The Centenary, 1903–2003

A centenary warrant was issued to Eastern Gate Lodge No. 2970 on 16 July 2003, a hundred years to the day after the consecration. The lodge kept its hundredth year in July of that year, with a meeting, a new banner, and a dinner for members and their guests.

The papers that survive from it are not minutes. They are the things a lodge writes when it wants to explain itself: a message from the Worshipful Master, a speech at the dinner, an address on the banner, and a poem.

A century of brotherhood

A mark was drawn for the year. It takes the lodge’s own device — the gate, the rising sun, the two pillars, the open book — and sets it between two scrolls reading 1903 and 2003, above a third that reads A CENTURY OF BROTHERHOOD. It was used on the invitations, the goblets and the commemorative books printed for the celebration.

A message from the Worshipful Master

The Master of the lodge in its centenary year was W. Bro. Mark R. Langhammer. His message for the celebration is short, and it turns almost at once from the past to what the lodge had become:

The world today could not have been envisioned when our predecessors founded this Lodge in 1903. And in another 100 years, I am sure the same will be said. But through it all, Freemasonry has been, and I am confident will continue to be, a positive force in society, professing Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth.

Founded by Brethren who were career military officers, the Lodge is now comprised of members from a wide variety of professions, educational background, races and creeds. It is from this diversity that the Lodge finds strength and continues to be relevant today.

The world the founders knew

At the dinner the Master looked back a hundred years, and took some trouble over the detail. The world of 1903 held about 1.8 billion people. Edward VII was on the throne and British reach was at its height. England and France had begun to talk to each other again after two centuries of not doing so. Henry Ford had started selling his Model A for eight hundred and fifty dollars, the Panama Canal was being cut, and the first messages had gone over the Pacific Cable, sent by President Roosevelt from San Francisco to Manila.

Singapore had a population of about two hundred and thirty thousand, of whom fewer than three thousand were resident Europeans. Trade was flourishing; the island was becoming a leading port for the processing and export of tin and rubber; the river and the harbour were packed with people, barges and sampans carrying cargo to and from the ships waiting offshore. At the same time the fortifications around the island were being massively reinforced and new ones built, which kept the resident Royal Engineers — the men who founded this lodge — very busy indeed.

The founders were non-commissioned officers of the Royal Engineers, the Royal Artillery, the Royal Garrison Artillery and the Royal Naval Reserve. It is hard, the Master said, to picture the life of the average British soldier in 1903. Attitudes had softened and in most cases he was accepted as part of the community, but only just. What the more sober and thoughtful men wanted, and desperately needed, was some outlet for intelligent thought.

He ended with the words of the Grand Master, H.R.H. the Duke of Kent, spoken at the 275th anniversary of Grand Lodge in 1992:

Anniversaries are occasions for celebration and congratulation. They should also be an opportunity to pause and consider the future. We are heirs to a long and proud tradition and we must ensure it continues for many generations to come.

A poem for the celebration

Bro. Ronald Ng wrote a poem for the celebration of 19 July 2003. It opens with a gun team hauling its pieces up Fort Canning in the year the lodge was founded, and it borrows two lines from Kipling’s The Mother Lodge to say what such a lodge was for:

Outside — “Sergeant! Sir! Salute! Salaam!”
Inside — “Brother,” an’ it doesn’t do no ’arm.

Its conceit is a coincidence of dates. The Russian cruiser Aurora was launched on 16 July 1903, the same day the lodge was consecrated. The Aurora fired the signal shot of the revolution of 1917 and is now a museum ship. The poem sets the two hundred-year-olds side by side and leaves them there:

One hundred years since their birth,
Aurora was no longer at its berth
It is now but a dead museum,
While Eastern Gate is a living Te Deum.

The poem does not pass over the years between. It marks the four years when, in its own words, the light went out at Eastern Gate, and the day it was lit again.

The gavels

A set of gavels was commissioned by a Past Master and presented to the lodge at its centenary. They were hand-made in New South Wales, and each head is built up from five layers of timber: two of red cedar, two of Huon pine from Tasmania, and one of old red cedar salvaged from a damaged nineteenth-century bookcase. The handles are of rosewood. They are the working tools a Master calls the lodge to order with, and they are still in use.

Since the centenary

The banner unfurled that July still hangs in the east of the temple; its own story, and that of the four before it, is on The Banner. The lodge went on to keep the centenary of the armistice at a special meeting on 6 December 2018.

Eastern Gate Lodge meets on the third Thursday of every month at Freemasons’ Hall, 23A Coleman Street, Singapore 179806. The first hundred years are set out on The Lodge, and a Freemason or an enquirer who would like to write to the lodge will find the form on Visiting.