In the middle 1980s, I visited a house in Northamptonshire called Sulgrave Manor, notable as the ancestral home of the Washingtons. We were conducted around this house by a guide who bore an uncanny resemblence to the late Larry Grayson (a well-known and rather camp tv personality and comedian of the time). At the end of the tour, we ended up in the attic where there was a small museum of Washington memorabilia. The guide let us look at this for a few minutes and then asked if we had any questions. "Yes," piped up one chap, an American. "I don't see any account here of Washington's Masonic connections. Why is this?" The guide looked embarrassed, shuffled his feet a bit, and mumbled something about how "We don't talk about that in this country."

The American went spare.

Afterwards, I was talking to him in the garden. He revealed himself to be a 33rd-degree Mason from Philadelphia. I explained that after Operation Countryman - the exposure of Masonry being used in London to cover collusion between the Metropolitan Police and the criminal fraternity - Freemasonry had got a bad press in the UK. And (through reading this book) I was able to tell him that the Grand Lodge in the UK would not admit, even to other Masons, that his degree of Craft even existed.

This book was topical in the middle 1980s. It remains useful background information today, for even though the Craft now has a more public face, it carefully chooses what it does and does not reveal.

The appendix, giving an account of the Masonic initiation ceremony, also confirms the account given in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'....

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