Love & Honour No 285, Learn of their Master in 1935

The provincial team, led by W Bro Richard Winter made a fraternal visit to the lodge of Love and Honour no 285, where Bro Gary Oatley was raised to the sublime degree of a Master Mason.

At the same meeting Brother Vincent Baughan of The Royal Cumberland Lodge No.41 in Bath gave a short talk about the “life and times of William Thomas Webber”, Worshipful Master of The Lodge of Love and Honour No.285 in 1935. 

He talked of William’s life, from his birth in 1871 to his death in 1953, and spoke of William’s early life working on the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway, before following in his father’s footsteps by becoming a farmer, first at Platterwell Farm, Beard Hill and later Field Farm on the edge of Shepton Mallet.  He included William’s initiation, a possible “double first”, with Henry Flower, an assistant steward to The Duchy of Cornwall, and his installation as Worshipful Master in 1935.  An echo of today was highlighted, in that when William was initiated in 1921, Britain was dealing with the aftermath of a pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, and he touched on the consequences on small Somerset and Dorset towns of the infamous Beeching railway cuts.

He produced some interesting documents from the time.

At the same meeting W.Bro Tim Fussell of Socrates Lodge 373  presented his late father’s Past Master’s jewel back to the Lodge. His late Father W.Bro Roger Fussell PPrGReg  was master of the lodge of Love and Honour in 1975/76