Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received
The Editor
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© F.Coakley , 2026
[from A.M Harrision's Descriptive List of Insular Societies]
In the 1830's after the Independent Order of Oddfellows opened their first Lodge on the Island, the Loyal Mona Lodge in Douglas, at the Saddle Inn in Queen Street in 1830, two other major collective mutuality insurance organisations became firmly established in England, the Ancient Order of Foresters and the Independent Order of Rechabites, (Salford Unity). All three offered the financial security for benefit funds of uniform, closely-linked lodges in combined operation under efficient centralised control, and the option of interchange of membership and benefits from lodge to lodge, important for the movement of skilled itinerant workers, and all three, each one of different style and character, became firmly rooted in the life of the Island, the most fundamental difference being the temperance of the Rechabites, and the conviviality of the Foresters and the Oddfellows who had both developed in the North of England in the 18th century from origins akin to Freemasonry with binding practices of secrecy and elaborate ritual.
The operations of the lodges included annual celebrations of their foundation as well as the regular meetings throughout the year in the convivial and congenial surroundings of their lodges. Like the Friendly Societies they marched with sashes and banners to church services and dinners, led by bands, often brought to the Island from the mainland, gala days lovingly recorded in the Folk-Life Survey
Founded in 1830 by two Yorkshire woollen workers employed in the Union Mills, Braddan, J. Foster and Jeremiah Lee, as a branch of the Yorkshire Unity, the Loyal Mona Lodge was slow to attract Manx support to a new and unknown society, but when in 1835 it was admitted to the Salford Unity of Oddfellows it began to prosper. In 1844 a member of the lodge, William Shirrefs, an English radical printer working in Douglas in order to exploit Manx free postal advantages for the dissemination of radical papers in Britain published the first monthly journal of the order, The Oddfellows Chronicle, proceeds from its sale going to the Lodge's fund for widows and orphans.
The Isle of Man Examiner Annual of 1914 records the number of its members as 380 and its capital as £6,200.
M.N.H.L.,Isle of Man newspapers ut supra, Isle of Man Examiner Annuals
J.C. Belchem, William Shirrefs and the Manx Free Press of the 1840's,
ProcsIOMNHAS, Vol.x,no.1, (1989) 1989 -1991,
Oddfellows conference programme D4/6.
see my page re Oddfellows
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Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received
The Editor |
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