Churchill, The Little Chef and Freemasons

I’ve been recently to a provincial Masonic Lodge in Cheshire, on behalf of a non-Masonic charity. Among the stands in the room there was one that listed ‘Famous Masons’. Quite a few biographies have been taken from an American database, including the one of Winston Churchill. At a certain point, when reading his profile, I thought my research into Tudor history began to bring the most unexpected fruit. I was reading on the sheet that Churchill had been initiated in ‘1591’. Fortunately for me, ‘1591’ was, of course, a typo.

That typo came as quite a surprise, since I never scan these kinds of profiles for the purpose of finding errors in them. So, I carefully let one of the members know, and he promised to try and do something about it. However, the story he told next confirmed to me that most people (including me, perhaps) would never notice that ‘1591’ thing.

The map of Cheshire on the Lodge’s stand was an extremely zoomed version of a nice colourful table mat from the Little Chef, the classic chain of road cafes. It was chosen simply because of its colour and slightly moderated, just to distinguish the names of the places where provincial masonic halls were located. What could not be moderated, were the black signs designating the locations of Little Chefs on the Cheshire roadways. The signs were, predictably, in the form of a chef.