‘BUILDERS OF THE TEMPLE OF THE NEW CIVILISATION’: ANNIE BESANT AND FREEMASONRY

ANDREW PRESCOTT

I love Co-Masonry, and feel it to be cruelly hard that after introducing it into Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and India I should be sacri- ficed by the Sup[reme] Coun[cil]. Annie Besant, March 19241

A distinctive and colourful feature of civic life in Victorian and Ed- wardian Britain were the many parades and processions held by vari- ous associations.2 The most exotic of these were perhaps the parades of freemasons, which most frequently took place when the foundation stones of public buildings were laid “with masonic honours”.3 On 3 September 1911, one such ceremony took place at Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum.4 There was always great interest in seeing a masonic ritual conducted in public, but the cere- mony at Tavistock Square attracted greater curiosity than usual, be- cause the new building was to be the British headquarters of the The- osophical Society, and the stone-laying was performed by the Presi- dent of the Society, Annie Besant, one of the most controversial women in Britain, who was a thirty-third degree mason and Vice- President of the Supreme Council of Universal Co-Freemasonry, a form of Freemasonry which admitted women. This was the first time a woman mason had performed such a ceremony, and the Grand Secre- tary of the Order in Britain declared that

1 Draft letter of resignation by Annie Besant to the Secretary of the Supreme Council of Universal Co-Freemasonry, Adyar, 20 March 1924: British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Deposit 10305. 2 Prescott 2004. 3 See, for example, Stewart 2002; Prescott 2003a 7, 12-13. 4 Dixon 2001 1-3; Harrison 1911. The ceremony was reported in The Times, 4 Sep- tember 1911 2. Photographs of the foundation stone laying were published in the popular newspaper The Daily Mirror, 4 September 1911 11. 360 A. PRESCOTT

The ceremony…will be known throughout the masonic world; and arouse widespread interest amongst our Brethren, who have hitherto looked on the speculative science of Freemasonry as the exclusive pos- session of men, they will see that at last women are recovering their rightful place in the Mysteries, of which this science is a part.5

As Ann Pilcher-Dayton has described elsewhere in this volume, this event at Tavistock Square was not the first time that the women co- masons had paraded in public. Five months earlier, Besant had led a contingent of co-masons, dressed in the regalia of all degrees from entered apprentice to the thirty third and carrying lodge banners, in one of the great marches demanding votes for women.6 These 1911 processions emphasise the major themes which dominated the history of women in Freemasonry in Britain from its first appearance at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign up to the Second World War. First, the introduction from France of a form of Freemasonry which admitted men and women was an integral part of the women’s movement. The standard bearer in the Tavistock Square procession was Charlotte De- spard, the President of Women’s Freedom League,7 and many of the participants in this event, such as the social campaigner and novelist Edith Ward,8 were activists for women’s rights. As the author of the article describing the Co-Masonic participation in the suffrage march put it,

May the good augury of the future that Co-Masonry has established by asserting in an activity for centuries exclusively male, that humanity underlies sex and that sex should be no barrier to the search for Truth and the desire to serve, be a good omen for woman’s speedy victory in the vast field of political independence!9

5 Harrison 1911 161. 6 Dixon 2001 1-3, 5; Severs 1911. 7 On Despard, see Mulvihill 1989, but this gives little attention to Despard’s interest in Theosophy, describing Despard as (p. 36) ‘a long distance recruit to fin-de-siècle mysticism’, and does not mention her involvement in Co-Masonry. In 1911, Despard contributed an article to The Co-Mason: Despard 1911. In 1917, The Co-Mason car- ried an appeal from the committee of which Despard was a member seeking to set up the Brackenhill Children’s Theosophical Home, to be based on Montessori principles: The Co-Mason 9 (1917) 41. 8 Dixon 2001 134-135: ‘As a Co-Mason, she [Ward] used the order to promote her continuing commitment to equality between men and women’. 9 Severs 1911 129.