ABSTRACT
Sir Walter Besant was a popular novelist, historian of London and a prime mover in the creation in 1883 of the first successful professional organization for published writers in the UK, the Society of Authors. Properly carried out, freemason has friends everywhere, and in the case of need, brethren of the same fraternity are bound by vow to assist him. Every lodge is a benefit club; the members are bound to each other by the vows and obligations of a medieval guild. Between 1851 and 1854 Besant was a boarding pupil at Stockwell Grammar, one of a number of schools associated with - or, as the jargon of the day had it, 'in connection with' - King's College, London University that were established in the 1830s in what were then rather remote and rural suburbs of the city. Besant was able to let himself remember the next phase of his life.
