How the Blitz destroyed Ulster Lodge’s early records

One reason the early history of Ulster Lodge No. 2972 is difficult to reconstruct is brutally simple: a large part of the original record was destroyed during the Blitz.

The Lodge’s 1953 Jubilee Review explains what happened.

The records were kept in the City

By 1941, Lodge records were being stored at the office of the Secretary, W. Bro. Morrison, at 5a Lawrence Lane in the City of London.

Those papers covered the Lodge’s history from its foundation in 1903 through to the early years of the Second World War.

They would have included the ordinary working memory of the Lodge: correspondence, minutes, administrative papers and records of members and meetings.

10 May 1941

On 10 May 1941, London suffered one of the heaviest raids of the Blitz. The Jubilee Review records that the building in Lawrence Lane was destroyed during the great raid on the City.

The Lodge records stored there were lost with it.

That single event created a permanent gap in Ulster Lodge’s archive.

Why the loss still matters

When the Jubilee history was written twelve years later, its author openly acknowledged that the account of the Lodge’s first fifty years was necessarily incomplete because so much source material had disappeared.

That helps explain why surviving booklets, newspaper reports, membership registers, personal papers and later recollections are now so important. Each surviving document can restore a name, a meeting, a visitor or a small piece of a story that might otherwise have vanished.

It also explains why some parts of the Lodge’s early history are much better documented than others. We are not dealing with a neat institutional archive that survived intact. We are rebuilding a history after a wartime loss.

The Lodge survived even when its archive did not

The contrast is striking. The records were destroyed, yet the Lodge continued to meet during the war. The same Jubilee booklet records that Ulster Lodge did not abandon its meetings even during the bombing of London.

The paper history suffered badly. The institution itself carried on.

That makes the archive work being undertaken today more than an exercise in nostalgia. Every surviving register, booklet and newspaper cutting helps restore part of a history that the Blitz almost erased.

Related reading

• The day a flying bomb passed over Ulster Lodge
• How Ulster Lodge secured its place at Freemasons’ Hall
• Four unusual moments from Ulster Lodge’s first fifty years

Source: Ulster Lodge No. 2972, A Jubilee Review, 1953.