W.Bro David J. Norris

David Norris

01732 350138

Postal address of Scribe E ... 142 Shipbourne Road, Tonbridge, Kent TN10 3EJ

Robinson Royal Ark Mariners
Date of Warrant 27th March 1923

This degree, although worked under the aegis of the Grand Lodge of Mark Master Masons, and requiring every candidate to be a Mark Master Mason, has no historical connection whatsoever with that degree. Mark Grand Lodge's rule over the 'Ancient and Honourable Fraternity of Royal Ark Mariners' is simply a quirk of fate and a very interesting story in itself (but one that must be left unto after you have joined our ranks!). 

Robinson Royal Ark Mariners meets at the Maidstone Masonic Centre on:-
Third Tuesday in January, February, April and November
Day of Installation - Third Tuesday in April   

It stands entirely alone and totally unrelated to any other degree in freemasonry. As its name suggests, it has a nautical flavour and takes, for its scenario, the circumstances leading up to the Great Flood as recorded in the Book of Genesis and the steps taken by Noah to build the Ark by which mankind was preserved from perishing in the "Universal Deluge".
Like the Mark Master Mason's Degree, which is based on an established fact (i.e. the construction of the Temple at Jerusalem), so the degree of Royal Ark Mariner is also based on an actual happening, (i.e. the Great Flood), as recorded in the Bible and as established in the year 1929 by the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, who not only found clear evidence of the flood, and established that it had occurred some 6000 years previously, but also proved that it had covered an area of some 4000 square miles of what was then Mesopotamia, now Iraq. To the people of that part of the world, who probably never travelled beyond the perimeter of their own villages, it must have seemed that the whole world was under water.