WORSHIPFUL Brother Peter Nunn, the District Grand Secretary of the District Grand Lodge of Hong Kong and the Far East, is sitting in the hot, semi-twilight of the Blue Room of Zetland Lodge. This discreet building at 1 Kennedy Road is where all the arcane rituals of Hong Kong freemasonry take place. To the public, these rites involve rolled-up trouser legs, the Ministry of Funny Handshakes, a peculiar jargon and things generally going bump in the night. But today Nunn is participating in what, even by masonic standards, is a singularly unusual activity. He is answering questions.
For a member of what has been called 'the world's largest secret society' he must feel he's in a tricky position. Is there not, for example, a memorable punishment for blabbing - something about the offending tongue being 'torn out by the root and buried in the sand of the sea at low water mark, or a cable's length from the shore, where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in 24 hours'? 'That's no longer the case,' Nunn replies, promptly. 'The promise was adjusted, those penalties were taken out in the 1980s. You take the obligation on a book like the Bible or an equivalent because every freemason has to believe in a Supreme Being.' Still, it must be novel for him to be sitting conversing with a journalist (and a female one at that) in the inner sanctum. Could he imagine having done this 20 years ago? 'No. I wouldn't have talked to you. You wouldn't be through that door. I wouldn't even have told you that I was a freemason. I would have evaded the question.' So would he have lied? 'Not lied,' says Nunn, evenly. 'Evaded.' IT IS not for nothing, perhaps, that the rites of freemasonry are known as 'the craft'. If you are a member of a secret society you are, almost by definition, bound to acquire a degree of cunning, and the masons have had centuries of practice at covering their tracks. Although there are supposed to be connections with the Crusaders, the group is more directly related to the stonemasons from which it takes its name, its symbols (compasses, gavels, chisels) and its interdenominational homage to the Great Architect. In English medieval times, these wandering artisans felt that they needed some social cohesion and formed secret guilds: secrecy was necessary in an era when groups of men gathering in one place might be accused of plotting treason against the Establishment.
The piquant irony of that now, of course, is that their many critics feel that the freemasons are the Establishment and that what goes on behind closed doors is the deeply ancient Rite of Back-scratching. When a book called The Brotherhood was published in 1983, its author, Stephen Knight, claimed that as many as 33 of the 50 chief constables of England and Wales were masons. The impression was given of a cabal of policemen and judges and government officials winking and nodding their way to undeserved power all across Britain in particular, and the globe in general.
The damage which the book caused seems to have taken the brotherhood genuinely by surprise. The hostility in the media was particularly marked, as if the masons were a combination of the Ku Klux Klan, say, and one of the more dubious religious sects. In Hong Kong, where the Cantonese word for 'freemasons' means 'society which helps each other', comparisons were naturally drawn between masons and triads.
As a counterbalance to such adverse publicity, the society decided to indulge in a spot of spin-doctoring. It now has a press officer, it has made a video (music by Mozart, a mason; quotes from Kipling, a mason) and it endlessly attempts to reassure the public that masonic meetings are nothing more than jolly Boy's Own affairs which raise money for charity - $4 million in Hong Kong alone last year - which is channelled into a central fund and administered to causes to be nominated each year. It's as if Enid Blyton's Secret Seven have grown up, and ditched the weedy girls, of course. The trouble is that once you take the sinister element out of masonry, you are left with something that can look very, very silly. Perhaps it is no coincidence that comedian Peter Sellers, former Goon and bumbling Inspector Clouseau, were also masons.
Not that there aren't perfectly grown-up men at the head of the masonic hierarchy. Lord Farnham, for instance, is as urbane and civilised an old Etonian as you could wish to meet. He is The Most Worshipful Pro Grand Master of The United Grand Lodge of Antient (sic) Free and Accepted Masons of England, which means that he's second-in-command to His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, the Queen's cousin. Lord Farnham was in Hong Kong last month with John Hamill, the Curator and Librarian of Freemasons' Hall in London, and in the spirit of glasnost a locally based mason, Prashun Dutt, rang up asking that they be interviewed.