Down early
Over to London for Mark Grand Lodge, and down the day before, which is the only sensible way to do it. The meeting is the reason. The day before is the point.
Straight to Taylor’s on Jermyn Street, who have appeared here before and need no further introduction. The beard now takes longer than the head, so it was scissors throughout and no clippers anywhere near it.
Then a short walk along to 45 Jermyn Street for the autumn menu. Dumplings in a broth to start, and after that a lamb dish that was gorgeous. I ate it slowly.
Every kerb
I was at the East India Club, of course, and the men I was meeting were on the other side of town, so the evening began with crossing it. A few pints in the Shakespeare’s Head on Kingsway, and a curry planned for afterwards at the Chambeli on Southampton Row, opposite the Bedford Hotel.
It was the walk between the two that made the evening. Southampton Row is what Kingsway becomes once it has crossed Holborn, and its kerbs are littered with utility marks. Not one or two, which is what you normally get and what you are grateful for. Every single kerb. Triangles, saltires with a dot in each quarter, a three pronged mark like an arrow that has lost its stem, and a long cross near the top of one stone that I still cannot account for. Some kerbstones carried four separate marks inside a couple of feet.
I have a theory and it is no more than that. Kingsway and the Aldwych were the London County Council’s great clearance of 1903 to 1905, and Southampton Row was widened as part of the same scheme, north as far as Theobald’s Road. Widen a street and you relay every kerb in it at once, and every service that comes along afterwards has a clean granite edge to cut its own record into.
Anyone who has read my previous posts knows a dotted cross on a London kerb is not new to me. Drury Lane is the far side of Holborn, a few minutes from here. A whole street of them is new.
I photographed as many as I could without looking like a total nut job.
A relatively quiet affair after that, and back to the club.
Great Queen Street
Tuesday, one o’clock, the Grand Temple at Freemasons’ Hall, a few minutes’ walk from the kerbstones I had been crouching over the night before. Mark Masons’ Hall itself is over in St James’s Street, but for a Communication of Grand Lodge you want Great Queen Street, and Great Queen Street is what you get.
The two sit together in my head. A man advanced into the Mark chooses a mark of his own, which goes into the lodge’s register, and the practice comes from the operative masons who cut a personal device into the stones they dressed so the work could be identified and paid for. The men who cut those saltires into Southampton Row were masons in neither sense, and were recording a service under the pavement rather than claiming a piece of work. It is the same instinct and the same medium: a private sign cut into stone, legible to anyone who knows the code and meaningless to everyone else.
All very good. It was also the first outing for the new Pro Grand Master, which gave the afternoon an edge it would not otherwise have had.
Grand Lodge noted grants approved by the Mark Benevolent Fund totalling three hundred and thirty one thousand pounds, across nineteen causes. Whatever else you want to say about a room of several hundred men in aprons, that is where the afternoon’s money went. Seven of the nineteen were wheelchair rugby clubs: Bournemouth, Taunton, Penrith, Norfolk, Cheltenham, Solent and a side from Gogledd Cymru.
Dining is at half past three, which sounds eccentric right up until you have done it. Out of the temple and next door into the Grand Connaught Rooms, and fed before most of London has begun thinking about the evening.
I bumped into several of the men from Lodge Sine Nomine No. 10,000, whom I had last seen in Philadelphia, and went on with a couple of them to the Savage Club for what I intended to be one gin and tonic. It was not one gin and tonic. Later I found the Isle of Man contingent again and we saw the night off between us.
The road south
Home today. There were no trains running from Victoria to Gatwick, so I ended up in the back of an Uber instead, going south through Battersea and out the other side.
I had expected to resent this. In fact I enjoyed it enormously. A train shows you the backs of things. A car takes you along streets I have never had a reason to walk down, in a city I thought I knew reasonably well.
Which is how I came to photograph a wall without the faintest idea where I was.
Windover Pianos. Gramophones, records, music. Strings and small goods. Cash or easy terms. Windover pianos were built by the British Piano Manufacturing Company, established in Kentish Town in 1877, and by 1929 the firm was showing not only grands and uprights but player pianos, gramophones and wireless cabinets. Pianos are at the top of the wall. Below them are the gramophones and records that would go on to empty a good many front parlours of pianos, and this shop was selling both, on the same easy terms.
It turns out to be Wandsworth High Street. Still legible after the best part of a century, on a building that has since gained a grey mansard and a satellite dish.
And a little way along the same street, at number 59, stands the oldest surviving Quaker meeting house in London. It was built in 1778, on a site where Friends have met since the 1670s. One of the early members of that meeting was William Mead, who in 1670 stood trial at the Old Bailey for unlawful assembly alongside a young Quaker preacher called William Penn. The jury declined to convict them. The judge had the jurors fined and shut up without food until they changed their minds, and when they still would not, one of them took the matter to the Court of Common Pleas and won, establishing that a jury cannot be punished for its verdict. Penn went on to found Pennsylvania.
I had lunch yesterday with some of the men I went to Philadelphia with.
I made the airport with forty five minutes in hand, at which point the flight moved from a quarter to two to five past three. So no sprint to the gate. Lunch in the No1 lounge, then Plaza Premium once a space came free. The Uber was not cheap. We are boarding.
