A Secret Order Is Four Boxes. One Of Them Runs The Bar.

MARTLEBURY, England — The order that meets on Cordwainers' Row does not own the bar downstairs. It does not own the hall, the chairs, the boiler, or the £190,000 in the benevolent fund.

In law it owns nothing at all, and it cannot be sued.

That is not a boast, and it is not a defence. It is the reason the other three boxes exist.

We paid a charity lawyer and a chartered secretary to draw one provincial order's structure from documents anybody can download for nothing, and to write down what each part was for before we told them whose it was.

There are four parts.

The four boxes

The ritual body. The Provincial Grand Lodge of the Sable Lantern, Marches, is an unincorporated association — a group of people and a rule book. It has no legal personality. It holds no property, employs nobody, and files nothing, and it is not required to.

The freehold company. Lantern Hall (Marches) Limited was incorporated on 9 September 1974 as a company limited by guarantee. It owns the hall. Its members guarantee £1 each. Its directors appear on a public register with their service addresses and the month and year of their birth.

The charity. The Sable Lantern Benevolent Fund (Marches) was registered on 3 June 1975. Income last year, £41,300. Its seven trustees are barred by clause 7(c) of their own governing document from holding any office in the ritual body — the clause the legend reads as a firewall, written to stop charitable money paying for dinners.

The trading company. Lantern Hall Trading Limited, 3 February 1975, runs the bar and hires the rooms out for weddings and wakes. Turnover last year, £61,400. It gave its entire profit to the charity — £11,400 — and paid no corporation tax on it. That transfer is the whole purpose of the fourth box.

Below all four sit thirty-four local lodges, each a separate association, each under every threshold there is. That is why the order appears to file small accounts. The order is not one thing.

Why 1974

On 14 October 1972 a plasterer named Cyril Brackenbury, then sixty-one, fell down the stairs at his niece's wedding reception in the hall and broke his hip.

The body he wanted to sue did not exist in law. So the writ named nine men personally — the treasurer, the secretary and seven members of the hall committee — at their home addresses. It settled in 1974 for £1,850 and costs.

Their solicitor was Gerald Pethybridge, of Pethybridge & Sant, forty yards up the same street. His client file survives in two lever-arch files, and the successor firm released it to us with the order's written consent.

The note of 11 March 1974 is four sentences long.

The rest of it proposes a company to hold the building, a trust to hold the charitable money, and — "when the Revenue's new tax has settled" — a fourth body for the bar. Value added tax was eleven months old.

The same four boxes everywhere

Duncan Threlfall-Osei rebuilt the group from the accounts before we told him what it was. His first note back to us assumed it was a sports club.

He then set the shape against twenty other bodies in the same county: a bowls club, a rugby union side, a village hall, a scout group, and a cathedral, which has a chapter, a charity, and a trading company for the shop and the café.

"You have not found the anatomy of a secret society," he said. "You have found the shape an English solicitor draws when a charity has a bar."

What the structure actually leaks

Here is the part the legend has backwards.

An unincorporated association publishes nothing. No names, no addresses, no accounts, no income, ever, to anybody.

Because of what happened in 1974 and 1975, this order publishes twelve years of accounts for three entities; the names of forty-one different people who have served as directors or trustees, with service addresses; the charity's income to the pound; the bar's turnover; and the title number of the hall.

All of it cost us nothing. It took an afternoon.

The closest thing in our own vault, PX-2083, is four pages of a French association's registration file from 1956 — two founders, one private address, an object concerning affordable housing — produced at a counter in a morning because the law required somebody to write it down. It has been the most useful document we hold on that subject for seventy years.

What we could not get

The thirty-four lodge books. Each lodge is below the registration threshold, each has a treasurer and a bank account, and nobody outside the room has seen inside them.

And Cyril Brackenbury. He drew his settlement in November 1974. After 1976 we lost him, and the Provincial Grand Secretary is right that we stopped looking sooner than we stopped writing.

The most secret-looking object in this story is a lever-arch file in a solicitor's office in a town of thirty thousand people. What is in it is a man's hip.