The Astede Lodge Benevolent Fund was registered with the Charity Commission on the fourth of February, 1963. The papers were drawn up at the dining-room table of the then-Secretary of Astede Lodge, in a house in Fetcham that is still there, and lodged with the Commission by Royal Mail the following Tuesday. The trust deed was four pages long and committed the Brethren to two purposes: 'the relief of need amongst the members of Astede Lodge and their dependants,' and 'the support of charities, Masonic and otherwise, operating principally in the parishes of Fetcham, Ashtead, Bookham and Leatherhead.' These two purposes have not been amended since.
The Lodge itself is older than the fund — Astede being the Anglo-Saxon name for Ashtead, recorded in Domesday — and the benevolent collection that became this trust had been kept informally in the Lodge cash-box for some decades before 1963. The decision to put it on a proper footing came after a Brother's widow was found, in the winter of 1962, to be heating her cottage with a single one-bar fire and a great deal of fortitude. The Brethren paid her coal bill for the rest of that winter from the cash-box, but the Secretary noted at the next regular meeting that 'a small fund kept by gentlemen's agreement is no fund at all when the gentleman in question dies on a Tuesday in February.' The trust was registered within the month.
How the fund is kept
We are a trust, not a company. We have no offices in the conventional sense — the registered office is the home address of one of our Trustees, in Kennel Lane. The fund has no paid staff and never has had. The Almoner of Astede Lodge, an unpaid role held for three-year terms by a willing senior Brother, identifies confidential cases of need and brings them to the Trustees for approval. The Trustees meet four times a year, usually on a Saturday morning, around a kitchen table.
The accounts are unaudited. As a trust whose income falls well below the audit threshold, we file an Annual Return with the Charity Commission each spring and a one-page receipts-and-payments statement; both are published here and lodged on the public register. Total income for the year ended 31 December 2024 was £954; total expenditure was £325. The difference is held as reserve against a winter we cannot yet see.
What 'small' really means
It is worth being plain about the scale. We are not Marie Curie. We are not the Masonic Charitable Foundation. We are a fund of a few hundred pounds, kept by two Trustees, for the benefit of a few dozen people — Brethren of one Lodge and their families — and a handful of named local good causes. We make perhaps eight to twelve small payments a year. The largest single grant we have ever made was £200, in 1987, to a Brother whose roof had given way in a storm. The smallest was £4, to cover the cost of a printed memorial card.
This is the right size for what we do. A larger fund would require a Treasurer and an audit; an even smaller one could not respond when needed. The current scale lets two Trustees keep the books in a single ring-binder, write the cheques by hand, and put the receipts back in the tin within a working week. That is the whole apparatus, and we have not yet found a reason to change it.
