Jersey Masonic Museum

by Crispin Paine

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The Jersey Masonic Temple, near the centre of Jersey’s capital St Helier, is fronted by a full-height portico with four impressive Corinthian columns; above the rusticated basement storey are tall arched windows between attached columns. The ‘Temple’ itself – the principal ritual room – is a big windowless hall, almost the full height of the building. On the upper floor is the Jersey Masonic Library and Museum.

Figure 1. The Jersey Masonic Temple today. Photo: Crispin Paine.

Can we really include Masonic collections among ‘Gods’ Collections’? Freemasonry is not ‘religious’ we are told: ‘Freemasonry explicitly and openly states that it is neither a religion nor a substitute for one’ (Rosser 2014, 12). Yet outsiders often do regard Freemasonry as a kind of religion; its ritual dramas and their mythological references, its rich material culture and the elaborate respect masons pay to all of these and to each other, all recall Christian and Jewish practices. Though discussion of religion at meetings is forbidden precisely to prevent the development of any dogma, all masons are required to believe in a Supreme Being. They construct their Temples as ‘sacred spaces’ in which a very standardised set of furnishings and decorations is designed to impart through their symbolism the moral betterment of men, and to provide an effective space for elaborate lodge rituals with the same aim.

The standard decorations and furnishings have been classified as ‘Support, Covering, Furniture, Ornaments, Lights and Jewels’ (Mackintosh 2018). Support means the columns that signify strength and uprightness, but in particular ‘Boaz and Jachin’, freestanding columns intended to recall those in Solomon’s Temple, that stand in front of the Master’s chair. Covering is the high ceiling representing the universe, the realm of the ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’, God, represented by a large G. Furniture here means the Pedestal in front of the Worshipful Master’s Chair, on which rests a Bible or other sacred scripture, and the square and compasses. The Ornaments include the checkered mosaic floor which recalls the lights and darks of life. Lights include three burning tapers which represent the sun, the moon, and the authority of the Master of the lodge whose Chair dominates the east wall of the room. Finally Jewels here refers to such symbols as the Ashlar blocks, Tracing Boards used for teaching, and the three stonemason’s tools: the square, the level and the plumb.

Besides these fixtures, individual masons wear their own ceremonial aprons, badges and medals (the ‘jewels’, so beloved in Freemasonry). Perhaps the drinking glasses, plate, table decorations and gavel used in the ‘Festive Board’ meal which follows every Lodge meeting should also count as ‘ritual kit’. 

Many Temples have accumulated donations of all sorts; gifts which in another kind of temple might be made to the deity – ex votos – are in a Masonic Temple gifts to the brethren. Many Temples celebrate their history through portraits, and many keep records and pictures of their philanthropic work. There is an extraordinary variety of souvenirs bearing Masonic symbolism (Masonry rivals Methodism in its wealth of souvenir china and glassware), including ‘trench art’ or POW work from the Napoleonic wars onwards. When masons die their masonic souvenirs are often donated by friends and family to the Temple; some have since been transferred for safekeeping to masonic museums.

Freemasonry in Jersey 

Freemasonry developed in England in the earlier 17th century, when middle-class men started joining working stonemasons’ guilds, and gradually transformed them from workers’ trade guilds into ‘speculative’ lodges which focussed on teaching self-knowledge through participation in a progression of ceremonies, and which used stonemasonry-related symbolism to represent a range of spiritual aspirations (MacNulty 1991).

Though there were military lodges in Jersey early in the 18th century, Freemasonry came fully to Jersey with Major Charles Shirreff, an army officer who had become a mason in America in 1758 at the age of 21. He founded Jersey’s first Lodge seven years later. By the middle of the next century Freemasonry was very well established on the island; a painting of the 1841 Laying of the Foundation Stone of the Victoria Harbour, now in the Jersey Museum and Art Gallery, shows a group of Freemasons prominent in the crowd. 

A generation later, in 1864, the Jersey Masonic Temple was built in Stopford Road to provide a permanent home for the Provincial Grand Lodge of Jersey, and Jersey’s nine craft lodges which previously mostly met in inns. It was a very ambitious building, especially given that there were only some 200 masons in the island. 

From a surviving photograph (fig. 2) we know what the temple’s ritual room, at least, was like before the War. The furnishings and decoration followed the almost-universal pattern. Against the east wall stood the Chair of the Worshipful Master in an ‘Egyptian’ frame, and against the west that of the Senior Warden. In front of each were Pedestals, around the room the Chairs of the various officers, and prominent were the Kneeling Stools, checkered carpet, celestial and terrestrial globes on their pillars, and other symbols (Knocker 1947). On the walls hung portraits of distinguished masons and silk embroidered banners of the various masonic bodies in the Province (Perrin 1993, 25).

The old Museum

The Stopford Road Temple had a reading room from the start; indeed, a member of a French-speaking lodge gave a collection of books in the 1850s, which was the start of the library. In 1917 a library and museum were formally set up, and in 1927 George Knocker was appointed Librarian and Curator; he remained in post until his death in 1952. He had been a marine engineer, spending time in Hong Kong and Bangkok and serving in the signals branch of the Royal Engineers during the Great War. Under his leadership a number of important collections of Masonic items were obtained.

No catalogue of the pre-War museum collection survives, but the main donated collection was that of Daniel Vonberg (1776-1842) one of the Freemasons depicted in the 1841 painting. Vonberg was a Prussian who had settled in Jersey; he was one of the founders of Freemasonry on the Island and ran a circulating library. His collection included ivory-handled seals, jewels (medals), and certificates (Knocker n.d.). A similar collection was Lieut. Col. Gardner Vatcher’s collection of jewels. The museum contained hundreds of other jewels, Sunderland pottery, Masonic glass, early aprons, and early Certificates, ‘as well as a great number of sundry objects of Masonic interest which had been gathered over a long period of years and carefully preserved and arranged’ (Knocker 1947, 10). The museum attracted many gifts and bequests from local masons; for example the Jersey Archive preserves the 1939 will of Charles Henry Wilson of St Aubin in which he left the museum a gold presentation cigarette box and Masonic regalia.

The loss of the old Temple collections

When in 1204 the king of England lost the ancestral lands of Normandy to the king of France, at least he hung on to the Channel Islands, just off the Normandy coast. The islands still keep their Norman legal and governmental systems, a few people still speak their French dialects, and for all that they depend heavily in very many ways on the United Kingdom they remain very independent in spirit, and at least some islanders are conscious of owing allegiance not to Queen Elizabeth II, but to ‘Notre Duke’, Elizabeth.

Figure 2. The Temple facing East before the Occupation. Photo: Perrin p. 57.

That loyalty was rewarded by the protection of the Royal Navy through centuries of Anglo-French wars, until the disaster of July 1st 1940, when the indefensible and demilitarised Channel Islands had no option but to surrender to German forces. The Channel Islanders suffered military occupation until Liberation on 9th May 1945, an Occupation that became increasingly harsh.

Freemasonry had been a major target of the Nazi Party from its beginnings. Nazis saw Masons as part of an international conspiracy with the Jews to dominate the world. Everywhere the Nazis took power Temples were closed and Freemason property confiscated (Thomas 2011), though the actual treatment of individual masons varied greatly. It is not known how many Freemasons throughout Europe died in the Holocaust and before, but one estimate suggests between 80,000 and 200,000 (Hodapp 2005, 85).

Soon after the German occupation of the Channel Islands, though, the military authorities announced that ‘provided no further masonic meetings were held nothing would be done to interfere with the property or its contents.’ Relying on this assurance, the Provincial Grand Master of the time, Charles Malet de Carteret, gave instructions that the Temple should be locked up, but there was no need to remove any of its contents (Perrin 1993, 26); the caretaker remained in residence. People began to trust the proclamation of the occupying power on its first day: ‘in the event of peaceful surrender the lives, property and liberty of peaceful inhabitants is solemnly guaranteed’.

But the ordinary German troops, the Wehrmacht, were soon followed to the Channel Islands by Nazi ideological forces. On 19 November 1940, not three months into the Occupation, the Geheime Feldpolizei – the Secret Field Police – arrived at the Stopford Road Temple, demanded all the keys to the building and put seals on all the doors. Then, on Thursday 23rd January 1941, a squad of special troops from the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR, see below) arrived to take an inventory of the contents, and to photograph the main rooms, including the museum. They were followed four days later by further squads of Einsatzstab from Berlin, who commenced the systematic looting of the building. The Temples in Guernsey and Alderney were similarly sacked and looted (Hamon 2016).

Figure 3. A corner of the Library and Museum after the looting. Photo: Perrin 1993, p. 47.

The 60+ soldiers stowed books and smaller articles into large packing cases in three 3-ton lorry loads, after which the furniture was loaded loosely on other lorries. This included the magnificent Master’s Chair, two Warden’s Chairs and other State Chairs, the pedestals, the ‘Boaz and Jachin’ pillars, kneeling stools, tracing boards, banners, carpets, curtains, etc. Even the 1914-18 War Memorial was ripped out.

Most of the museum’s mahogany cases themselves were smashed, while picture frames from which the pictures had been ripped were thrown on to a bonfire in the caretaker’s garden. Almost all that survived were (surprisingly perhaps) the portraits on the walls and the carved panels commemorating the past masters of the various lodges. The destruction took two days, and much of it seems to have been discretely observed by the curator. The items were shipped to France, together with that from the two Guernsey Temples, on captured freighter S.S. Holland, and thence to Berlin (Knocker 1947; Perrin 1993; Hamon 2016).

The collection in Germany: made to work for its enemies

The Einsatzstab was a Nazi Party organization dedicated to seizing cultural property, and using it to argue against ‘false’ ideologies and peoples. It was led by the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg (Wittman and Kinney 2016); in January 1934 Hitler had appointed him as the cultural and educational leader of the Reich. The very day the ransacking of the Jersey Temple was in progress, Hitler ordered Rosenberg to prepare an elite Nazi Party university to open after the war. To support this the Einsatzstab accumulated vast quantities of books and works of art confiscated from Jewish organisations, from individual Jews, from Freemason Temples, and from other ‘opponents’. According to Einsatzstab estimates, 1,418,000 railway wagons full of books and works of art were sent to Germany, and another 427,000 tons sent by ship, including 550,000 books of which some 300,000 ended up in the specialist anti-Jewish library in Frankfurt [1].

Less than a week after the ransacking of the Jersey Temple, Rosenberg wrote to Martin Bormann: 

Enclosed please find a memorandum on an extraordinarily interesting find which my Einsatzstab made on the Isle of Jersey occupied by German troops. I am asking the Führer to allow me to exhibit here in Berlin this material which is extremely interesting from a historic point of view . . . – with the appropriate captions necessary for political education (Perrin 1993, 36[2]).

There was already a considerable tradition of the Nazis using museums and exhibitions for anti-Mason propaganda. In 1935 the SS had published guidelines on how to close down a Temple, record the contents and use them for propaganda. Temples in a number of towns including Berlin, Hanover, Nuremberg, Düsseldorf and Erlangen were opened – at least temporarily – as anti-Mason museums (Thomas 2011, 127); that at Chemnitz saw a million visitors between 1936 and 1943, and lasted until the end of the War. Extraordinarily, one actually survives today in Salamanca in Spain (Sánchez 2017). They recall the many anti-religion museums created in churches in the Soviet Union, where too the objects were made to argue against their former nature (Paine 2010; Shakhnovich 2019).

Link to the ‘British Freemasonry Exhibition’ film

Though much is still to be learnt about the Anti-Freemasonry Exhibition that used the Jersey material, it seems to have opened on 15th March 1941, in the Kunstlerhaus art gallery in Bellevuestrasse, Berlin. We now know a good deal about its contents, thanks to the discovery of a contemporary film in the German National Archives. The film shows both the Berlin exhibition, and one in Brussels. The main features of the former were the reconstruction of the Jersey Temple, and a reconstruction of the Chapter Room from one of the two looted Guernsey Temples; it contrasts with the latter’s ‘house of horrors’ approach [3].

Figure 4. The Jersey Temple reconstructed in the anti-Masonic exhibition in Berlin. A page from a contemporary German magazine, by courtesy of Simon Hamon.

Figure 5. Another page from the magazine. Freely translated, it reads: “The temple of the Freemasons' Lodge, Jersey, shown in the Berlin exhibition 'British Freemasonry', commissioned by the Führer to inform the NSDAP's [Nazi Party’s] intellectual and ideological training and education. Freemasonry has posed as a doer of good deeds, but it is widely known that its actual aim is to poison international relations. In England, in association with Judaism and the Anglican Church, it has openly proclaimed the goal of supporting England's world domination. This highly-recommended exhibition also gives interesting information on the historical foundations of Freemasonry and its effects on international politics.”

The museum today

In 1946 some 250 books from the Temple library were found in the Offenbach Archival Depot in the American Zone of Germany, and were returned to Jersey (Perrin 1993, 54). However, the Temple only ever recovered books; not a single item of furniture, masonic ritual artefact or jewel has ever resurfaced.  It seems very likely that much of the Jersey Masonic Temple collection was destroyed in Allied bombing of Berlin at the end of the war. However, all hope of rediscovering some things is not lost; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has taken the lead in setting up a project to list all the loot seized by the ERR (Grimsted 2017). So far the project has not recognised any Jersey material, but that was just a drop in the ocean of loot from the occupied countries of Europe (Simpson 1997); investment in the project could be well worthwhile. A similar project is that of the German Lost Art Foundation.

Despite the loss of the whole of the old museum, both museum and library were built up again in Jersey after Liberation with astonishing speed. At first the reassembling masons had to improvise (There are home-made aprons of sailcloth in the museum and in the London Museum of Freemasonry (Stubbs & Haunch 1983, 43)), but very soon donations and purchases had reequipped the Temple and begun to rebuild the museum.        

Figure 6. The Temple facing east today. Photo: Crispin Paine.

Many of the new furnishings have their own stories. Thus the chairs – almost thrones – of the Immediate Past Master and the Provincial Grand Master came from the Court of the Independent Order of Foresters; they date from 1842, while the Master’s chair was made to match. The Boaz and Jachin pillars are bedposts from a Brother’s four-poster bed. The tracing boards by a local artist were given in 1946, but their mahogany cabinet was one of the few things to survive the looting and dates from 1855 (Goss 1993, 37, 61).

Figure 7. The Library and Museum today. Photo: Crispin Paine.

Today the Library and Museum holds 21,000 books, records & objects, and the Librarian Curator Geoff Morris (a picture restorer) has greatly developed the documentation to meet the increasing public demands on both Library and Museum. The object collection is attractively displayed in purpose-made showcases, both in the very-cramped Library & Museum itself and elsewhere in the Temple. Besides the expected aprons, banners, jewels, china, silverware, photographs and so on, there is (for example) an exhibition of ‘Freemasonry and the Post Office’. Before Covid the Temple and its Museum could expect between 1,500 and 2,500 people through the door at open days.

Figure 8. Museum showcases in one of the Temple rooms. Photo: Crispin Paine.

Figure 9. A display of historic regalia. Photo: Crispin Paine.

Other Masonic museums 

As we have seen, all Masonic Temples hold collections of ‘ritual kit’, most also hold a variety of other furnishings, decorations and pictures, while a good many have been given a variety of personal effects. A much smaller number of Temples have actually organised part of their collections into a formal ‘museum’. ‘Masonic Lodge Info’ offers a list of just 35 Masonic museums worldwide, including nine in the UK.

It is the personal collections given or bequeathed to their owner’s Temple that chiefly distinguish these museums. Thus some have a particularly fine collection of ‘jewels’, others hold collections of masonic glassware and ceramics that a decorative arts museum might envy. Other collections are more unusual; after his death in 1969 the widow of one of America’s leading clock-collectors began a series of donations, eventually giving 140 timepieces to the large Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Masonic museums differ, too, in the ways they use their collections. Most focus on telling the story of their Lodge and its members, so the principal displays are of portraits, no-longer-used ‘ritual kit’, personal regalia and jewels, and so on. Their main audience is their members. Other Temples focus rather more on addressing outsiders, and while they too tell their lodge’s story, they may also serve as local history museums, giving much attention to lodge members’ lives in the outside world.

The biggest Masonic Museum is probably the Museum of Freemasonry in London’s Freemasons’ Hall, while the Masonic Museums in Canterbury and Worcester both claim the finest collection in the UK outside London. Freemasons’ Hall was founded in 1717, and its museum occupies splendid galleries in the 1869 building. It holds 30,000 objects and its interpretation (website, displays and public programming) focuses very much on the personal and curious stories that lie behind them, as well as on the more usual art-historical items like ceramics and glassware. Key exhibits include the jewels made of aluminium from a wrecked bus in the Changi wartime prisoner-of-war camp, the recently-collected items illustrating Freemasonry during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the mason’s mallet from a Scottish Temple claimed to be made of timber from a Spanish Armada shipwreck.

However, there are new approaches. The new Museum of Freemasonry in Riga, Latvia, plans a Room of Reflections, a meditation room that ‘will let our visitors enjoy unusual for the city center silence surrounded by the ritual objects. Those objects are used in Freemasonry before initiation.’ This museum, too, has deliberately collected material from other countries, and is very much aimed at non-Mason visitors. The larger Masonic museums are increasingly getting involved with collections research, as shown both by their websites and exhibitions, and by their publications, for example Saunders & Dennis 2003, or Newell et al. 2013. As more research is undertaken into the collections held by Masonic Temples, we shall learn more and more about this very distinctive part of the ‘gods’ collections’ tradition.

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Notes

[1] https://www.tracesofwar.com/articles/4515/Rosenberg-Alfred.htm See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsleiter_Rosenberg_Taskforce.

[2] Perrin’s file of these materials is in the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, at GB 1556 WL 884.

[3] The issue of the Völkischer Beobachter (Norddeutsche Ausgabe) for 12.3.1941, referred to by Perrin 1993, 40, is missing from the British Library’s microfilm, but the Brusseler Zeitung for 15.3.1941 is at British Library MFM MF272. The German Bundesarchiv film is at https://www.bundesarchiv.de/benutzungsmedien/filme/view/B97280?back_url=%2Fbenutzungsmedien%2Ffilme%2Fbasket. Accessed 10.6.2021.

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Bibliography

Goss, Colin. 1993. The Story of Jersey Freemasonry. Jersey: Colin R. Goss. [This book is an updating of Knocker, George Stodart. 1930. Freemasonry in Jersey. Lowestoft: M. F. Robinson & Co.]

Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. 2017. Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder: A Guide to the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and the Postwar Retrieval of ERR Loot. Amsterdam: NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Revised edition. Available at www.errproject.org. Accessed 28.3.2021.

Hamon, Simon. 2016. Dissolution of Freemasonry in the Channel Islands. Channel Islands Occupation Society Review 44, 155-168. Available at https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=325886908291329&story_fbid=528767001336651. Accessed 16.5.2021.

Hodapp, Christopher. 2005. Freemasons for Dummies. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing. 

Knocker, Geo. S. n.d. The Daniel Vonberg Collection: Province of Jersey Masonic Library and Museum. London: Masonic Record. 

Knocker, George Stodart. 1947. The Sack of a Temple i.e. the Masonic Temple, Jersey. The Masonic Record. [Copies are held in Jersey Archives and the British Library]

Mackintosh, Phillip Gordon. 2018. Freemasonry’s Sacred Space in America. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Available at https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.545. 

MacNulty, W. Kirk. 1991. Freemasonry: A Journey Through Ritual and Symbol. London: Thames & Hudson.

Masonic Service Association. 1998. Masonic Libraries: A Listing of Masonic Libraries in the United States, Canada and England. Silver Spring, MD: The Masonic Service Association. 

Newell, Aimee E, Stelling, Hilary Anderson and Swanson, Catherine Compton. 2013. Curiosities of the Craft: Treasures from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts Collection. Boston: Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts and Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library.

Paine, Crispin. 2010. Militant Atheist Objects: Anti-Religion Museums in the Soviet Union. Present Pasts, 1(1). Available at https://www.presentpasts.info/articles/10.5334/pp.13.

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Saunders, Nicholas and Dennis, Mark. 2003. Craft & Conflict: Masonic Trench Art and Military Memorabilia. London: Savannah Publications.

Shakhnovich, Marianna. 2019. Comparative Religion and Anti-Religious Museums of Soviet Russia in the 1920s. Religions 21.1.2020. Available at https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/2/55. Accessed 28.3.2021.

Simpson, Elizabeth (ed.) 1997. The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath, The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Stubbs, James & Haunch, T.O. 1983. Freemasons’ Hall: The Home and Heritage of the Craft. London: United Grand Lodge of England.

Thomas, Christopher C. 2011. Compass, Square and Swastika: Freemasonry in the Third Reich. PhD Dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available at https://core.ac.uk/works/2060085 Accessed 6 July 2021. 

Wittman, Robert K. and Kinney, David. 2016. The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich. London: William Collins. 

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Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Geoff Morris for his generous welcome on my visit to the Jersey Temple, and for sharing his extensive knowledge of the collections and their history. I am very grateful too for further help to Simon Hamon of Guernsey, Teresa Mayfield, and the Bundesarchiv staff.

Crispin Paine, July 2021.