Letter: Secret within the law
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Stephen Friar (Letters, 23 July) asks if the provision of the 1799 Unlawful Societies Act requiring Masonic lodges to send an annual return of members to the Clerk of the Peace has been repealed. It was, as part of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1967.
Such was the publicity given to the event that Grand Lodge itself was not aware of it until 1969, when a number of Clerks of the Peace wrote in to ask Grand Lodge to stop sending in their returns as they were no longer required.
Yours faithfully,
J. M. HAMILL
Librarian and Curator
Library and Museum of the United Grand Lodge of England
London, WC2
23 July
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