The highest-ranking Freemason in the judiciary has told FMT that, in his opinion, Grand lodge should have a register of Freemasons available for anyone who wished to inspect it, including journalists and MPs.
    Speaking from his office in the House of Lords, the Rt Hon the Lord Millett PC, who is a Royal Arch Grand Officer, also told how he did not take the ritual and the secrecy at all seriously, adding: “But then I don’t think anyone in the higher echelons of Masonry really does.”
    He called for greater openness within the Craft and told why he thought younger people were being put off Masonry. He also referred to the “extraordinary nonsense of the masonic handshake.”
    The 66 years old Baron Millett of St Marylebone in the City of Westminster, who was made a Life Peer in 1998, is one of Britain’s highest ranking Appeal Judges.
    He joined the Craft at the ageof 36.

Obviously, you enjoy your Freemasonry?
    Oh yes, very much but I don’t get much time for it these days, I’m afraid.

What do you get from it?
    I think fellowship, a night out with the boys really, I have always been happy to be with men’s company I suppose: at the Bar, at the Bench and so on. It’s good fellowship really. I don’t take the ritual and secrecy at all seriously really, but then I don’t think anyone in the higher echelons of Masonry really does. I like to do the ritual well, I like to see it done well, but I’m not a stickler or a pedant for the accuracy. Indeed some of my most joyous moments in Masonry have been when things go disastrously wrong, as they do from time to time!

So you do not look into the spiritual aspects?
    Well, I find some of the parts of the ritual very moving; I think the message is a very good one. I am one of those people, I am not deeply religious at all, but I like the masonic message. I particularly like the ecumenicist aspect I suppose, and the way we can all accept a sort of what is really, I suppose, a lowest common denominator of belief. The ethical message is of course extremely good, it is very much a 19th century English message which I think is deserving of wider dissemination really. The trouble is our critics don’t have anything remotely like as high a moral standard as we insist on ourselves. I have of course sat on Grand Lodge’s Appeals Committee. I take the chair at appeal hearings about three times a year and have done that probably for about four years.

So you say you do not take the ritual and the secrecy at all seriously?
    I don’t think one should take it too seriously. I think that one could get far too pompous about it and I don’t think one should. I deplore the secrecy. I think we should be much more open about it.

Would you go so far as to say the ritual should be open?
    The real problem about making that open is that you do not want the initiate to know about it. The whole beauty of the ceremony is that he does not know what is in store for him. He takes an awful lot of that on trust. I was mercilessly ribbed when I was initiated. Several senior members of my chambers were already masons and I knew that because there was no secrecy about that; I knew they got a lot out of it but I never felt any inclination to join. And then one day a member of the Bar not in my chambers said, out of the blue, that if I would like to become a mason he would be happy to propose me, and suddenly I realised that as I was 36, if I did not say yes, then I never would, and so I accepted, and then, having accepted, of course my mates in chambers knew, and then on the morning of the day, one of my friends in chambers said he hoped I had put on a good pair of underpants!
    It is important the initiate does not know what is in store for him. And when I was being led around in the dark, blindfold, and there was me in this ridiculous garb and knowing that I was in full public gaze of a whole lot of my associates and professional colleagues who were all there, I realised no one was laughing, and I felt they had all been through it too and they know what I am feeling - and I don’t think that should be spoiled.
    So there are good reasons for keeping it private. On the other hand I see no harm in having it available for those journalists and politicians who actually want to find out about it; I don’t say it should be available at every local library but I don’t see why if an MP wants to find out about it he should not be able to find out about it.

Do you feel every mason should say ‘I am a mason’?
    Oh that certainly, but that is specific. There has never been any secrecy about our Masonry; there is no reason why the aprons and the regalia should not be pictured. There are a lot of pictures about (and I have actually got one up at my house of me in my Supreme Grand Chapter Acting Officer dress) and between the wars when a new civic building was opened it was the custom of the Freemasons to walk in procession through the town in their regalia and I think that is a wonderful thing. It shows they have a civic responsibility and it shows they have nothing to be ashamed about. The Orange Order do it and - leaving the politics out - it’s a similar sort of thing. What’s the secret about our regalia? Nothing at all.

Do you have any ideas why it became a secret?
    Well, I understand it was a reaction to the war and I don’t understand entirely, but I do know Nazi Germany persecuted the masons and when a lecture was given to the Old Harrovian Lodge, a Nazi cartoon was produced from a German newspaper of 1933 and it was horrific. One forgets how virulent the anti-semitic and anti-masonic anti-religious propaganda was. It was absolutely horrendous. It portrayed two villainous looking individuals each clutching and strangling some nice Aryan young boy (obviously a Hitler Youth member) and one villainous individual is holding a cross with a bible on it and the other manages at the same time to have the Star of David and holds the square and compasses. They always talk about the victims being the Jews and the homosexuals and the Gypsies but actually Freemasons were also part of the list and they always have been. Freemasonry has always been one of those bodies that every dictatorship has had to quash. It is difficult to know why but they have always seen Freemasonry as inimical to totalitarianism and I think probably it is. I am rather proud of that.
    But I think possibly as a result of that, and I don’t know if that was the reason but it may be, Freemasonry rather turned in on itself and became very secretive and then of course it has only been in the last few years that we have realised that it has been counter-productive. It is very difficult to persuade people we are not a secret society. And also of course I do insist to people, and again it is something that ought to be known more widely, this extraordinary nonsense of the masonic handshake is never used out of the lodge and, if it were, if anybody tried to sidle up to me and tried to use it, a) I am not sure I would recognise it at once out of context, but b) if I did, I would be rather offended.

Why would it offend you?
    Because if he wants to make it known to me he is a fellow mason he ought to know perfectly well he can tell me. He could say, ‘I understand you are on the Square and so am I. What lodge are you a member of?’ We can talk about it openly, but doing it like that the other way suggests he is after some secret favour.

Do you feel that this is why, for some people who do not know, they perceive Masonry through the secret handshake?
    Yes it is, and I feel we should make it much more public. I go around saying or using the expression that it is no different from being a member of a golf club and if you find someone you meet is a golfer and you are, then you tend to chat about it. ‘What club are you a member of?’ or suchlike and you can chat about it; there is nothing secret. On the other hand if an MP wants to find out who are all the golfers in the country it is no earthly good writing to the Amateur Golf Association; they would have no idea. It would be quite difficult if you thought people were hatching up a plot in their local golf club - where they would be much more likely to, incidentally, than in a lodge where there isn’t really that much time! - there is no way of finding out.”

Registry of members

“But I have to say (although I am not sure that Grand Lodge agrees with this) it does seem to me extraordinary that Grand Lodge doesn’t have a registry of members. I do understand that you join your individual lodge and it is the individual lodge which has the membership list, but surely it wouldn’t be very difficult, and especially with computers, to have a central registry where every member is entered. After all they have a Year Book and it is certainly possible to find out who is a Grand Officer, and I am not sure how far down it goes, whether it also includes London Grand Rank and Provincial Grand Rank I don’t know. Well then, why not all members? Why is it not available? I am not suggesting that it should be freely available but again, if a journalist wants to find out, it should be made easy for him. There is nothing secret about it.

Probably that takes us on to Chris Mullin MP, the former chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee…
    Yes, well, I think he was publicity seeking. He had absolutely no basis for his inquiry. It produced nothing and yet he has not withdrawn his comments so far as I am aware. I think he treated Higham unfairly. He put great pressure on him and he was only a paid employee. He was a Secretary and so on, and he did not have the power to deal there and then with Mullins’ requests. I saw some of that interview on television and I thought he behaved oppressively. He was wielding some power as chairman of a Commons Committee just as a judge does, and no judge would dream of behaving the way he did.
    Arising from that is the move for masonic members of the civil service and local government to make themselves known.
    Yes, and I think that is wrong. I am not speaking for Grand Lodge because I think Grand Lodge takes a different view. Personally I would much prefer that every person who becomes a mason, joins a lodge, goes on a lodge membership list and that is automatically forwarded to Grand Lodge and anyone who wants to find out can look it up. Nobody should be compelled to disclose it but if anyone wants to find out they can go and look it up and that is the sensible way of dealing with it.
    The real problem of this way round from the judicial side is this. It has immediately led, it has already led, to a number of litigants who promptly demanded a judge should cease to sit because he was mason. Nine times out of ten a judge isn’t a mason in fact; or the litigant has demanded to know whether a particular judge is a mason when he is told to mind his own business, and the problem is that he then says, ‘Well, I am entitled to know’ and when the judge says ‘No you are not, because it is irrelevant’ he says with some justification ‘Well, if it is irrelevant why does the government require you to disclose it?’ and in a way the government has given litigants ammunition.

Does the government require to know if judges are masons?
    Well, we were all asked to respond. A circular was sent out. We could decline to answer; a few did. The interesting thing is, as far as I am aware, no judge who was a mason refused to answer because Grand Lodge asked them to answer, and so when people say to me that 20% did not answer, those are the ones who aren’t masons but who as a matter of principle did not answer, and one man, one Lord Justice I know personally, who is of German origin, not Jewish - his family left Germany because of the Nazis in the ’30s - he refused to answer. He is not a mason but he refused to answer on principle. He wrote a letter to the Lord Chancellor explaining that the reason why he was not prepared to answer was that he only knew one other government which had ever done this and that was Hitler’s in Nazi Germany and he regarded it as the thin end of the wedge and the same sort of thing and he was right.
    Now, I can tell you one little story in this respect which shows how ridiculous it all is. I gather I am being taken to the European Court of Human Rights because (and the whole thing is ludicrous) in the Court of Appeal I gave a judgement dismissing an appeal from a deputy High Court judge. The appellant, who had lost below, had now appealed and was a litigant in person. It was a probate action, I forget if he was trying to upset the will or confirm it, I think he was trying to upset it, and after the case was over and he had lost, he had then read the newspapers and discovered I was a Freemason (because I have never concealed the fact, I am quite well known as a Freemason) and he then discovered the deceased was a Freemason, the solicitor to his opponent was a Freemason, and we then discovered that the deceased was a Freemason, and the deputy High Court judge who had tried the case was a Freemason. He complained therefore that he did not get a free and independent hearing before an impartial tribunal and he would go off to Strasbourg. Well, of course the Lord Chancellor’s Department wrote to me to say of course they were to defend it but would like me to put on record what I knew about all this. I said yes, I knew the deputy judge was a Freemason because we are in the same lodge but the idea I would dismiss an appeal from him because he was a fellow member of my lodge is ridiculous. I have often allowed appeals from him. It is no skin off his nose. I said to put it in perspective. As fellow members of the Chancery Bar Lodge we dine together at the very outside three times a year and in practice it is probably once, but as fellow Benchers of Lincoln's Inn I at that time was lunching with him virtually every day. No one thinks there is anything wrong in me lunching with him on a daily basis but they pretend there is something wrong that I dine with him once or twice a year.
    It is ridiculous. As for the deceased and the solicitor being Freemasons, I can’t say there was anything in the papers to alert me but I don’t remember if there was. If there had been and I had noticed, it would really have passed me by as a piece of irrelevance, and that is all I can say.
    What does concern me is that it does give ammunition to the litigants to try and choose their tribunal which is wrong, and secondly, it is having a terrible influence on lodges getting young people in.
    I think Masonry is having an uphill struggle as it is because of social changes. People, especially barristers, are not coming forward to join lodges because they feel it could do their career prospects harm; they don’t trust the assurances that are given and they say well, even if the assurances are right, why take the risk? Why take any risk? And so we are losing young members, or not getting young members, and that is very unfortunate. But it will blow over I am sure.



Lord Millett joined the Chancery Bar Lodge in 1968 and has twice been Master (having inititated his son). He also joined the Old Harrovian Lodge, of which he has been Master. He was exalted in Royal Arch Masonry in the early 1980’s and became First Principal. He was Grand Officer and became Acting Registrar for one year (1982) and later became Past Junior Grand Warden (his present position) and was in September last year made a Royal Arch Grand Officer, being made Acting Scribe. Interview by Lance Freeman.