BEGINNINGS: William George Lemon (WGL) was the quintessential Victorian Londoner. He was born in 1830 not far from St James’ Palace where the newly crowned King William IV resided and not far from Kensington Palace where the teenage Princess Victoria was growing up. His home being in Tyburnia (Marylebone), WGL was baptized in the Anglican church of St Mary’s Bryanston Square, presided over by an eccentric book-collector named Thomas Frognall Dibdin (a close friend of slave-trade abolitionist William Wilberforce). WGL was a 7-year old Sunday school ‘scholar’ when Queen Victoria came to the throne and his life story roughly spans the entirety of her reign. (He died the year she celebrated her diamond jubilee in 1897).
    WGL was born in a house close to the present-day Marble Arch (before the monument was installed) - then better known as the site of the former Tyburn Tree, London’s most notorious gallows. He was born to modest working-class parents James and Elizabeth Lemmon (two mms) who had the fortune to live and work in a splendid, ultra-wealthy part of London. With a family background in horse veterinary and farrier skills (in Hampshire), WGL’s father worked with the finest horses of the day and became foreman of a commercial-stables next to Hyde Park. In later years WGL always referred to his father as “James Lemon of Piccadilly, Gentleman” which is probably an exaggeration. WGL’s siblings all went into service or trade apprenticeships, though most died young.
  1840s and 50s London was a time of stinking soot-soiled air and the furious, noisy pace of steam-powered construction and railway engineering so WGL was fortunate to always live next to large parks. He was close to Hyde Park for 21 years, then within audible distance of the zoo monkeys of Regent’s Park for 4 years in Camden (although closer to the engine yards of Euston and the Roundhouse). After that, for 40 years he lived on the edge of Blackheath’s expansive commons. Part of his legacy as a politician in later years was to help give London so many parks.

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AN EDUCATION: WGL’s formative schooling was in Pimlico and Belgravia very close to Buckingham Palace. This was a time of great religious tension between Anglicanism, Catholicism and non-conformist Christianity (Non-conformists or ‘Independents’ included Congregationalist, Baptists, Methodist Wesleyans and others). The anti-popery ‘Pimlico riots’ of 1851 which occurred along streets WGL walked would have profoundly influenced him. His parents, particularly his mother, divided their Sabbath day loyalties to a small Congregational chapel and the magnificent St. Peter’s Pimlico where they baptized two later children. In one they worshipped with the respectable working class, in the other among London’s aristocracy.
    It is uncertain if WGL first attended Anglican or Congregational Sunday schools, but as a ‘monitor’ student in his teens who excelled in Latin, Math and Scripture WGL became a day-school teacher (Congregational), then a boarding school headmaster at age 21 thanks to his mother’s connections with the London Missionary Society (LMS). Opening in 1852 the new school needed a young headmaster who was non-conformist, educationally progressive, and capable enough to manage what was also a home and orphanage for boys with missionary parents posted across the Empire. (One of the first pupils was the son of celebrity medical missionary David Livingstone, the pioneering explorer of the ‘dark Continent’ as Africa was dubbed.
   WGL remained a life-long Congregationalist (one of the Non-conformist or Independent branches of Christianity). While he was an evangelical, WGL also believed in tolerance between the different groups. The school also took on boys from Baptist and Wesleyan backgrounds which fit with a progressive educational thought that, while the Bible should be the primary text for instruction, children from other faiths should be admitted into national schools. 
   Such unity was borne out in practice when, in 1855, WGL married a Baptist wife Selina (who shares his grave to this day). Selina was from Abingdon where the wedding was held. The couple lived in quarters at WGL's mission school in Camden. Within a few years they had 5 children but do not seem to have imposed Non-conformist loyalties on their family. (Their 3 sons all married Anglican wives).

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MOVE TO BLACKHEATH: In 1857 WGL’s school moved to a purpose-built neo-Gothic building in Blackheath which resembles the Hogwarts of popular fiction. This building still exists next to the station and, having been used as an NHS hospital in recent years, was sold to private developers in 2026. The expanding Lemon family lived on the premises for 5 years and all except 2 children were born there. In about 1862 the family moved to an impressive Georgian-style house looking across the heath. The house still exists as No.20 Montpelier Row, just 100 meters from the spire of St. Michaels church. Behind it is a long garden which required the family to retain a gardener.
   In 1860, inspired (or shaken?) by Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species WGL studied for a degree in Geology and, in 1862, became a Fellow of the Geology Society. Contrary to most readers, he believed Biblical Creation and the Theory of Evolution were compatible. He signed a declaration with 700 others to this effect.
    WGL was a leading member of the West Kent Natural History Society which held its monthly meetings in his Mission School hall. The society boasted several gentlemen-scientists, clergymen and eminent locals. One of these was the David Attenborough of his day, Sir John Lubbock (also sometimes dubbed ‘Darwin’s apprentice’) and aeronaut balloonist James Glaisher, the Neil Armstrong of Victorian times . The organisation still exists as the Blackheath Scientific Society. WGL was President in 1881, and 1882 the year Darwin died. Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Wallace, was a guest lecturer to the society that same year, at WGL’s invitation. The society’s ‘Annual Soirees’ (elaborate exhibitions) were held next door to the Mission School in the Blackheath Congregational Church where WGL was a Deacon and Secretary. Turning a place of worship into a museum for a day was typical of, what I call, WGL’s ‘open-minded evangelism’.
     On the Sabbath each week, in the 1860s and 1870s, WGL taught at Sunday schools and became an examiner for the Sunday School Union at their Old Bailey headquarters. In so doing, he helped the SSU select and recruit a new generation of Bible crusaders for the Home Front. These young domestic missionaries needed Christian Evidences to combat the growing doubt in the land. Congregational churches by definition were independent of any central authority so it is ironic that a Congregational Union had been founded in 1831. WGL also became a prominent officer for the Union and attended (and sometimes chaired) its annual meetings in other major cities around England.

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CHANGING PROFESSION: In the 1860s WGL went back to university (UCL) with a view to changing his career to the Law. He continued to work in education, teaching a few private students in the late 1860s and, in 1870, was expected to be elected to the newly formed London School Board but lost to education reformer Emily Davies. In 1866 WGL became a barrister, at first working in an office next to the Temple Church, then keeping his own Chambers in New Square Lincolns Inn. He specialized in Conveyancing, with work that also involved auditing companies. In this capacity he first audited and later became a Director at the British Equitable Life Assurance company which drew its customers from non-conformist church families. 
   In the 1860s WGL and his circle of anti-slavery Congregationalists worked to help America’s newly released slaves gain self-sufficiency and education. In 1869 his Latin skills were put to good use when he translated, as co-author, an influential legal book on Roman Law “The Commentaries of Gaius” and its ancient systems and classifications of slavery.
   Related to his work in life insurance was WGL’s interest in the science and statistics of health, fate and mortality – more the specialty of an actuary. From this he steered his eldest son to become a life insurance actuary. His lifelong and closest friend John Coles, and several chess club friends in Blackheath, all worked in this field. 
   WGL’s magnificent Georgian-built chambers at Lincolns Inn still exist and have been used in many movie and TV drama shoots, (exteriors recently appeared in Downton Abbey and Mr. Holmes, the interiors in ‘A Fish Called Wanda’). His basement office was a few minutes walk from the Great Queens Street headquarters of both the Craft and Mark degrees of freemasonry. This was an interest, that for WGL, became a passion.

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FREEMASONRY: In 1867, WGL was ‘raised’ (reborn) into freemasonry at a time when it was a more open and entirely respectable past-time (the Grand Master in this period was the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII). The worst that masons endured in public was some gentle fun poked at them from the pages of Punch magazine. Freemasonry matched well with WGL’s belief in self-study (through degrees), self-improvement and self-less-ness in terms of charity and voluntary service.
    For many years WGL had volunteered in the local Vestry bodies that managed the rates of then fast-developing Lewisham. He was a Guardian of the Poor and member of the Lewisham Board of Works just as it needed to expand to cope with the growing population. When the committee built and opened a neo-gothic designed town hall in Catford in 1875. WGL’s name was inscribed on the commemorative brass plate mounted in the entrance hall. (Sadly, the building was demolished in the 1960s). Several of the committee were masons. In 1876 WGL was a founder member of a new freemasons lodge (Ravensbourne) which was given permission to hold its monthly meetings (for a fee) at the new town hall.
  In the 1880s, WGL channeled his ‘open-minded evangelism’ into more extreme-Christian fringes of freemasonry. One of these included the myth-steeped Knights Templar and, as if ceremonial swords and capes were not enough, he was a founder-member of another Bible-inspired Order called the ‘Secret Monitor’. Their rituals used a sacred bow and arrow and they celebrated the profound friendship and loyalty explained in the Book of Samuel between Kind David (he of Goliath-slaying repute) and Jonathan, son of the previous king. 
   In the early 1880s WGL joined an even more esoteric branch of freemasonry known as the Societas Rosicrucia in Anglia (SRIA) and became one of its leading Metropolitan (London) members. In 1893, despite illness, he became SRIA Metropolitan Master. The SRIA had their own set of rituals (a ‘magic circle’) and held lectures on ancient belief systems, mythologies and fantastic creatures. This was a secret group within an already secretive organisation. But this story becomes even more extraordinary.

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CREATIVE OCCULTISM:  Within the SRIA WGL met William Robert Woodman, William Wyn Westcott and Samuel Liddell Mathers who in 1888 created the extraordinary occult group  ‘The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’ which took SRIA ideas about ‘magick’ much further, allowed women to join and attracted many celebrities including William Butler Yeats, Constance Wilde (wife of Oscar), Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne, actress Florence Farr, and later, the immortal Aleister Crowley. Such a circle of free-thinking and radical Bohemian creatives is not the obvious group I would connect with the relatively serious, scientific, and evangelical world WGL usually inhabited. Imagining these members of the Isis-Urania Temple meeting for an autumnal equinox of magic ritual dressed in robes and an Egyptian Nemyss headcloth while holding wands, daggers and other occult tools seems more ‘Hammer House of Humour’ to modern thinking than the behaviour we might expect from custodians of the British Empire at its height. 
    WGL’s invitation to join the Golden Dawn may have been related to his freemason rank. As their most senior mason member he gave the new society credibility and respectability. Having co-founded the Secret Monitor Order in 1887, WGL was promoted to national rank in the three most important masonic orders and adjuncts, namely 1) Mark Grand Lodge (Senior Grand Overseer in 1889), 2) United Grand Lodge of England (Asst. Director of Ceremonies in 1890) and 3) Royal Arch (Grand Standard Bearer, also in 1890). He acquired so many jewels and badges that he needed a special lapel extension to support the sheer weight of them all for special occasions. The Freemasons Museum today holds several of them, although the prize item of a diamond-encrusted jewel remains in the Lemon family. [See the photo in the “About” section of this site].

ENTREPRENEURIAL PROJECTS: In the 1880s, WGL invested in projects and patents related to ventilation, Turkish baths and affordable homes for working people. Unfortunately, London was already over-supplied by property developers, so the building of new homes was not especially profitable. (The houses still stand on the Coleraine Park Estate in Tottenham). A major fire put an end to WGL’s baths venture, then his inventor-partner from the ventilation business sank and drowned in an “unsinkable yacht” of his own design during its maiden voyage. Fortunately, WGL’s work as a barrister and with British Equitable insurance provided a reliable income.

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LOCAL POLITICS: In 1888, having given 20 years to public service in Lewisham, Blackheath and Greenwich, WGL stood for election as Lewisham’s Councillor after a major Act of Parliament created the London County Council (the LCC) to replace the inefficient and corruption-riddled Metropolitan Board of Works. WGL was elected to the new 3-year post and served two terms from 1889 till 1895, a period cited as a golden age for the LCC in terms of getting things done through “somewhat idealistic but well-principled, earnest men”. WGL assured his Lewisham ratepayers that he could communicate efficiently with the LCC’s Whitehall offices at Spring Gardens using the new telephonic apparatus installed in his chambers.  
  As well as representing Lewisham’s general interests at the LCC, WGL also served the whole of London, chairing various city-wide committees for drainage (sewers), asylums, corporate property, and parks.
  In 1875 WGL had joined a livery guild to become a Freeman of the City. He was Master of the Wheelwrights and gained many connections in the Square Mile and an insider’s knowledge of its arcane institutions. In 1881 WGL ran for election to become the City ‘Remembrancer’ whereby he would protect its interests in Parliament (WGL lost to Sir Gabriel Prior Goldney). However, as Chair of the LCC’s Corporate Property committee WGL was well-placed to broker cooperation with the City and the many philanthropic properties and schools it owned. (The City – controversially – had been left outside of the 1888 LCC Act). WGL, now on the LCC, joked that the “Lion of Spring Gardens [the LCC] would “lie down with the lamb of Mansion House” [the City] to allay fears that the larger animal was out to simply consume the smaller creature.
  As part of his LCC work WGL in 1891 became Chairman of the Strand Board of Works, its offices located next to Covent Garden. The Board had the unenviable task of protecting the interests of London’s most powerful ratepayers - the several river-side palaces built along the medieval Strand - while simultaneously trying to requisition and demolish properties to widen what was the main artery between the City and Westminster. Traffic congestion was still a problem on London streets despite the opening of the Underground in the 1860s.

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NATURE CONSERVATION : At a time when there was massive development around London’s suburbs, WGL, as the LCC’s Parks and Open Spaces Committee chairman, opened many new gardens and recreation grounds around London. New parks were all part of a broader health and morality vision that would keep people out of the pubs, give them some fresh air and the exercise needed to improve British physiques (German youth was far more fit). The parks included Hackney Marshes and Lincolns Inn Fields.
   WGL had concerns for the environment noting in a speech the absurdity of using coal to generate electricity for lights installed into greenhouses to supplement the smog-blocked natural light. In the 1880s environmentalism was not yet a word but conservation movements were gaining momentum at afternoon tea gatherings nationwide. With influential aristocrats like Lord Meath, WGL sought more green spaces. His LCC colleague Sir John Lubbock brokered the first legislation to protect ancient monuments. WGL joined local RSPCA efforts and in the late 1880s his barrister son Frank and Frank’s wife Etta became founder members of the RSPB. Their crusade to protect birdlife, backed by Winifred the Duchess of Portland, began in Blackheath and Etta’s story has been told in a recent biography by author Tessa Boase. 
   In the 1880s and 1890s, in line with the Victorian craze to breathe the healthy air of the seaside and bathe in saltwater, the Lemon family took annual summer vacations at seaside resorts around England and Scotland. They stayed in Whitby the year before Bram Stoker visited and began to write his famous vampire novel. In different years the Lemons stayed on the Jurassic Coast which presumably allowed WGL to pursue geological interests. For WGL, on at least one occasion, the seaside break must have been on doctor’s orders. While described as having a “splendid energy” by the 1890s his health began to decline. In 1893 he was taken seriously ill. 

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HEALTH MATTERS: In 1892 while standing for re-election to the LCC WGL had been victim of a vicious smear campaign in which one of his Lewisham rivals certainly played a big part. That rival was Theophilus W. Williams, a banker and newspaper owner with dictatorial political ambitions that WGL had mostly thwarted since the early 1880s (when Williams first joined the Lewisham Board of Works). I believe the stress, a barrister’s workload, all the LCC commitments and perhaps too many City and masonic dinners began to take their toll. 
    The aforementioned ‘smear’ in 1892 concerned WGL’s political allegiances which had been Liberal and Gladstonian during the 1870s. However, in the 1880s WGL could not support Gladstone’s campaign of Home Rule for Ireland (aka “Rome Rule”) so he joined the break-away Liberal Unionists which became allied with the Conservatives. When the LCC had been founded in 1889 WGL was able to run for election on a non-partisan ticket – neither a vocal liberal, nor staunch conservative - but by 1892 battle lines had been drawn as re-election time drew near. As a Liberal Unionist, WGL had allegiances among both Lewisham’s Liberal and Conservative supporters a confusion that his rivals took full advantage of. Despite being vindicated near election day (he was re-elected), he endured weeks of accusations and press-abuse about double-standards and hypocrisy. 
    Presumably to reduce demands on his time in relation to health concerns, WGL in 1892 resigned from some of his hobby activities, notably the London Geology Society and the Golden Dawn of occultist magicians. The latter was beginning to attract a more flamboyant assortment of personalities from the world of theatre whereas I suspect WGL only enjoyed its original incarnation in 1888 as a group of Rosicrucian intellectuals exploring esoteric ideas by Masonic-style degrees. By 1892, the Golden Dawn had evolved more elaborate ceremonies for practical magick and built a colourful crypt for its new Inner Order.  Perhaps WGL realised that most of the new non-masonic members were simply nuts. He was probably one of those that Irish nationalist and activist Maud Gonne referred to as the "very essence of middle-class dullness.“ WGL was against Home Rule and her membership of the Golden Dawn in 1891 would have alarmed him.

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EMPIRE UNIVERSITY: As a Liberal Unionist WGL believed in Empire, the beating heart of which was the Union, and within that, WGL’s beloved London Town. He proudly talked of being “born within the sound of Bow bells” (i.e. East End) which, back in 1830, might indeed have been audible from Marble Arch (West End). He must also have been proud that his youngest son Arthur had recently been posted to Singapore as a Colonial administrator. His two sons William and Frank were also keen Territorial army volunteers. WGL made several speeches at their battalion dinners, declaring support for campaigns then either anticipated or being waged overseas including the First Boer War. (1880/81).
   Due to his 1893 illness WGL had to curtail many non-work activities. Now, as well as LCC duties, he re-devoted the last of “his splendid energy” into a very national project close to his heart. This was a complex and controversial plan, started in 1884 and backed by a Royal Commission, to reform London University into a teaching institution. The vision was that a secular London University, then merely an examining body, would at least equal the clergy-controlled Oxford and Cambridge, and become an institution worthy of its location at the centre of Empire. (The names ‘Empire University’ as well as Albert or Gresham University were proposed). In 1884 WGL and son Frank had even founded a new masonic “London University Lodge” to mirror those at Oxford and Cambridge. Unfortunately, the vision for an Empire University fell apart although he would be pleased to know that his alma mater, UCL, is now a major-ranking college internationally. WGL had more success in helping establish the system of Polytechnics and Art Schools which broadened the vocational skills-training previously only offered through indentured apprenticeships and the City’s ancient guilds. As an LCC councillor, he was on the board of various colleges around London including the Borough Polytechnic and St. Pauls School. 

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RETREAT: WGL retired from public life in 1895, declining invitations from supporters to stand for a third term in the LCC elections. He knew his end was near. He had cancer. It is possible that he knew this from an X-ray. His own doctor had just introduced Rontgen’s new X-Ray system from Germany into the UK.
    WGL’s sons were no longer living at the family home Montpelier Lodge (Wm Kent and Frank had married). So, he began to make plans for the future. An expert on property law and trusts, he drew up a will trust that secured Selina’s financial comfort. He also looked for a more practical home that he could leave to his two unmarried daughters. In about 1895 WGL moved with Selina, Ettie and Annie to a semi-detached property of two houses, one for each daughter, fittingly named ‘The Retreat’.  This was also on the edge of the heath and faced Montpelier Row from the opposite side. 
     No.1 The Retreat was to be WGL’s last home. He died there Wednesday morning on May 26th, 1897. Funeral invitations had already been printed and were posted out the same morning. Train timetables had been checked. The service at his Blackheath Congregational Chapel was set for Saturday May 29th. The procession and burial in Ladywell Cemetery were all planned to immaculate Victorian precision. After the pastor, family and friends departed the grave, the masonic brethren present held their own small ceremony and placed an “emblematic sprig of acacia” onto the coffin head, before - as WGL hoped - he departed for the land he loved, “the bright inheritance of Saints, Jerusalem above”. He was 66. 
    His grave at Ladywell is within sight of Hilly Fields, one of the parks he steered into being with the LCC. As his tombstone reads “His End was Peace”. Selina lived a few more years at The Retreat and then joined him at Ladywell in January 1900. She had survived a single day into the brand-new 20th Century. The Retreat still stands today having narrowly escaped destruction by a ‘doodlebug’ V1 rocket from Nazi Germany in July 1944. The Talbot houses next door were levelled. Similarly, terraced houses just behind Montpelier Lodge were destroyed. WGL would have been dismayed to see what the next generation allowed to occur in the new century. There had been such hope and promise in his own.