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THE MEN AT THE TOP:


arena EDDY HOLDING


W. Bro Stan Marut continues the series on our Men at the Top in London….


Eddy went to Primary School at


Eddy Holding with his children around the time of his Initiation.


E


ddy Holding comes from the heart of London, having been


born at the Lying-In Hospital in Lambeth, close to Waterloo Station, (the splendid hospital portico still fronts York Road), but the family home for his first twelve years was actually in Brixton. Eddy was very much a child of the 1950/60s and grew up within an environment of immigration as particularly witnessed in Brixton, which had a major influx of West Indians at that time. Eddy fondly recalls growing up in such an environment, especially as a teenager. He had a number of Jamaican friends and it would appear that, like local boy John Major, who later became Prime Minister, there was no thought of race holding any boundaries as to who was a friend or not - just like Freemasonry! In time, the family moved to the leafier suburb of Balham.


WINTER 2014


Stockwell Juniors; his secondary education was at Aristotle Secondary in Clapham where he excelled at swimming and cross country, being very thin and lanky. He represented his school in London Schools cross- country events, always managing to come within the top twenty! He obtained the regulation 6 “O” Levels which were needed for any youngster to get a reasonable head- start in the job hunt and in 1963, began his first job as Trainee Manager for W H Cullens, the Grocers, which was close to home, until he realised that he did not want to make his way in life from behind a shop counter. He therefore left to become a Clerical Officer in the Civil Service working within the Crown Agents in Westminster, where he worked for the next three years, before deciding that he wanted to take a leave of absence to go and travel abroad and develop some language skills. The 'gap year' not having been invented as such, there was no real prospect of this, so he resigned and then, unlike most people who would take a train after the ferry got them to France, he actually “walked” all the way to Spain, ending up in Barcelona! He left England in January 1968


and recalls camping out in the snow on the continent. He had no companion and it was an exciting adventure to head off to pastures unknown. With only his occupational experience of a grocer's shop and the Civil Service, Eddy ended up sharing a Barcelona flat with two students, a German and a Tunisian. Bearing in mind Eddy’s quest for a language learning opportunity, with his two newly


found companions he managed to converse on a daily basis in French, German and Spanish. Indeed, whilst there, Eddy taught English to youngsters from many nationalities at a private school. However, things came unstuck when the headmistress died and all of a sudden, there was no job. Based on Eddy's apparently excellent teaching ability, an offer did come from an American school, but as he had been working without formal teaching qualifications, a return home became inevitable. Back in London, he joined the London Ambulance Service as an ambulanceman in 1969. In the meantime, he had met his wife-to-be, Joan, while out dancing at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley and they married in 1970. Up until this time there had been no family link with masonry and no inkling of any likely developments in this field. Unknown to Eddy, his younger


brother, John, had become a mason in a Surrey lodge in the early 1980’s. However, it wasn’t John who introduced Eddy to masonry but an old friend, Basil Preuveneers and Basil’s father, Maurice. Despite knowing very little, Eddy was encouraged to take that first step and was finally initiated - in a double initiation - into Valentia Lodge No. 3097 in May 1983 by his friend Basil. The Lodge, founded in 1905, had been the “brainchild” of Viscount Valentia, a former PGM of Oxfordshire, with the objective of providing a masonic home for those men from Oxfordshire living or working in London. Eddy was 36 years old when initiated and recalls it as having given a very strange first impression. However, he relied on


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