Tolleshunt D'Arcy - masonic Photo: Dr John Henry Salter, on the right, with Lord....need to check in Salter's Diary...on the left, both wearing full masonic regalia and outside what I believe to have been their Lodge in Essex.
What I don't know is which Lodge this was, though I should be able to determine this by looking through Salter's diary for this too.
Does anyone know which lodge Robert Boutflour belonged to? My guess is that it's likely to have been the same lodge as Salter's as they were both D'Arcy men.
Freemasons.
I was wrong in saying that Robert Boutflour was a D'Arcy man, he wasn't, he was a Wix man by adoption. However, having had a quick look at Dr Salter's Diary it does appear that Boutflour could still have attended one of the lodges that was once attended by Salter.
Salter's Diary has him as member of two lodges: the small lodge of Easterford, at Kelvedon and the much larger Provincial Grand Lodge of Essex, one of the largest in the country and much more prestigious than that of Kelvedon.
What's interesting about the Provincial Grand Lodge of Essex is that, though based in Wickford, it also met at Colchester.
Looking at the location of Wix, where Boutflour lived at Carbonnells Farm, he could have attended lodges at Manningtree, Harwich, Mistley or another lodge in that area, however, Colchester wasn't that much further away for him. I wonder if he did what Salter did and, in addition to joining a small local lodge, was a member of the more prestigious Provincial Grand Lodge of Essex, attending meetings at Colchester? certainly events there would have been grander and more attractive.
As Boutflour was involved in the family's camp site business at Goldhanger and his family owned farms around there he might have used visits to Goldhanger as a base from which to travel to Colchester for Essex Lodge meetings.
