Intriguing secret societies offer more than conspiracy theories

Submitted by daniel on Tue, 25/11/2025 - 15:13

Intriguing secret societies offer more than conspiracy theories - Inside Croydon

KEN TOWL delved into the little-known world of local literary societies, the ‘Lits’, where talk is cheap and at least the fruitcakes promise ‘no nuts’

I have discovered a hidden world, a world that exists in the shadows, a world in which people, mostly retired people, visit buildings, mostly churches, between the months of October and March, to hear about such topics as “Paranormal Mysteries and Cover-Ups” and “A Conspiracy Theory of the World”.

Local cemeteries and high streets are popular topics, too.

For this is the world of “The Lit”, the Literary Society, where a guest speaker and a slide show entertain an audience for an hour or more on a wet autumn or winter evening.

Tea and cakes are often part of this suburban ritual which dates to the early 20th Century, and doesn’t appear much changed in the intervening hundred years or so.

It is a world with its own arcane rules.

At every lit soc meeting there is a table with a small tin box, the cash box. Smart phones and credit cards are not acceptable forms of payment. “We’re not that modern,” I was told at the Shaw’s Corner Literary Society at the Redhill United Reformed Church last Monday.

You can, however, pay in advance via Eventbrite if you want to attend the Norwood Society’s talks and if, like me and a lot of other people, you don’t tend to carry cash. And at £3 a talk, it’s excellent value. I attended their October monthly local history talk – “The History of Beulah Hill” – and was treated to a fascinating lecture steeped in history and spiced up with nudity.

Let me be clear, both audience and lecturer, local historian Stephen Oxford, were fully clothed throughout.

But it turned out, according to Oxford’s talk, that at 4, Upper Beulah Hill, one of the grand houses we were learning about, “sun-worshipping” had been quite the thing in the 19th Century. Apparently, some people from Streatham would climb the hill, peer through the hedges and shout “Naked Norwood!” at the sun-worshippers.

And they would quip back, “Stupid Streatham!” What larks!

It wasn’t all nudity. There was famous food, too.

Because here on fashionable Beulah Hill was the home of tea importer William Peek, who had a partnership with a Mr Frean and, as Oxford put it, “went into biscuits”. They made a fortune with their bourbons.

There was culture, too. The opera singer Simon Reeve also lived up on the hill, and he was rich, for a while, anyway. He could command £200 for a performance, which was, as historians are wont to say, “a lot of money in those days!” He lost his fortune through bad investments.

The Norwood Society’s lectures are held on the third Thursday of the month at 7.30pm at The Phoenix Centre, Westow Street, London SE19 3AF, up on the Crystal Palace Triangle. They sell nice cake for a couple of quid a slice. You can see information on

their contrasting January (“Palaces of Sydenham Hill”) and February (“Slums of Lower Norwood”) talks, here.

My next Lit was the St Mildred’s Literary Society, established in 1934 and still going, albeit with only about 20-odd in the audience on the evening I was there to hear renowned Croydon historian John Hickman on “The Origins and Residents of Crystal Palace District Cemetery”.

Some of these were:

Edmund Arbuthnot Knox, (1847-1937) Bishop of Manchester and, ironically, considering his burial, a leading proponent of crematoria.

William Stanley (1829-1909) creator of the stereoscope and provider of the Stanley Halls.

Frank Bourne (1855-1945), last survivor of the battle of Rourke’s Drift (yes, he was one of the red-coated soldiers portrayed in the blockbuster movie Zulu).

It occurred to me that all of these seemed to have lived for 90 years. Was there something in the water in the district of Crystal Palace?

Towards the end, Hickman revealed that another “resident” of the cemetery was the great Victorian cricket superstar, WG Grace (1848-1915) who, unlike those above, didn’t get to see three score years and ten.

Another notable grave was that of ballcock inventor Thomas Crapper (1836-1910), who has lent his name forevermore to, well… the crapper and, by extension, as it were, crap.

The Lit meet at St Mildred’s Centre, 30 Bingham Road, Addiscombe, CR0 7EB on the first and third Tuesday of the months October to March. You can subscribe for the season of 12 meetings for £30 or dip into individual talks at £4 a go. Tea, coffee and custard creams are provided free. Their next lecture is the seasonal “An A-Z of Pantomime” with Chris Abbott, at 7.30pm on Tuesday, December 2.

For my next treat, I travelled out of the borough to investigate Shaw’s Corner Literary Society at the Redhill United Reformed Church where Andy Thomas, who we were told is “one of the UK’s leading speakers on mysteries and histories”, and was going to be talking conspiracy theories.

Thomas primed his audience of 40-something mostly older people with an actual conspiracy, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and explained how, at the time, there was a view that the apparent attempt to blow up Parliament was in fact what we today might call “a false flag” attack to discredit Catholics.

He touched on the theory that the royal family had plotted to kill both Camilla and Diana in some half-arsed way that involved nanny Tiggy Legge-Burke, an unidentified white car in the Paris underpass, and a conclave of English killer doctors.

There were, inevitably, several references to the New World Order, from its appearance in the 18th Century on the dollar bill as Novus Ordo Seclorum (and 1789 was the year of the establishment of the Illuminati!) through its use at Yalta when, apparently, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin re-imposed it, and through to the JFK assassination.

“It does look like it was New World Order necessity to get rid of Kennedy,” Thomas said. And the Twin Towers in 2001? “I’m going to level with you. The official story is not true.”

As for the moon landings, apparently fewer than 50% of the world’s population believes they happened. Thomas took us through the objections to various photographs supposedly taken in space and on the moon during the Apollo missions. There were questions about shadows and angles and reflections and flags and clarity of images.

To his credit, Thomas pointed out that it may be true that some of the photographs were manipulated or faked and that the moon landings had also taken place. Perhaps it was a question of aesthetics and NASA marketing, rather than a conspiracy that would, after all, have needed the co-operation of thousands of scientists and everyone in every country who had the capacity to track aircraft.

He left us with an exhortation to buy his books, and a warning: “By the way, the next stage is that we are all going to be micro-chipped. Like our pets!”

Ha!, I thought. Not if we insist on paying for everything by cash like the Shaw’s Corner Literary Society!

Shaw’s Corner Lit Soc meets in the upstairs hall of the URC, Hatchlands Road, Redhill, RH1 6AU at 7:45 pm on alternate Mondays. The next one is December 1: Christine Jarvis’ “Eat, Drink and be Merry – a story of London Food and Drink.” You will need a five-pound note.

I didn’t get to Purley Lit (established 1901), which meets at Christ Church, Purley, CR8 2BN, but I think I will. Their meetings run, of course, from October to March, and start at 8pm. The next meeting, on Thursday December 4, features Michael Withers’ “Medieval and Renaissance Musical Instruments”. One talk is £6, or you can pay £14 for all six 2026 talks.

I might also drop into the Sanderstead Literary Society at the United Reformed Church Hall, 3 Sanderstead Hill, Sanderstead, CR2 OHB,where they are part of a lively selection of social groups, from am-dram to a women’s guild, to a tennis club and Scottish country dancing.

The Sanderstead Lit appears to be aspiring to a younger audience – their visitors’ fee is £5 for adults but £2.50 for under-18s. The next talk is “My Magical Life” with Vanessa Horsfield, who will talk about the “fascinating experience of growing up in the world of The Magic Circle”.

Rather intriguingly, the talk on February 18 next year is “Margaret Thatcher”, described as “our first Lady Prime Minister”, by Tony Harris. The intriguing part is what follows: “Tony will be in costume, as usual, so come and enjoy this highly entertaining evening.” That’s definitely in the diary.

Possibly the oldest learned society based in Croydon is the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society, which was founded in 1870. In the 21st Century CNHSS meets most weeks, also in a church hall, the East Croydon United Reformed Church on Addiscombe Grove, and they have talks (plural) this Saturday, November 29, with seats to be taken by 2.20pm: “20th Century buildings in Croydon”, with Dr Alan Powers and John Grindrod.

There is no entrance fee for CNHSS talks, “but we do invite a small donation of £3”. They don’t say whether they accept payment by debit card.

In this age of Tik-Tok and Google, the 24-hour news cycle and allegations of institutional bias, there is something quietly reassuring and reliable about the quaint, suburban lits, even if it did seem that, at some of the meetings I attended, I was the youngest person in the room.

But I do feel like I have discovered a truly analogue and human world that combines sociability and community cohesion with an interest in people and places.

As long as there are lit socs, I don’t think we will need to fear being micro-chipped.