The Xtra Diary - Exhibition - The Patriot Mason: Freemasonry in American Society

Published: 1 July, 2011

FREEMASONS Hall is perhaps best known to the younger generation through its role as MI5 HQ Thames House in the hit BBC drama, Spooks.

This is, of course, not the Freemasons’ only mysterious connection. Ask a certain gentleman who regularly takes his placards to Parliament Square and you’d hear that the secretive organisation is responsible for most of the world’s evil. Perhaps that’s why the Freemasons want to put out a more friendly face, with their new exhibition, The Patriot Mason: Freemasonry in American Society, taking centre stage from July 4.

The show, at the art deco temple in Covent Garden, boasts as its centrepiece a mannequin in the splendour of a 1960s full dress uniform.

The splendid feathers, sword and scabbard of the Knight Templar of the Sixties make it more reminiscent of the age of chivalry than that of the Beatles.

But Diary hears that the icing on the cake will be an ostrich feather-trimmed “chapeau” hat. A sign of more mystery, or an endearing reference to the glories of the past?

‘Weak’ Reagan statue unveiling

A CONTROVERSIAL bronze statue of former US president Ronald Reagan will be unveiled next week close to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair.

Granting permission for the structure in 2009, planning chiefs at Westminster Council decided to waive their own rule that 10 years should pass from the time of death before a commemorative statue can be erected.

And minutes from a behind-closed-doors meeting which took place in 2008 revealed that Westminster’s Public Art Advisory Panel had been “lukewarm” about the statue, which was designed by sculptor Chas Fagan.

The minutes stated: “The panel were uneasy about a number of aspects of this proposal. Their concerns fell into these categories: selection of artist, quality of work and the appropriate use of the site. They added that the ‘pose was felt to be weak’ and that ‘the piece was felt to lack the gravitas required for a distinguished subject as Reagan’.”

But the President Reagan Memorial Trust Fund persuaded City Hall’s planning committee to give the go-ahead to the statue, which will be inaugurated by Baroness Thatcher, with whom Reagan had a famously close relationship, and his wife Nancy Reagan, 87.

The unveiling will take place at a private, ticketed and extremely security conscious event in Grosvenor Square on July 4.

The ‘Bard of Bayswater’ and magnetic pull of West End...

HE never had the fame and the glamour, but Sam Selvon – you might call him the Bard of Bayswater – gained literary repute for his vivid depiction of the day-to-day lives of Caribbean immigrants in 1950s London.

Tomorrow (Saturday), academics from across the world will gather for a one-day special conference at the University of Warwick to share their thoughts on the man who made the mundane lyrical.

The Lonely Londoners, set in 1950s Bayswater and considered Selvon’s greatest work, tells the story of the hand-to-mouth existence faced by long-standing black Londoner, Moses Aloetta, and the newly arrived “Sir Galahad”.

While Bayswater is a land of dark backstreets and dingy basements in Selvon’s London, the West End represented a surviving wonder of the dreams which lured characters from their island homelands to the big fog.

To Galahad, Piccadilly Circus “have a magnet for him, that circus represent life... That circus is the beginning and ending of the world”. Selvon tired of London eventually, settling in Canada before his death in 1994. But just as Dickens’s Bleak House ensures you never walk down Chancery Lane again without imagining the coach of Mr Tulkinghorn and Jo the crossing-sweeper, Selvon’s poetic writing transforms one’s perception of the Marble Arch and beyond.

Even today, when gentrified Bayswater seems wholly transformed from the soot of Selvon’s age. 

Soup run ban is canned by Archbishop

THE latest high-profile figure to criticise Westminster Council’s proposals to ban soup runs from streets close to City Hall? Step forward the Archbishop of York. 

Writing in the Guardian at the weekend, Archbishop Dr John Sentamu asked: “Can it be right that we now live in a country where some councils want to ban soup kitchens and stop volunteers offering care and support to the homeless? We can judge the health of a nation by the way it cares for its vulnerable.”

Earlier this month, Westminster councillor Daniel Astaire said he was listening to the views of soup run providers, adding that the council would “avoid going down the legislative route”.