Page 46 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

46 An Account of the

taken to ensure better dinners & that if it should be decided to move the Lodge
to consider the House to which the Lodge should be taken.” At the next meeting in
r
December “It was ... moved by P.M. Addison & seconded by PM & Treas . Warner
that the Lodge be removed to the Clarendon Hotel Bond St and that the Treasurer
& Secretary do make the necessary arrangements - Carried unanimously.”
The Treasurer and Secretary carried out their instructions and the Lodge met at
the Clarendon Hotel on 14 February 1865, with Bro. Muggeridge in the Master’s
chair. There the Lodge had its quarters till 1873, when the hotel was pulled down.
It stood on the west side of New Bond Street, a little to the south of Grafton
Street, on a site now occupied by part of Asprey’s shop (No. 169).
The last meeting at the Clarendon Hotel took place on 8 April 1873. The
November meeting was held, as a temporary expedient, at the St James’s Hotel,
Piccadilly. It was at this meeting that Bro. Walter Webb was elected a joining member,
though his long connection with the Lodge actually began in the previous April,
when, a visitor to the Lodge, he was, in the words of the minutes, “elected an
Honorary Member till the next Lodge when he will be ballotted for”. Bro. Webb
took a leading part in the activities of the Lodge for some forty years; readers have
already been introduced to him and more will be heard of him later.
On 9 December 1873, the Lodge met for the first time at Freemasons’ Hall
– not of course the present building but its predecessor. The minutes read “The
Lodge at present having no place of meeting owing to the demolition of the
Clarendon Hotel ... it was ... carried nem: con: that the meetings of the Lodge be
held for the future at the Freemasons’ Hall.”
The change was not a success; only three months later it was “Resolved that
the next Lodge meet at the Freemasons Hall for work and adjourn to the Queen’s
Hotel, Cork Street for the Banquet”. Cork Street lies to the north of Piccadilly,
behind Burlington House, nearly a mile from the Freemasons’ Hall, and no doubt
the arrangement proved inconvenient, for in April 1874 the Lodge decided to
move altogether to the Queen’s Hotel. But only two meetings, those in November
and December 1874 were held there before the Lodge was again on the move, and
on 6 January 1875 (wrongly minuted as 6 December 1874) we find the Lodge
meeting at Long’s Hotel, Bond Street, as a Lodge of Emergency, when