-Caveat Lector- >From the Electronic Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000579381554028&rtmo=auX9a5uJ&atmo=99999999 &pg=/et/99/9/3/bascot03.html - ISSUE 1561 Friday 3 September 1999 Will members be upstanding The British Museum The unlocking of a cupboard in the British Museum led Byron Rogers to discover a centuries-old Scottish secret society, whose followers had some extremely odd rituals SOME weeks ago I wrote about the Secretum, a locked cupboard in the British Museum, which contained the lifetime collection of a one-time Mayor of Bedford. This man had the curious obsession that early religions had their roots in phallus worship and had industriously bought every erect penis in Assyrian, Egyptian and Classical art he could get his hands on. But amongst these was something that was neither anatomical nor ancient - it was a certificate of membership to something described as a dining club. It was called the Beggars Benisson, or blessing. I thought no more about it, assuming someone in the Museum had made a mistake in including this in the Secretum. And then through the post came a book. This was a reprint, with a foreword by the Scottish poet, the late Alan Bold, of an 1892 edition limited to 250 copies and privately distributed in the Scottish town of Anstruther. It consisted of the records of a dining society that had existed in the town from 1732 to 1836. It was called the Beggars Bennison. They were, to quote Dr Richard Gaimster of the British Museum, "the strangest guys imaginable". What they got up to, he went on, was beyond belief. They were also the most influential men in 18th-century Scotland, met twice a year in secret in a ruined castle, and had two things on their minds. One was treason, the other the measurement of their penises. "That is the problem," said David Stevenson, Professor Emeritus of Scottish History at St Andrews University. "Scholars have steered clear of them, thinking it was all a hoax." But their records, I now find, survive, and, what is even more extraordinary, their glass and pewter ware, which, were they to come up for sale, would surely break all records. At Christie's in May a single Jacobite goblet went for £32,000, but, given the sort of collector these pieces would attract, you could name your own price. The names of the Beggars Bennison were recorded in Bold's book. These included pillars of the Scottish establishment, who 20 years earlier would have formed the Scottish Parliament. But with its abolition they apparently assembled at Anstruther, a fishing town on the Firth of Forth, to plot Jacobite politics (one of their number was hanged after the '45, another fled overseas), and to engage in their other little distraction - the measurement and brandishing of their dicks. There is surely a lesson in devolutionary politics here. It is said that they wore ceremonial robes, the Sovereign of the Order a genuine historical relic, a large wig made out of the pubic hair of Charles II's mistresses, and had elaborate rituals, which involved the measurement of their members (on a specially commissioned pewter plate); they had seals and medals and sashes, just like the Freemasons, only to a much more obsessive design, which was engraved on their glassware. No group of men more urgently in need of psychiatric attention, with the exception of the higher ranks of the SS, might be thought to have assembled in one room. Then in Castle Dreel, the treasonable politics (and the measuring) over, they got stuck into supper, after which they would listen to a learned paper on some aspect of sex - as on St Andrew's Day 1733, when they listened to a lecture on menstruation in skate. In skate. By this stage in the book my head was reeling. For all this time some local girl, paid sums ranging from five shillings to a pound, lolled stark naked in a chair, her face covered, with no member of the Order being allowed to touch her. So in 1734 there was "Betty Wilson . . . a bad model and unpleasant". But then Betty was only 15, and there passing before her in emphatic procession were the local Controller of Customs, the Chief Magistrate, the odd earl and bishop (one on his appointment urgently requested that his name be removed from the Order's records), all of them men to whom her mother would have curtsied in the street. Whatever Betty did, it prompted the aggrieved comment, "Resolved against another such row." Two centuries on, my enquiries into the Beggars Bennison were prolonged because of the number of women who became helpless with laughter in various research institutions. "Oh well, that's the morning gone," said one in the National Library of Scotland. The Order had their own Bible, an anthology, with illustrations, of the most prurient passages, decorated with the coats of arms of the Scottish nobility who belonged (from the Duke of Gordon to the Earl of Lauderdale). Even George IV belonged, and when one of the members made off with the wig, the King graciously presented them with a silver snuff-box containing the pubic hair of his current mistress, thus preserving, albeit in a minor mode, the Royal connection. That the Society is said to have survived as long as it did is amazing, for it was only wound up on the eve of the Victorian age, in 1836. Its last Secretary, so the tradition went, burnt its records, though not before someone had made a fair copy of them, and, incredibly, given the remaining funds to provide prizes at the local school. The Society's artefacts, the glassware, the pewter and the horn blown at appropriately bizarre moments, were taken to America. Or so it was said. I rang the National Library of Scotland where, once they had stopped laughing, they said they would make enquiries. I was rung back, and a slightly stunned voice said that St Andrews University, eight miles from Anstruther, might know more. "Ah yes," said a lady in the university's Special Collection sadly. "There are papers." These, she went on, were kept in a box in a strong room. She had never seen them, only a few even knew of their existence, but she had once been in a room with a man who had been reading them. There were also, she said, things. "Yes, I keep them in a cupboard in my room," said Dr Ian Carradice, the keeper of the Museum Collection. "I think of them in the same terms as some of our medical items, but my predecessor didn't want to advertise the fact that we even had them." Has anyone ever asked to see them? "To the best of my knowledge, just one man. Professor David Stevenson has for some years been trying to write a book about the Beggars Bennison, ever since the contents of the cupboard were revealed to him. It was, he said, an uphill job on account of the double meanings he found it almost impossible to evade. But yes, they were all there, the platter, the glass, the silver snuff-box ("full of some very curly hair"), also an empty wig-box. "The University, to its horror, was given them by a solicitor from Fife, for everything you've heard about the Society, I'm afraid, is true." It consisted, he said, of the oddest mixture of men. There were Jacobites and Hanoverians, smugglers and customs officers, but they all had one thing in common, they were against the Government, except that from this they went on to be against everything. In the 1730s there was a great scare about the effects of masturbation, so they decided to elevate this into a semi-social and extremely beneficial activity. Sex, smuggling and Jacobite politics, Prof. Stevenson went on, did not fit easily into academic history. "And it gets worse. Did you know that they had a St Petersburg branch? After a while nothing about them surprised me." The artefacts were kept by the last Secretary. Who was he? "I'm afraid, the Town Clerk of Anstruther. Then in the 1920s they were bought by a Colonel Kavanagh, who, with eight other Army officers, one a VC, tried to revive the Society. What they got up to is not known but this involved dawn rites on the banks of the Forth. "When Kavanagh died, his wife tried to sell the relics to the National Museum, saying she had turned down all American offers on the grounds that they were part of our national heritage. Of course they nearly fainted, and in the end the things came to St Andrews which has kept very quiet about them ever since." It is in all our interests that the Scottish Assembly succeeds. If it doesn't, the tape measures will be out again. -- Dan S DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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