Miss G M FRIEND was initiated into the Golden Dawn in May 1893 and took the Latin motto ‘Vincit Veritas’. Three years later, in June 1896, she was initiated into the GD’s 2^nd Order - the level at which you started doing practical magic rather than just reading and learning occult texts. At the date of her initiation she was living at 52 Kent House Road Sydenham.

This is another GD member I know nothing about. It’s very difficult to identify - say, on the census - someone whose forenames you do not know. And women marry, and change their surnames. I have not tried to figure out who Miss Friend was. And as to WHO DID SHE KNOW IN THE GOLDEN DAWN? The only suggestion I can make is connected with her address. Several GD members lived in the Sydenham area so very tentatively I suggest Miss Friend might have known either Maria Jane Burnley Scott or Annie Horniman; though in the case of Annie Horniman, no one with the surname Friend is mentioned in the index of the biography I read.

BASIC SOURCES I USED.

Membership of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888 and 1914. The list is based on the Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden.

Family history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk; familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial Families; thepeerage.com; and a variety of one-family genealogy websites.

Famous-people sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Who Was Who. Times Digital Archive.

Catalogues: British Library; Freemasons’ Library.

Wikipedia; Google; Google Books - my three best resources. I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.

Biography of Annie Horniman: Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre by Sheila Gooddie. London: Methuen 1990.

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

23 April 2012