A ‘brotherhood of the rink’? Curling, Freemasonry and the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, 1600–1939
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the relationship of the sport of curling with freemasonry and associated customs. Prior to the 1840s local curling societies and clubs initiated members in their organisations using ‘mysteries’ such as a ‘word’ and a ‘grip’; some held a ceremony known as a ‘curling court’, used for initiations as well as adjudicating unwritten rules of conduct. The formation of the Grand Caledonian Curling Club—later the Royal Caledonian Curling Club (RCCC)—in 1838 was an effort to reconcile the various traditions of ‘mysteries’ more than it was an attempt to draw uniform rules for the sport. RCCC officials enforced these rules because they believed that these quasi-masonic traditions represented an attempt to forge intra-class socialisation; their strength of belief, however, was sometimes reflective of their own status as freemasons. Ultimately, it is questionable that these ‘mysteries’ were successful in achieving an egalitarian culture in curling. Many Canadian curlers, whose clubs had a significant presence in the RCCC, either refused to take part in them or were altogether ignorant of them (and it was impossible for the RCCC to enforce them). A large number of Scottish curlers did not initiate. The presence of women in the sport, banned from mainstream freemasonry, further indicates accommodations with non-masonic culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".