Page 100 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

100 An Account of the

We have fortunately other light on Bro. Crew as a singer. At a meeting of
the Hertford Lodge on 30 September 1879, the Chairman, in proposing “The
memory of the Founders”, said:
He felt that he must say a word about Bro. Crew .... There were people alive
now who could recollect his powers of vocalisation; anything more exquisite
than his singing he had never heard, and he pleased the members so greatly that
it was felt they must have the ladies present to listen to him. Accordingly, when
singing was going on, the doors of the Lodge were opened, and the ladies, who
were in the adjoining room, were permitted to hear, and this was continued for
some time. (Applause).
The arrangement, however, not unnaturally led to difficulties and had to be
given up.
This is taken from Extracts from the Records of the Hertford Lodge, 1829-1929, a
copy of which W. Bro. Elton Longmore, the Secretary of the Lodge, very kindly
presented to the writer.
At the expense of digression this opportunity may be taken for a few words
about Bros. Crew and Whitsed. Bro. Crew was a very active Mason. As we have
just read, he was a founder of the flourishing Lodge at Hertford, of which he was
the first Master in 1829; he was J.W. of the Nine Muses in 1835 but did not
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proceed to the chair, and Secretary for twenty-six years, from 1836 to February
1862. He was W.M. of the Grand Master’s Lodge, No. 1, in 1828, and Secretary
of the Institution for Girls from 1841 to 1861, when he met with a serious
accident, or according to another account had a paralytic stroke, and retired on
pension. A portrait of Bro. Crew, painted by Bro. F. P. Green in 1862, now hangs
in the magnificent Dining Hall of the Girls’ School at Rickmansworth; the Lodge
subscribed five guineas towards the cost. Bro. Crew, a tall and substantially built
man in the late sixties, is shown seated, facing slightly to the right. He is clad
in the conventional black coat, white linen and black bow of the day; the face,
serious but not ungenial, is shaven except for a fringe of beard beneath the chin
(as worn by Mr Gladstone), and the iron-grey hair is still abundant. A welcome
touch of colour is supplied by a pile of Masonic regalia lying on a table alongside.

33 Bro. Crew’s P.M’s. jewel came again into the hands of the Hertford Lodge by purchase in
1906, and is worn by the I.P.M.