At a recent Quarterly Communications meeting at Grand Lodge, Rt W Bro Jean Knight was nominated by the current Grand Master, Most Worshipful Brother Zuzanka Penn, as The Order of Women Freemason’s new Grand Master for 2025-2026. 

 

Rt W Bro Knight was initiated into Lodge St Edmundsbury No 93 in 1987 and is currently a Grand Inspector looking after the Order's members in Norfolk and Suffolk and is active in many of the Lodges in her area. 

 

On her nomination Rt W Bro Knight said “I feel extremely privileged to have been nominated, as the successor of one of the most inspiring and accomplished Grand Masters of the 21st century”. 

 

Rt W Bro Knight will be installed as Grand Master of the Order of Women Freemasons at the annual Enthronement meeting to be held in June. 

The Order of Women Freemasons is the oldest and largest Masonic organisation for women in the United Kingdom working along the lines of regular male Freemasonry. Lodges are also located in Australia, Canada, South Africa and Spain and members are encouraged to join the further and higher degrees from the Mark Degree through to Rose Croix. 

 

The Order was formed in 1908 and called The Honourable Fraternity of Antient Masonry and the three lodges consecrated in the same year still meet today. The first lodge in Yorkshire was in consecrated in 1948 in Bradford. 

 

The Order of Women Freemasons was formed at a time when women were fighting for recognition in many spheres of society and there were close ties to the suffragette movement. In 1902 a group of English men and women travelled to Paris to be initiated into Freemasonry and subsequently the first lodge of Co-masons in England was consecrated - Lodge of Human Duty led by Annie Besant, a prominent activist. 

The Order of Women Freemasons is signed up to the UK Armed Forces Covenant to "acknowledge and understand that those who serve or who have served in the Armed Forces, and their families, should be treated with fairness and respect in the communities, economy and society they serve with their lives". 

A large freehold premises was needed with either a room suitable for a large Temple or sufficient adjoining land onwhich to build one and Bro Florence Turner, a member of Lodge Unity No.3, offered to purchase a suitable building, if found. The search was long and difficult, if the building was good the situation was not but finally, at the meeting of Lodge Unity No. 3 on 10 March 1924 The Grand Master, MostWorshipful Bro Marion Lindsay Halsey, announced that a deposit had been paid on a house in Notting Hill Gate – this was 27 Pembridge Gardens, one of a number of large domestic dwellings built in the mid-1850s by the Radford family. Originally leasehold, the freehold was bought by William Radford in 1860 and then subsequently sold to a Mr Herbert Pott, gentleman of Wimbledon, in 1914. The last tenant of the property, Mrs M J Paterson, having died in or around 1924, the house was, conveniently for the Order, put on the open market. 

 

The foundation stone for the Temple was laid on 2 July 1924 by Most Worshipful Bro Marion Halsey using a silver trowel now displayed in the library at No. 27. The work was completed quickly and by the end of 1924 the new Temple was finished. It was duly Consecrated on 20 January 1925 in a ceremony incorporating prayers specifically written for the occasion and much of the ceremonial one would see in the Consecration of a new Lodge. 

Charity and service to others is a key principle of Freemasonry. Worshipful Masters of Lodges throughout the UK and overseas select, during their year of office, a charity particularly dear to them and often local to the lodge. The money raised during the Lodge year is shared equally between the charity and The Order of Women Freemasons Grand Charitable Trust.