Welcome to the latest in this (very) occasional blog series of historical nuggets about Britain’s Hispanic communities. Today I want to share with you how Ancestry’s “England, United Grand Lodge of England Freemason Membership Registers, 1751-1921” (£) helped me to uncover a network of Spanish friends and colleagues. These registers were digitised from the collection of the United Grand Lodge of England held by the Museum of Freemasonry in London.

What’s Freemasonry?

Freemasonry is a worldwide, men-only society with its roots in the medieval stonemasons guilds. In modern times it has been primarily a social and charitable organisation and a source of networking for its members. Homepage of the United Grand Lodge of England / ‘Freemasonry Explained‘ (Ian Cobain, Guardian, 4 Feb. 2018)

What can the Freemason Membership Registers offer researchers?

Lots! If you are looking for an individual, the membership registers record information about the members of individual lodges, organised by lodge and by date of admission. The amount of detail included differs, but at the very least you should find a name, a date of admission, an occupation and an address, along with the dates on which each individual passed through the three degrees of membership, and the years for which he paid membership dues. Some registers will also tell you if a member joined from another lodge or moved on somewhere else.

The most useful thing for my research, however, was to see the individual admissions in context. Members of the same lodge would have spent a great deal of time together, building friendships and business networks, so identifying a man’s lodge brothers could provide contextual information not available elsewhere. In the case of my Spanish research, I was able to build from noticing a small group of five men joining the same lodge within a few weeks of one another to identifying an extensive network of London-based Spaniards whose interests ranged throughout the Spanish colonies. Cross-referencing the information from the registers with other more familiar genealogical sources has allowed me to build up a picture of these men, their relationships and their lives in London.

What did I learn?

Case Study: The founding Spanish members of the Lodge of St John and St Paul, Erith

On Saturday 3 October 1857, a group of men met at the Pier Hotel in the booming new riverside resort of Erith-on-Thames, about 14 miles downriver of the City of London. This was the first regular meeting of the new masonic lodge of St John and St Paul, chaired by its Worshipful Master elect, Cuban cigar merchant Luis Artus. Artus swiftly installed his officers, including Buenaventura de Cuadra as Junior Warden and Treasurer, Manuel Pitarc as Senior Deacon, José Jiménez as Junior Deacon and Francisco García Gastón as Inner Guard (thanks to Louise Pichel for clearing that one up!).* The new organisation was a ‘summer lodge,’ presumably established to occupy its members during the slower summer season. Over the next ten years, it would admit at least thirteen more Spanish members, all part of the same social and professional circle.

The senior figure in the network was Manuel Pitarc (c.1790-1876), who had lived in London since at least 1833. He had risen rapidly through London’s social and commercial networks, starting out as a grocer, then working as a language teacher, a ship broker’s clerk and eventually setting up on his own as a ship broker. His son Manuel Joseph (b.1839) joined the Lodge in 1858.

The group who joined the lodge alongside Pitarc and formed its first committee were all younger members of his professional network active in the Spanish Peninsular and Colonial trade:

• Buenaventura de Cuadra Gonzalez (1823-1874) was from a Seville merchant family of Basque origin, who had been brought to England by his father at the age of 16 and ran a commercial and general merchant house specialising in the Spanish and Cuban trade. Cuadra’s Cadiz-born nephew Eduardo Marzan de Cuadra (1826-1878), and his Seville-born business partner José Romero Valvidares (c.1825-1863) both joined the Lodge in 1858.
• Luis Francisco Artus (1828-1887) from the remote Cuban city of El Baga had followed his older brother José to London, where they ran a cigar import and tobacconist business just off Trafalgar Square. After José returned to Cuba, Luis stayed in London, first as a commercial clerk and later as a wine merchant. He fell out with the other members of the network, but remained a prominent figure in London Freemason circles.
• Francisco García Gastón (c.1817-1901), born in Cadiz but from a large Basque-Guatemalan family, had arrived in London by 1843. He ran a general merchant house specialising in the Spanish colonial trade and was also Consul for Ecuador in London.
• José Florentino Jiménez (c.1822-1876) was from the tiny Spanish village of Cabezon de Cameros in La Rioja and had arrived in London by 1845. He started out as a merchant’s clerk and eventually ran his own business specialising in wine and port. José’s younger brother Antonio Ignacio (1836-1899), joined the lodge in 1858 and married Manuel Pitarc’s daughter Emilia in 1863.

Spanish members joining up later included José María Mora (c.1816-1862; son of the prominent Liberal exile and politician Joaquín de Mora), Guillermo Vilches Videgain (1830-1880; Malaga-born commission merchant), Ramón Silva Ferro (c.1830-1889; Galician-born consul for Chile and Honduras), José María Ortiz, sherry importer Andrés Matheu, and Marcos Angel de Pereda.

What did the other Freemasons think?

Obviously, a British Lodge dominated by foreign citizens was a relatively unusual occurrence and it appears to have occasioned some disquiet among the Masonic hierarchy. In May 1861, the Grand Lodge of England investigated the WM of the Erith Lodge for ‘[admitting] as joining members two Spanish gentlemen who had been initiated in an irregular Lodge’.** The gentlemen in question were required to be ‘reobligated in the different degrees’ and the WM was ‘admonished … to be more careful for the future,’ although the Board did ‘[express] its high sense of the frank, honorable, and Masonic spirit which had been exhibited throughout the whole affair by the Spanish Brethren in question’. Which is nice.

* ‘St John and St Paul Lodge (no. 898),’ Freemasons’ Monthly Magazine, 1 Nov. 1857: 905-6.
** ‘Irregular Masons,’ The Freemasons’ Monthly Magazine, vol. XX. 1 May 1861: 215