Page 48 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

48 An Account of the Lodge of Nine Muses

The Willises succeeded Almack, and the story is well known of the refusal
of the Willis of the day to admit the Duke of Wellington, who came in trousers
instead of the indispensable breeches and stockings.
By 1879 the glory had long departed, but Willis’s Rooms were still in request
for meetings, dinners and entertainments.
On the last night of its tenancy at Willis’s Rooms the Lodge returned for the
banquet to its original site, and dined at the Thatched House Club in St James’s
Street. Then, after a transitional meeting at Long’s Hotel on 11 February 1890,
the Lodge took up its quarters at the Grand Hotel, Trafalgar Square, for the first
time. Here the Lodge met till 1916, to return again for two years, 1925-7, when
the hotel was pulled down.
The Hotel Metropole was on the east side of Northumberland Avenue, at
20
the Trafalgar Square end; (older members of the Lodge will recall the spacious
and commodious rooms where the Lodge met, and the handsome, if somewhat
over-exuberant, panelling and mantelpieces in dark walnut.) The move from
21
the Grand Hotel in 1916 was due to its being taken over by the Government for
war purposes.
The later meeting-places are too familiar to call for comment, but it may be
explained that the two meetings at 37 Essex Street, Strand, during the war years,
were held at the offices of the Secretary, Bro. Webb, informally and mainly to
preserve continuity.
The Hotel Metropole still stands, occupied as Government Offices; when the
windows are open the passer-by may gaze upon the pillars of the now profaned
Temple, for eight years the scene of our Mysteries.

20 In the original this is misprinted as the ‘The Grand Hotel.’
21 Again this is in 1939.