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The Brotherhood
Martin Short
Stephen Knight
A classic and highly controversial exposé of the secret world of the Freemasons reissued with an introduction by Martin Short, author of ‘Inside the Brotherhood’.The Freemasons have long fascinated outsiders. The subject of Dan Brown’s new novel – set for release in 2007 – this secret and exclusive society, thought to be the largest in Britain today, remains a mystery to the many excluded from its ranks. One would never know if a father or brother was a member due to the mandatory vow of secrecy.In this classic, controversial exposé, Stephen Knight talks to the men on the inside – those who have broken their vow of secrecy to reveal the darker side of the ‘brotherhood’. Do they influence the law? Is the KGB involved? And is there is a secret group of Masons running the country today, perhaps influencing every move we make?Now with an introduction by Martin Short, acclaimed author of ‘Inside the Brotherhood’, this is the unmissable, true story of an ancient, and mysterious brotherhood operating in our midst.
STEPHEN KNIGHT
The Brotherhood
The Secret World of the Freemasons
With a new foreword by
MARTIN SHORT
Copyright (#u008cf99f-f0aa-5435-a099-cd5311db03a1)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007
First published in Great Britain by Granada Publishing 1983
Copyright © Stephen Knight 1983
Foreword © Martin Short 2007
Stephen Knight asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007246298
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007370726
Version: 2017-05-02
Dedication (#u008cf99f-f0aa-5435-a099-cd5311db03a1)
For Ma and Pa, with love
Contents
Cover (#u53f85fe9-6efe-5cc7-b2ad-253754333c49)
Title Page (#u505f3a90-ae84-5350-92ea-931b076f9cdf)
Copyright (#u5af7314a-159f-5256-b116-953e9580e283)
Dedication (#ub8d96f3b-4d35-5559-8f23-3d8c79190e96)
Foreword by Martin Short (#uc8d05da2-30cf-5536-978b-0d29f822d975)
Prologue (#u275f00ba-d0a6-5bd1-9ce8-a7d2cc71bc14)
PART ONE: WORKERS’ GUILD TO SECRET SOCIETY (#u6c68ff33-a726-57fc-86f5-d096cb0e2495)
1 Origins (#u8478c32a-b08d-5b35-9e26-4941e087ff66)
2 Metamorphosis (#uef818823-34b7-5c0f-8c0d-293b20cbfaae)
3 Schism and Reunion (#uf53e0f75-812e-5ed9-a9b7-3c17b1300225)
4 Across the Seas and Down the Centuries (#u2341676b-d2ef-580c-9cc7-cedf585b63d7)
5 The Thirty-Third Degree (#u242ff2cb-e428-5eff-86b7-8997cdf48b38)
PART TWO: THE POLICE (#uf630cb57-297a-55f5-bbcf-0d82e5982333)
6 The Great Debate (#u61ffe621-1847-5e59-ad01-2cea027369fa)
7 The Men at the Top (#u6629d82e-6030-50b1-853b-fed50333aee7)
8 Worshipful Masters of Conspiracy (#u03043694-6f19-5e30-8ad5-aa69ac14cf15)
9 Operation Countryman (#u092da185-0711-517f-9441-06372c3b0b31)
10 The Brotherhood Misjudged (#uf52fbf63-05b9-56f8-b6c5-3b51f19335fb)
11 Birmingham City Police (#u5cd505e1-3e8a-5bb7-8e6a-80ee288be368)
12 Conclusion (#ua23d33d2-b02e-53d7-a692-cecd1d66b3fb)
PART THREE: INSIDE INFORMATION (#u957271bf-b804-5eb4-a534-b82a32d69374)
13 The Rabbi’s Tale (#u0c9b5791-afb6-5978-8a13-0f8d730462f5)
14 Five Masters and a Lewis (#u3e04d7ed-260c-5ac8-aa85-ccabcbc3b4f0)
15 Jobs For the Brethren? (#u1195a42b-0872-53c9-a44e-82ed33976826)
16 The Dissidents (#u723481be-36dc-50e5-8d79-2e7a8c600206)
PART FOUR: THE LAW (#ub3feab37-6b3c-505c-b5ba-ba7a64840ec2)
17 The System (#u6c9349d0-ca4f-53f1-903d-9acb5a3e2a7e)
18 The Two-Edged Sword (#ua950d300-da95-5c23-a665-e44a30a7d3c6)
19 The Mason Poisoner (#u89d5c61c-c9ee-5546-acce-deb01ef9190a)
20 Barristers and Judges (#u9685855a-a2e5-5d47-9d0d-64e844f0335b)
21 Solicitors (#u106a2090-eaad-5fe3-807a-faa93a429eaf)
PART FIVE: POWERS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL (#u5952e5c5-bb70-5558-aaee-66e67fe41b7e)
22 Government (#ucf71a9f6-3cb3-5d05-82ff-df198aa1cf82)
23 The Highest in the Land (#u34071a11-c554-57b1-ac7b-0d1546196b84)
24 The City of London (#u513847df-8968-59c6-a8cd-3fe28d6c25ae)
25 The Devil in Disguise? (#ua1f88d55-d0e0-59b3-ab0e-5b0b247d430b)
PART SIX: THE KGB CONNECTION (#u7c7a8462-1505-56cc-9e55-477fd93cd4ae)
26 The Italian Crisis (#u1f1f69b1-605c-52f4-ba18-78f4d1d5a876)
27 The Chinaman Report (#ua4e121f4-87db-5009-9ab8-1ce1e8c6da4f)
28 The Threat to Britain (#u5dd7f479-3f24-5820-867d-4c617b44f7ca)
Epilogue (#udbada8b2-84a0-51fc-98bb-f814270a0b5c)
Appendix One (#u3859cb6e-1ea5-551f-8656-8a12842d8ac5)
Appendix Two (#ue505469e-0537-5088-8a4e-8ad163c83293)
Appendix Three (#u339897dd-e3a3-572b-84a1-672a74668498)
Further Reading (#u9f3a39e8-64a3-599e-a5eb-26e4a48ee74c)
Index (#uef3e7d9a-ef68-558e-bdcc-4374313276c0)
Acknowledgements (#uac80515a-91be-59db-9a82-041c726bd72a)
About the Author (#uc6f3442b-4bb5-52f4-8b19-47ca722a1e07)
Also by the Author (#uee5c5688-0b26-53b3-bc54-293ae8df4dc2)
About the Publisher (#u0db6ac32-42da-5e9c-80e2-e17c3c3bbbca)
Foreword by MARTIN SHORT (#u008cf99f-f0aa-5435-a099-cd5311db03a1)
As the author of the sequel to The Brotherhood, I am proud to be mistaken sometimes for Stephen Knight. This honour has its drawbacks. Recently I came across a Masonic website revealing that in 2004 the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England (otherwise known as the Duke of Kent) received a letter from a non-Mason containing these words:
I admire your decision in 2003 not to ‘cut the throats’ of your members who disclose the Masonic secrets, although this did not help Martin Short (author of Inside the Brotherhood) who unfortunately died of a brain tumour as reported in the press, even though we both know ‘you’ authorised his murder as well as hundreds of other innocent people’s.
Reports of my death are exaggerated but for Stephen Knight they are true to this extent: he did die of a brain tumour in 1985, a little over a year after his explosive exposure of Freemasonry was published.
Four years later, in Inside the Brotherhood, I gave a detailed account of his death, so readers could decide for themselves if he had died from natural causes or a Masonic conspiracy, as was widely rumoured at the time. For some people this remains a matter of intense curiosity. I have learned nothing since to alter what I said then: His troubles began in 1977 when he had an epileptic fit. He had a brain scan which was interpreted as revealing a ‘cerebral infarct’: a small dead area of the brain which might have been caused many years earlier when he had been accidentally hit with a cricket bat. This condition is not necessarily dangerous but it might have been the cause of the epilepsy. In the next three years Stephen suffered many epileptic attacks until they were striking every six weeks.
He had been told to have another scan but did not have £100 to pay for it. However, in 1980 he spotted a newspaper advertisement for guinea-pigs to help with a BBC Horizon programme on epilepsy. He volunteered and was tested on a new brain-scan machine which revealed a cerebral tumour: a malignant cancer which, if untreated, would certainly kill him. Horizon captured this awful moment on film. With Stephen’s full accord his fight for survival now became the programme’s main theme. He promptly underwent a biopsy which removed 70 per cent of the tumour. He was told the rest could be treated with radiation and he had a good chance of full recovery. The epilepsy ceased. Stephen took this to mean the illness was over, and got on with the rest of his life. When I met him in 1981 he was recovering well physically and was in good mental form.
The Brotherhood was published in 1983, but by then the epilepsy had returned. Within six months the tumour also recurred but this time it was much more aggressive. With X-ray treatment and chemotherapy it regressed, but at this point Stephen decided to drop chemotherapy in favour of ‘alternative’, non-medical therapies. His specialist told him he thought this was unwise but the patient’s wish prevailed. A few months later another test showed that the tumour was out of control. Stephen was now walking with difficulty. His speech became hesitant and his ability to muster thoughts was seriously impaired. He tried to live life to the full but in Scotland in July 1985 Stephen died.
I went on to explain that the main proponents of the theory that Freemasons had conspired to kill Stephen were Freemasons themselves. When news had emerged that I was writing the sequel, anonymous members of the fraternity wrote to say they would finish me off just as they had done for Stephen. I interpreted these threats as hoaxes or wishful thinking. Either way they weren’t worth worrying about. And yet I wasn’t entirely satisfied that Stephen’s death was as natural as it seemed when it happened.
Why, for example, did his epilepsy first show itself while he was giving a public lecture in Australia about his equally scandalous book of 1976, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution) This alleged that the notorious murders of five prostitutes in London’s East End in 1888 were committed not by a crazed loner but by a cluster of scheming Freemasons. Their motive? To protect the royal family by preventing the revelation of a secret marriage between the Duke of Clarence - Queen Victoria’s grandson and Heir Presumptive - and a Catholic commoner. Even more shocking, that marriage had yielded a daughter. Some of the prostitutes knew the bride and the secret so, according to Stephen, they had to die.
Credible or not, this theory and the entire tone of Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution were far more ‘anti-Masonic’ than most of Stephen’s later revelations in The Brotherhood. Indeed Jack the Ripper is a brilliant conspiracy thriller, a far better read than The Da Vinci Code, and so good that it has inspired two gripping feature films: Murder by Decree (starring Christopher Plummer and James Mason) and From Hell (Johnny Depp). It also scooped by 26 years Patricia Cornwell’s much-hyped book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, in claiming that the artist Walter Sickert was involved in the killings. Cornwell went further by claiming Sickert was the Ripper himself but, despite spending an alleged $6 million to prove this, she came up with little evidence to convince anyone but herself. In stark contrast, Stephen worked on a shoestring budget and produced one of the classics in the vast canon of ‘Ripperology’.
I myself do not believe that Sickert had anything to do with the Ripper killings but, despite its factual chasms, Stephen’s book is such a page-turner that I am sure he would have turned out many more best-sellers, had he lived.
This brings me back to his death, an event which adds greatly to the lasting fascination of The Brotherhood. Though probably he died of natural causes, foul play cannot be ruled out. At a public appearance such as his Australian lecture, someone in the audience could have ‘zapped’ him into epilepsy by aiming ionizing- or X-rays or electromagnetic rays (laser-beams) at his head. Alternatively, as one Mason told me, he could have been implanted with a radioactive source or a slow-release capsule containing a cancer-inducing drug. This is not far-fetched. Remember the minute metal sphere, filled with poison and injected by umbrella-tip into Georgi Markov, a dissident Bulgarian exile in 1978.
Also, as Freemasonry was rife at that time in Britain’s armed forces, security services, medical professions and, notoriously, our police, such ways to kill would have been well known to many brethren in Britain as in Australia, and well within their capabilities.
But again I hesitate to endorse this theory. As I wrote in Inside the Brotherhood:
Stephen could have been injected with a cancer-inducing agent or carcinogen (as in the Markov case) but the cancer would probably have arisen in another part of the body, not the brain. The same applies to a carcinogen secreted in someone’s food or drink. Nor, I understand, is it odd that Stephen was first struck with epilepsy when speaking in public. His was a ‘classic left-frontal pole tumour’. In other words it occurred in that part of the brain which is greatly pressured during public lectures and speeches.
Overall, there seems little room for doubt that Stephen Knight’s brain cancer was anything other than natural. The tumour’s progress, histology, its response to X-ray and chemotherapy treatment were all normal. But can a natural brain cancer be induced by unnatural means which cause no visible side effects, cannot be noticed at the time, and are impossible to detect during later tests and examinations?
I still don’t know the answer to that question. And I cannot ignore menacing letters sent by Freemasons to Stephen following The Brotherhood’s publication. They reveal such intense bitterness, as well as a touch of madness, that the writers could have gone on to kill him:
You have been responsible for the persecution of many of our members, who have lost their jobs because of your book. This has caused great hardship to their wives and children, and writers like you ought to know better. I do not know if anyone has committed suicide yet, but it will be you and you alone who has murdered these unfortunate people …
So, what awaits readers in these pages is powerful stuff - enough to drive some Freemasons to distraction - but I believe the book’s continuing appeal lies partly in the fact that Stephen was a genuine seeker after spiritual enlightenment. In his researches he really did set out to discover if it was possible to reach a higher plane of consciousness through Freemasonry. He earnestly wanted to explore its ‘theology’ and its belief in the Great Architect of the Universe (abbreviated to ‘G.A.O.T.U.’ if you happen to find a book of encoded Masonic ceremonies in your grandfather’s attic).
In contrast, when I wrote Inside the Brotherhood I had no desire to go on a spiritual journey because I knew it would reach nowhere. To me the cult’s rituals are man-made mumbo-jumbo, shakily based on myths, fairy-tales and superstitions, some derived from orthodox religions which Freemasonry appropriated to give it a façade of acceptability and went on to distort. Stephen was far less cynical.
Again, I researched my book on Freemasonry already primed in its corrosive capacity to corrupt public life. In television programmes and a book which I had co-authored (The Fall of Scotland Yard), I had investigated Masonic scandals afflicting the police and local government - two areas in which I had also helped Stephen. For me, Freemasonry, whatever its grand claims to morality, had proved the perfect vehicle for grubby, mundane racketeering and back-scratching.
In contrast Stephen had been on a religious quest of his own, as his all too brief life story reveals.
