodge No. 97, and in New Mexico, the Carlsbad Caverns have also witnessed lodge meetings. In Australia, there has also been a lodge, which has met in a cave in New South Wales a number of times. Quarries have also been the location of lodges in both the US and in Australia.
No evidence has yet come to light that Williamson was a Freemason, but there is slight evidence that Freemasons may have been in his tunnels; either digging them or visiting them. Amongst the many common artefacts discovered in the tunnels are clay pipes, and one particular clay pipe bowl was brought to my attention after a visit to the tunnels, one which had the Masonic symbol of a square and compass on it. Clay pipes were used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and were fairly common as most men smoked, some were personalised with names and symbols on them; for example anchors and military insignia, and in this case, Masonic symbols.
This particular clay pipe bowl is typical of the ones manufactured in the early nineteenth century; it has the typical ribbed and vine/leaf design, and on the reverse side to the square and compass is a bird, which could be interpreted as a liver bird. So it is possible that the man who smoked this pipe was a Liverpool Freemason. At this time, there were around ten lodges operating in Liverpool, and in 1823, a Masonic rebellion took place in Liverpool which resulted in a separate rebel Grand Lodge operating in the port for a time. There were at least two Liverpool lodges under this Rebel Grand Lodge, but unfortunately, no complete records exists of their members after 1823, even though one of the lodges continued to operate until at least 1858. It is not known where they met after 1823, and their leader, a local engineer and cartographer Michael Alexander Gage was actively involved in local politics, later working against the proposed Liverpool Waterworks Bill in 1850. The liver bird was also used as a symbol for some Liverpool based Masonic lodges, such as the Merchants Lodge, a lodge, which supported the rebellion at an early stage, and used the liver bird on its Masonic certificates.
Freemasonry in Liverpool attracted tradesmen, businessmen, professionals, merchants and landowners, so Joseph Williamson and his associates certainly fell into the category of being members of the Craft at that time. Williamson undoubtedly knew the value of local networking; he was a member of the Liverpool Hunt, famously attending the Hunt on his wedding day, and there is the revealing legend of him hosting a dinner for guests in the tunnels; serving, to their disgust, a cheap meal of porridge, which led to a number of the invited gentlemen to leave, only to take his real friends who stayed behind to a magnificent feast in the famed ‘banqueting hall’.
Of all Williamson’s known associates, none appear to have been members of the Liverpool lodges during the early nineteenth century, though there is one particular name who had a tenuous link to other known Freemasons. Cornelius Henderson painted portraits of a number of prominent Liverpool gentlemen, including William Shepherd, abolitionist and Dissenting Minister of the Gateacre Unitarian Chapel. Shepherd had been taught by none other than the radical Minister Dr. Richard Price, a Freemason who was connected to various Dissenting Academies. Price had visited Joseph Priestley while he tutored at the Warrington Dissenting Academy, an Academy, which had a number of tutors that were Freemasons. Shepherd himself had been educated at Holden’s Academy near Rainford and at Daventry Academy.
This of co
urse brings us back to the clay pipe bowl with the Masonic symbol of the square and compass; where exactly was it found? What stratified layer of tunnel debris did it come from? The answers to these questions we will never know, and the section of tunnel it was found had been used for dumping the port’s refuse during the later Victorian era. Because of its design, it can be dated to the early part of the nineteenth century – before 1840, and it is likely to have belonged to a local Freemason. The design of the bowl is very similar to pipe bowls found at a clay pipe making ‘shop’ at the Rookery Farm site, Rainford. There were said to be other clay pipe bowls found with the same Masonic symbol of the square and compass in the tunnels, so there may have been other men in the tunnels from the same lodge, and who knows, one day more concrete evidence may come to light of Masonic activity in the tunnels, with evidence that Williamson himself was a member of the Fraternity.
i. See J. Stonehouse, ‘’The Excavations of Edge Hill, with a Brief Notice of the Late Joseph Williamson’, in The Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Volume 68, (1917).
ii. The Joseph Williamson Society is based at the Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre, on Smithdown Lane, Liverpool. More information can be found on their website: www.williamsontunnels.co.uk [accessed on the 30th of December, 2012]
iii. For information on the Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels, see www.williamsontunnels.com [accessed 30th of December, 2012]
iv. See David Harrison, The Genesis of Freemasonry, (Hersham: Lewis Masonic, 2009), pp.139-141.
v. For the history of the Robert Burns Lodge No. 97 and the Malheur Cave, see http://www.burnslodge.org/malheur.html [accessed on the 30th of December, 2012]
vi. K. Arrington, ‘Highest Hills or Lowest Vales’, www.masonicworld.com [accessed on the 30th of December, 2012]
vii. Many thanks to David Cook for his information on Australian Freemasonry. David Cook is a member of Barron Barnett Lodge of Research No. 146, United Grand Lodge of Queensland.
viii. See David Harrison, The Liverpool Masonic Rebellion and the Wigan Grand Lodge, (Bury St. Edmunds: Arima Publishing, 2012).
ix. See David Harrison, The Transformation of Freemasonry, (Bury St. Edmunds: Arima Publishing, 2010), pp.19-36.
x. P.J. Davey, Rainford Clay Pipe Industry, (Oxford: B.A.R., 1982), pp.179-183.
