Discovering Friendly & Fraternal Societies: Their Badges and Regalia Victoria Solt Dennis, Shire Publications, Somewhere in Buckinghamshire, 2005. Paperback, 160 pages, £10.99. ISBN 0-7478-0628-4. Available at The Shop, Freemasons’ Hall, London.

Lord Beveridge, the prime mover behind today's Welfare State, dreamed that his reforms would transform Britain so that 'at last human society may become a friendly society… each linked to all the rest by common purpose and by bonds to serve that purpose. So mankind in brotherhood shall bring back the day'. Of course this was not to be the case, and we had politicians and their civil servants running the show and collectively almost destroying fraternal associations, with their 15,000 lodges, that Beveridge was so keen to emulate in 1940's. Either by default or pure genius the Library and Museum of Grand Lodge has been acquiring artefacts of the material culture of different fraternal associations for generations. While some have been on display at the museum most have laid dormant in the stores; but recently, thanks to funding from the Supreme Grand Chapter, lids came off boxes, drawers were opened and Victoria Solt Dennis has accessioned this, the most important collection of regalia, jewels artefacts of fraternal societies of the common people in any museum.
    The bonus is that Shire books decided to publish Discovering Friendly and Fraternal Societies based on this collection, beautifully illustrated with 265 colour pictures, admirably researched and well written by Victoria Solt Dennis. The importance of this book is that with no pretension it demonstrates the central role played by Craft Freemasonry and the forming of the Grand Lodge in 1717 as a prototype for fraternity and fraternalism in modern society. The copy explains this admirably, but the book comes into its own with interplay between text and image in all of the chapters, from symbolism to detailed studies of numerous different associations. While Freemasonry may have been the model, in 1875 there were just 1085 Craft Lodges but the Oddfellows had 3074 Lodges and Foresters 4323 Courts; while being registered under the Friendly Societies Act with regulated membership contributions and scaled benefits for members in distress, they had traditional histories, initiations, moral lectures, glorious membership emblems and regalia: items of pure folk art, as this book shows so well. For today's Freemason this book is a must, not least as it kills the myth that as an organisation our ideas and form were limited to the few. On the contrary, millions of ordinary people joined fraternal associations based on this model throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
    Andy Durr