Catered for 35

Yesterday was the day the whole weekend was for.

We were up in good time and out of the East India Club early enough to eat properly. Maison François on Duke Street, which we have been to before, for a breakfast sandwich. My girlfriend had a Virgin Mary. I had a gin and tonic at eleven in the morning.

Over to the Royal Over-Seas League at twelve to set up.

Alexandra Palace Lodge No. 1541 was consecrated on the seventeenth of July 1875, at the palace itself, in Muswell Hill. The petition had been signed by twenty-nine masons that February and recommended by the Royal Somerset House and Inverness Lodge No. 4. It was approved in the April by the Prince of Wales, then Grand Master. Bro J.C. Parkinson was the first Master.

The lodge did not stay at the palace long. In 1882 it applied to move into the City, and from the following year met at the Imperial Hotel on Holborn Viaduct. After that the Gaiety Restaurant, the Abercorn Rooms, the Café Monico, the Charing Cross Hotel, the Café Royal, Colonial House on Mincing Lane, the National Liberal Club, Butchers’ Hall, and the Information Technologists’ Hall. Since October 2016 it has met at Mark Masons’ Hall in St James’s Street, four minutes’ walk from where we were standing. A lodge named after a building in north London, which took a hundred and forty years to arrive in this street.

There is more of it than that. The lodge became a Hall Stone Lodge in 1929, having raised £808 10s towards the building of Freemasons’ Hall. The Master of a Hall Stone Lodge wears the Hall Stone Jewel for his year, which is one of the better parts of the job. St Bride Lodge amalgamated with it in 2007 and its warrant is in our keeping. The Tyler’s sword was presented in 1955 by Major General A. Snelling, who according to the lodge history received it as a surrender sword from the Japanese commander in Burma in 1945, on the single condition that the blade should never be cleaned, as it is stained by the blood of British soldiers. That condition forms part of the lodge’s own piece of ritual for presenting the sword to the Tyler at his investiture. I did it when I took the chair. It is one of the most poignant bits of ritual I have ever had to do.

I am Master this year, and was re-elected, so I go in again in October for a second. Another year of the jewel, which pleases me more than it probably should.

I had catered for thirty-five. We were closer to twenty.

The drinks had been set at three beers a head, or half a bottle of wine, with a glass of prosecco each on top. All of it was already there, bought and standing ready for thirty-five. After a short negotiation with the staff, who could not have been more helpful about any of it, we settled on the simplest arrangement available: the allocation was abolished and we drank what was in front of us. The three spare bottles of prosecco went the same way once we knew nobody else was coming.

We had the decking from one until five. It was quiet, and they let us stay on well past that, so we made rather more of the afternoon than I had paid for.

There were clients there, members from my own lodge, and brethren from several others. It was a good afternoon.

The centenary, in 1975, was marked with a dispensation to meet at Freemasons’ Hall, Great Queen Street, and a four-course banquet for a hundred and twenty-three at the Connaught Rooms. The hundred and fiftieth got a garden in Park Place and drink for thirty-five shared among twenty, at least three of whom do not drink at all.

I was in bed at the East India by seven. Others carried on. I am told they did well with what was left.