Martin Short - The Brotherhood

In eight more hearings spread over two months, the Committee examined 14 further witnesses including the Lord Chancellor (Lord Mackay of Clashfern) and representatives of the Association of Chief Police Officers, other police organizations, the Magistrates Association and the Law Society. The Committee’s report prints the entire hearings and a welter of correspondence from other people with a personal or professional interest. Spokespersons for public institutions and professional bodies tended to give a know-nothing yet ‘best of all possible worlds’ response to the suggestion that Freemasonry was prevalent or powerful among their workforces or memberships, but other contributors gave accounts that wholly supported the negative views that Stephen Knight and I had voiced years before.

I strongly recommend that anyone who wishes to plunge deeper into this morass reads the entire report. It contains the testimony of the two final witnesses, the then Grand Secretary of the United Grand Lodge of England, Commander Michael Higham RN, and its librarian, John Hamill.

Their session was far more peppery than mine, for they were confronted by tricky questions about specific cases of wrongdoing that I had raised in my evidence. In particular Commander Higham did his best to rebut allegations that other Freemasons had committed misconduct so gross that, if true, amounted to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Here is an edited extract from my submission on what I called, ‘A Quintessential Masonic Scandal’ that proved ‘the Craft is still able to play a debilitating role in Britain’s police - to the detriment of innocent citizens who are not Masons and at a grotesque cost to public funds’:

In 1988 a Leicester store owner and his adult son were staying at a hotel in Blackburn. Before going to bed they felt like a drink but it was now around midnight and the main bar was closed. However, on the ground floor they discovered a cash bar was still serving drinks, so they bought two pints of bitter and stayed by the bar.

At this point several burly men in dinner jackets told them they had no right to be drinking there and ordered them out. The father and son had no idea what had provoked this outburst but they said they would just drink up and go. The other men said that if they did not leave immediately, they would call the police. The father responded, ‘Then call the police!’, to which some of the men responded, ‘We are the police!’, pulled out what they claimed were warrant cards and quickly proceeded to beat and kick the daylights out of them.

Neither visitor weighed much over ten stone, whereas two of their assailants each weighed at least fifteen stone. The four men who later claimed they had been restraining the father from chucking one of them over a balcony weighed a total of 54 stone. The father was convinced they were trying to throw him over the balcony.

The pair were shocked to discover that they were arrested, not their assailants. They were taken to Blackburn’s central police station, charged with actual bodily harm and assaulting police officers, and kept in the cells overnight. The following morning they were freed on bail and allowed to return to the hotel, only to discover their rooms had been cleared and all their property seized. The management said it was refusing to release the property until they had paid £500 for the damage they had allegedly caused to the hotel and to two of their assailants.

They agreed to pay £180 just to get their keys and property, then, battered and dishevelled, they made their way to the car park. When they got there they saw that their car had been entered by key, its contents disturbed, its hubcaps removed and all its tyres deflated. After spending hours inflating their tyres with no help from the hotel, they drove back to Leicester to notify their solicitors, get urgent medical attention, and get their widespread injuries photographed and recorded. These proved to be severe.

It was months before their solicitors received a bundle of witness statements from Lancashire telling an unrelenting account of how, without provocation, the pair had viciously attacked half a dozen men, including the hotel manager, merely because they had been asked to leave a private function. The father and son knew the entire case was a farrago of lies. Even so, it constituted a very serious case which, if it were to succeed, could put them in jail for eighteen months.

Their solicitors were bemused not only by stark contradictions in the evidence but by the fact that, even at committal, none of the statements named the function which the witnesses had been attending. Such an omission was extraordinary, especially as the alleged cause of the affray was the visitors’ violent refusal to leave the function. It took six months before the CPS’s Burnley office disgorged the information that it had been a Masonic affair ‘organized by wives of some of the members’.

When the case came to court in February 1989 the prosecution evidence repeatedly caused the jury to laugh out loud. The witnesses contradicted themselves, and each other, about where they were when they saw what, and they wholly failed to explain how two slight and weak men could have inflicted so many injuries on so many huge and fit physiques. What is more, all the injuries alleged by the Victims’ were medically unproved. One who had been threatening to sue the father and son for losing an eye came up with nothing better than a hospital casualty report written several hours after the affray, saying he had a slight abrasion of his eye but still had perfect vision.

The prosecution conceded that almost all the ‘victims’ were police officers (most still serving) and that the lodge to which they all belonged was essentially a police lodge: the Victory. The function was indeed a private ‘Ladies’ Night’, but there were no signs to that effect at the entrance to the function room, so how could the visitors have been expected to know? The investigating police officer had made no attempt to find anyone who might support the visitors’ account. Only during his cross-examination did it emerge that this officer was himself a Mason. So was the hotel manager who was a member of the same Victory Lodge. The jury rejected the idea that the two skinny Leicester men, who had demonstrably suffered severe beatings, had attacked so many huge policemen. It found the father and son not guilty. The verdict’s obvious implication was that their Masonic accusers had been lying and should have been in the dock instead: for perjury and conspiracy, as well as GBH. The judge awarded costs to the defendants.

While they tried to recover from this ordeal, their solicitors began to seek civil redress against seven individual Victory Lodge members, the hotel group and the Chief Constable of Lancashire. Their final statement of claim would allege wrongful arrest, assault, malicious prosecution, conspiracy to injure and libel.

As they developed the case for damages, they naturally looked for assistance to an investigation which had been carried out by the Police Complaints Authority. For years they had no idea what it had found out, but eventually got wind of testimony the PCA had gathered from the hotel’s night porter which wholly supported the father and son’s account. Despite its clear and fundamental relevance to the civil case, the PCA stubbornly refused to part with it or to divulge the porter’s whereabouts. It also cited ‘public interest immunity’. When the civil judge considered this argument, he threw it out. But this was in 1995, five years after the PCA inquiry had interviewed the porter.

During those five years the solicitors had pursued every route to gather evidence to support their case, so not having had early access to the porter had cost them tens of thousands of pounds in wasted time and effort. Back in 1989 their private detective had discovered a woman who had also been on the staff and saw the entire affair. She also confirmed the victims’ account of unprovoked assault by members of Victory Lodge, but was said to be too scared to get involved.