When in 1883 J.M. Baernreither, a Doctor of Law from Venice, visited Britain he got very excited. He found that ‘there [had] gradually been formed an aristocracy of workmen, a kind of vanguard, which already counts many hundreds of thousand’, actors in a ‘gigantic’ ‘theatre’ of ‘associated life’. For Baernreither these Working-Men’s Orders as he called them, were ‘offshoots of, or in imitation of, Freemasonry’.
    These Working-Men’s Orders, Secret Orders or Affiliated Societies as they were better known, were numerous with over 150 of them recorded in 1874. They boasted an array of names, such as the Loyal Order of Alfred’s, the Loyal United Anglo Saxon’s, Orders of Britons, the Ancient Order of Comical Fellows, the Druids, the Foresters, the Free Gardeners, the Order of Ancient Grey Beards, the Odd Fellows, the Order of Old Friends, the Sons of Phoenix, the Rechabites, the Ancient Order of Romans, the Ancient Order of Shepherds, and more. Each, in turn, generated for themselves a mythological history; the ‘Druids claimed links with Moses’, the Foresters with the Garden of Eden, the Rechabites with ancient Egypt and the Odd Fellows with the Roman Empire.
    The reality was that these associations had their roots in the eighteenth century but were institutions of the nineteenth. For brevity we will concentrate on the Odd Fellows, the most prolific: by the mid-nineteenth century there were over thirty-five different Orders of the Odd Fellows – such as the Nottingham Ancient Imperial, the Grand United, the Ancient Noble Order of United Bolton Unity, the Independent Order - Manchester Unity to name a few. Some were quite small, consisting of a handful of lodges but the largest, Manchester Unity, had over 4,500 lodges by the early 1890s. When compared with the Freemasons – United Grand Lodge of England at the same period mustered 2000 lodges – the numerical magnitude is impressive.
    It has been argued that the Odd Fellows started to form lodges in London in the mid-eighteenth century. This may well be the case since by the 1790s they were well enough known for publishers to engage engravers to produce caricatures of their initiation rites. What we do know is that by the end of the eighteenth century, they had lodges all around London under a Grand Lodge. This Grand Lodge was issuing dispensations for Lodges to be formed in the provinces; in the North with two in Sheffield, others in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Liverpool; and in the South with lodges in Maidstone, Canterbury, Dover and Lewes with others in Bath, Shrewsbury, Windsor and Richmond.

Odd Fellows’ Rituals

From what can be pieced together, the Odd Fellows were not ‘offshoots’ from Freemasonry but like many other organisations were ‘in imitation of Freemasonry’. As with Freemasonry these lodges met in taverns and had food and drink at their meetings. Early reports of initiation rituals suggest that the candidate was blindfolded before he entered the lodge room. He was made to walk on ‘loose planks [that formed] an imaginary road with rough knots left at intervals, some faggots of wood and bundles of cork, so arranged as to form rocks and forests’ - giving much the same effect as early eighteenth century Freemasons being led blindfolded over a floor covered with sand. The Odd Fellow then made his obligation, his blindfold was removed and the presiding officer then confronted him in a ‘long white beard and wig’ and a long apron ‘with the emblems of mortality painted’. This officer stood in front of a pedestal on which was a skull and a scythe. All around him the other members of the lodge, also in white surplices, had their faces covered by ‘grotesque masks’. The masks had the same effect as described in reports we have of early eighteenth century Freemasons grotesquely distorting their faces as the initiate’s blindfold was removed. The importance of masks to the Odd Fellows can be seen in the images used in early nineteenth century certificates and pottery. Then, as with the Freemasons, he was given the secret signs and passwords. Following this lectures were given on the benefits of charity.
    It is not until the late eighteenth century that we can get a feel of who these Odd Fellows were. In Sheffield, the Freemasons had two lodges, the first formed in 1765. By the 1790s they were joined by two Odd Fellows’ lodges. The masonic lodges in Sheffield reflected the social composition that modern academic research is revealing across the country. They were predominantly composed of artisans and shopkeepers with a small tail of others: an attorney, a surgeon and some gentlemen. In this period the occupations of all four lodges mirrored Sheffield: there were cutlers, file-makers, grinders, hammer makers, silver-platers and a mix of other trades, not least working masons.
    Functionally, what both the Freemasons and the Orders were doing at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was filling that gap in ‘civil society’ left by the demise of the Social or Religious Guilds at the end of the Reformation and the Craft Guilds at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They would bury their dead, look after widows and orphans and relieve members in distress, not least as they moved around the country from lodge to lodge seeking work. In public, they would wear their regalia at a brother’s funeral and take part in the funeral rites. Both Freemasons and the Orders alike played a part in civic life. In Sheffield, at the opening of the General Infirmary in the 1790s, the thirty-five trade clubs took part, each carrying different coloured silk flags. The freemasons were preceded by two trumpeters dressed in white on white horses, a band, two Tylers with swords and, in the first of many banners, one of crimson silk depicting Faith, Hope and Charity.
    Coming down another street were the Odd Fellows: ‘The Most Noble Grand Master’ with a scarlet sash, trimmed with silver lace, and his jewels suspended by a narrow ribbon of the same colour, carrying in his hand a gilt staff. The supporters wore green sashes, medals and gilt wands. An elegant flag, of white silk, was carried. It delineated many symbolic figures of the Order.
    It was not just the large cities which held such parades: in Lewes, with the visit of the King and Queen, they had the trade clubs of the Carpenters and the South Saxon Lodge of the Freemasons and the Royal Clarence Lodge of the Odd Fellows stationed on either side of the carriage road in full regalia under their respective banners.
    With the French Revolution and then war with France, the State passed a raft of legislation making national associations illegal. The Freemasons only just escaped when they agreed to give the names of each lodge member annually to the local magistrates. The Freemasons then formed into the United Grand Lodge of England. Lodge meetings became separated from the eating of food and drinking. Regalia became much plainer as did the membership certificates. Gone were the glorious colour and the emblematic images. In simple terms we begin to witness perceived respectability and internalisation of English Freemasonry which helped to seduce the fast growing white-collar Victorian managerial and professional middle-class into membership.

Benefiting Society

The Orders, on the other hand, after the set-backs caused by the Napoleonic Wars, emerged in public from the second decade of the nineteenth century little altered.
    What the Orders did was to recognise the down side of the astringent doctrine of laissez-faire economics which added to the ‘ancestral hazards of illness, accident and old age, unaccustomed perils of unemployment and unpleasant anonymity of the new industrial centres’. To achieve their aims they needed to become legal, not least to safeguard their funds. The only route open to them was to register under the Friendly Societies Act of 1790 which, for them, was far too restrictive – it allowed the collection of funds but not the regalia, the rituals or the feasts. In the end, after a Select Committee took place at which they gave evidence, a new Bill was passed. While each lodge had to register their rules they were able to maintain their rituals of initiation, pass words and signs and their regalia, banners and other social activities that many would have liked to remove – there were complaints of the ‘reckless extravagance, trumpery regalia’ but as the Friendly Society actuary, Charles Hardwick, noted with some pleasure in 1856, ‘no expenditure, however great, in the manner adopted by the modern “scientific” insurance companies, could have commanded much success, for the simple reason that it neither is, nor was, adapted to the education, taste, or condition of the people addressed. The “respectable” companies now generally employ an artist to design for them an allegorical emblem which they display as conspicuously as the Odd Fellows do’ on their sashes and aprons.
    But it was not just that. The Orders were all-round organisations with social activities, adult education classes and more. On a practical level there were a range of benefits not the least that lodges would employ their own doctor. By the late nineteenth century it would be the Odd Fellows’ Hall in many towns that would be used by many different community organisations. It was the different Orders, Trade Unions, Churches, and Sunday Schools that would parade around the towns on annual Hospital Day collecting money.
    These Working-Men’s Orders, Secret Orders or Affiliated Societies were so important with over 12 million members that when Lloyd George started the embryo Welfare State in Britain with the first National Insurance Act of 1911, it was in partnership with these societies. If one skims through the pages of Bevridges’ Report - the 1940s working document from which the Post-War Welfare State derived - so much of what these organisations had in place was a model which now forms part of our National Health Service.

Andy Durr was Mayor of Brighton and Hove, currently Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. Member of South Down Lodge, No.1797. This article summarises some points from a chapter of his book in progress, The English Artisan and Fraternal Association.