Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/591

This page needs to be proofread.

12 s. ix. DEC. IT, 1-921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 485 for an adherence to the original designs." An examination of the work shows that, in spite of the limited knowledge of old glass then available and the crude colours to paint on, the result is highly creditable. In the following year Messrs. Barnett restored the St. Stephen and St. Lawrence window on the south side of the nave nearest the west. About a third of this window is old glass. About this time the following advertisement appeared : YORK CATHEDRAL GLASS WORKS. John Barnett and Son Stair.ed Glass Manufacturers and Restorers to jthe Dean and Chapter of York Beg to inform the Nobility, Clergy and Visitors to the City that they manufacture every descrip- tion of stained and painted windows in the Ancient and Modern style at the shortest notice and at very reduced prices. In 1847 the firm, which then consisted of John Joseph Barnett, Francis and Mark, again removed, this time to St. Andrewgate, to a house formerly occupied by the Rev. John Graham, rector of St. Saviour's Church, who died in 1843. In 1851 Francis Barnett exhibited a window at the Great Exhibition, and two years later the firm was broken up. John Joseph Barnett retired, and in 1859 he died and was buried in York Cemetery. JOHN A. KNOWLES. (T be continued.) XOTES ON EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WAPPING. 1. WAPPING' s ANTIENT FBEEMASONEY. IT may seem strange to non-initiates of Freemasonry that a once influential lodge of " the craft and mistery " one of the oldest of " the antients " had its local habitation for more than a century at an inn of reputation at the head of Wapping New Stairs, and that it still shows an un- >roken record from the year 1722. The undee; Arms Lodge, No. 9 (now No. 18) at the inn so named from 1747 to 1763, len the landlord used as his sign the jutcheon of the borough of Dundee ; and, 1755, the lodge adopted armorial bearings its official papers which were a variant the shield of that Scottish town corpora-

and the original copper-plate of the

ing is still in the possession of the ). Mr. Arthur Heiron, who was worship- master of the lodge in the years 1901 1917, has recently produced a fine book rtiich for distant readers at least throws luch useful light upon the real social life Wapping in the period of the long sea wars and the sometimes desperate and irregular adventures of the builders of the Georgian British Empire, when Grub Street " stunting " pamphleteers and burletta com- pilers frequently styled Wapping and St. Katharine's " the sink of the port," and Freemasonry was dubbed farcical and im- pious including " Old Dundee " in the imprecations. Mr. Heiron shows that from the earliest days the lodge at Wapping New Stairs was very closely allied to Grand Lodge ; and that two of its members, Giles Clutterbuck and Captain Benjamin Hodges, represented the Wapping Freemasons as grand stewards at the festivals of the years 1723 and 1724, held at the Merchant Taylors' Hall. The first master of this Wapping lodge was Dr. Stephen Hall, physician of Greenwich Hospital for Seamen of the Navy, and many of his successors in office have been prominent, if not renowned, in the learned professions. Mr. Heiron, by the by, makes a plausible case for the " Old Dundee " lodge being the masonic home of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the pontiff of the Georgian literati, in the years from 1767 to 1770. The ancient Wapping freehold passed into the hands of the Roman Catholic body a century ago, the ground floor being used as a chapel and seminary, and the upper part as a schoolroom, for the accommoda- tion of the fast-growing Irish immigration. The regard which the brethren had for the due rendering of the ceremonies of Free- masonry without resorting to the aid of other guilds, or custodians for furniture, is shown in the fact that in 1741 the lodge paid nearly 40 for a master's and two wardens' chairs, and in -1755 12 10s. for " a crimson velvet pall with gold fringe." In that time Wapping Freemasons had no occasion to resort to a loan of the " Trinity " pall, which was made a perquisite by official underlings of the Old Stepney Vestry's trust for account of the Trinity Guild and Corporation, busy, as a State adjutant, in another part of Stepney churchyard in RatclifTe. 2. TAVERN LOBE OF WAPPING.. Collectors of tavern lore tell us that for a period mine host who presided at the ordinary of the inn at the head of Wapping New Stairs, just before the Masonic records under review, was a former tall soldier of Frederick the Great's father, who had been trepanned from a Wapping wynd in his youth by crimps in the Prussian pay " on