One of the many collections held in the Library and Museum at Great Queen Street is that of photographs and prints. The three largest subject areas are pictures of individuals (including members of the Royal family), group pictures, often at ladies nights or public masonic events, and pictures of masonic buildings and their interiors including Freemasons’ Hall in London.
     Before photography came into use in the middle of the nineteenth century, the pictures are in the form of engravings and the collection proliferates once photography became common and affordable.
     The collection has a number of uses including as a resource for family historians, lodge historians and for exhibitions. Over the last couple of years, in a project supported by Supreme Grand Chapter, two Library and Museum staff, Derek Hammond and Michael Coleman, have been cataloguing this material, starting with the pictures of individuals.
     The catalogue of the collection is available on line at www.freemasonry.london.museum. There is biographical information and, where copyright permits, the catalogue entry also includes a digital image of the engraving or photograph.
     Several lodges have their own albums with images of Masters and other members. In the album of the Bank of England Lodge No. 263, which is on loan to the Library and Museum, these start with delightful water colours and then become photographs.
     Leonidas Caldesi, one of the first photographers to gain the patronage of Queenbrary and Museum’s own collection by the photographer Edward Haigh, a member of St Albans Lodge No. 29, is a useful source for images of the major masonic figures in the 1860s and 1870s.
     Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), was photographed by Charles Watkins in his regalia shortly after being installed as Grand Master in 1875. Reproductions of this photograph were advertised for sale and many of them still survive in masonic halls across the country. Advertisements for photographers had started to appear in the masonic press from the 1870s; the patronage of the Grand Master opened the way for other freemasons to be photographed in their regalia.
     A number of Victorian society photographers were also members of lodges including Charles Orsich, who ran the Royal Masonic Photograph Studio in the Strand and William Downey (a member of Mizpah Lodge No. 1671), who was often summoned to Balmoral with his camera and held a Royal Warrant as Photographer in Ordinary.
     The Library and Museum has recently been given a collection of photographers’ trade cards assembled by Stephen Dunderdale. This includes examples from photographic studios all over the country, most of which feature the square and compass or other masonic symbols.
     The images of interiors and buildings often record lost views. One example of this is a photograph taken by Bedford Lemere and Co. The firm became the foremost architectural photographers of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods with a wide range of clients including not only architects but also building owners, builders, decorators and specialist craftsmen.
     The company style aimed to convey the maximum amount of information. Using a special camera, long exposures and usually photographed early in the morning in dull, diffuse light using very small lens apertures, this ensured crisply detailed definition over the entire image.
     On at least one occasion, Bedford Lemere photographed the interior of the Grand Temple at Freemasons’ Hall in London. In the centre of the picture there is a rare image of Sir John Soane’s Ark of the Masonic Covenant, a triangular cabinet which held the Articles of Union.
     The cabinet (although fortunately not the Articles of Union) was destroyed in the fire at the Hall in 1883, and the Hall itself was demolished in the early 1930s, so this photograph, like so many others, is an important document of the past.

Any work on masonic photographers is indebted to David Peabody’s research and I have used his article The Portraits of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No 2076, published in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Vol. 107, in preparing this article.

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