ENDLY SOCIETIES

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIV, 6 April 1927, Page 3

ENDLY SOCIETIES

lv "ODDFELLOWS?” * an Oddfellow ? If so, why an ® w - -A queer term, really, for * a member of one of the 4,000 f 'l.inchf’ster Unity In‘Drder of Oddfellows you are a ’person. You have provided * financial strain of sickness Qr jen that your death might others is lightened. That’s oddity. . name “Oddfellows” arose is “wrapt in mystery/* Set/splanations which, if ingeni/newhat far-fetched, the most °i the word is that advanced /capley, an historian of the 6 thinks that the society grew by masons forming , les conducted on somewhat j a nd that the term “odd” "as now—indicating something in the past something E or remarkable. He ( ?! e of a very old lodge in i u e,t y is referred to as “our Wer.” Thus “Odd” Fel'he “God’s” Fellows. Minority says that the OddRivals of the old trade at the Reformation, and Masonic Order maintained J °I the masons' craft guild. a were those who. not bei’ g * s ° liS J dyers, smiths, and so

on. were unable to carry on a distinctive club or society, and thus came togethei 1 as “odd” fellows—those left out, as it were. So much for the name. The “Oddfellows,” as such, were formed in the eighteenth century, hut with the intermediate link of the trade guilds they stretch back to Roman times. From a marble, monument found at Lam rium near Rome, it is clear that the practice of combination for providing decent burial, and periodically spending a convivial time in each others’ company, was a feature of tne life of the ancient Romans, and those two objects (with others) have always been part of Oddfellow ship. Some, indeed, contend that the Roman legions founded lodges in Britain! Most of us know the Oddfellows as a great Friendly Society, or as one of the “approved” societies of the Insurance Act, but it is also a “secret society,” with its signs, passwords, oath, degrees, initiation ceremony, regalia, tyled doors at its meetings, and the like. " Its ritual is allied to that of the Freemasons, and cannot, of course, be disclosed here. In 1797. because it was a “secret society,” it fell under the ban of the Corresponding Societies Act, and the Order and lodges were very severely hit. But revival came, and the “Manchester Unity,” founded in 1810. pulled the remnants together, and after internal troubles had been overcome the Order took its place in the nation as a Friendly Society. The adult members in Great Britain alone number 7d4,470.