Mike Ashton was installed as master of Warton Lodge No 8411 in the presence of Past Assistant Grand Director of Ceremonies Neil McGill, the representative of Provincial Grand Master Mark Matthews. Neil was accompanied by PAProvGM Philip Gardner. Scott Devine, Chairman of the Lancaster and District Group and group secretary Daniel Crossley were joined by Provincial Assistant Grand Director of Ceremonies Steven Ellershaw, Provincial Assistant Grand Standard Bearer Steven Murray, Provincial Assistant Grand Pursuivant Syd Bateson and Provincial Grand Stewards Stuart Bateson and Andy Baxter.
WM Michael Clark opened the lodge and continued to conduct the installation ceremony together with assistant director of ceremonies Richard Escolme. The installing officers were; senior warden Bob Skelly, junior warden Eric Walker and inner guard Dr Keith Lowson. The master elect was presented for installation by his proposer Jim Stewart.
The third degree working tools were presented by Jimmy Nisbet. Junior brethren Bob Mitchell and Stephen Barton presented the second and first degree working tools respectively. The WM appointed Dr Keith Lowson as senior warden and Michael Yeadon as junior warden.
At the end of the ceremony, Jim Stewart gave the address to the master, the address to the wardens by Bill Manderson and to the address to the brethren of Warton Lodge by Fred Fox. Neil McGill was presented with a list of donations that the lodge had made to Masonic and non-Masonic charities totalling £3,710. Neil thanked the brethren of the lodge for their very generous donations.
Organist for the evening was David Tattersall and the Master’s Song was performed by Simon Almond. A total of 49 brethren attended the festive board. The toast to the WM was given by Jim Stewart. A raffle raised £246, which together with an additional £40 from the master’s swindle, made an impressive of total of £286.
WM Mike Ashton was born in 1961 in Little Hulton, which was a new town at the time and was still being built as the Salford overspill. His father was a police officer and his mother was a trainee pharmacist. At two years old and now with a younger sister the family moved to Aintree following a new posting in the police. Mike’s mother had to give up her job in the pharmacy and worked at the local supermarket.
Mike started school in Aintree, but still an infant his father was posted again, this time to Ormskirk where his mother went to teacher training college after which she worked as an infant teacher for the rest of her working life. Mike left St Bede’s High School in Ormskirk with the usual slack handful of O levels with his eyes set on working in agriculture. He completed 12 months practical on a dairy farm near Parbold as there were very few dairy farms near Ormskirk. Mike recalls getting up at 4am every day travelling on his moped to Parbold to start milking at 5am.
In 1979, he went to Agricultural College and from there worked on a large arable farm in Ormskirk taking charge of planting and harvesting of 500 acres of potatoes and running the grain dryer in the summer. Mike missed the livestock and later started work on a dairy farm at Ings near Staveley. He knew the farm as the family had a holiday caravan on the caravan site next door, and Mike had been helping out on the farm since he was about 10 years old.
It was on this caravan site in his early teens that Mike met his future wife Pippa., They lost touch, but he bumped into her again while still working at Ings in the early 1980’s where they began courting. They married in 1987 and later moved to Warton where Mike commenced work on a local dairy farm belonging to Brian Butterfield, a well-known local Freemason. They went on to have two boys, Joe and Ben, and now have three grandchildren, Isobel, Joshua and William.
After suffering a few cases of pleurisy from all the cold and wet Mike reluctantly decided that milking cows was not the best choice of career for him. After a short spell of selling animal feed and supplements, Mike worked for a contractor driving a multitude of machines. Before long this evolved into landscape work and eventually to having his own landscaping business. A lot of the work was management of the countryside. Mike was approached by Lancashire County Council about a new scheme they were introducing called the Parish Lengthsman Scheme, he readily joined.
Mike has been a self-employed Parish Lengthsman for over 22 years and doesn’t miss the paperwork, staff management and all that went with running a small business. As a Parish Lengthsman he works for three Parish Councils, maintaining the play equipment, buildings, sports pitches, open spaces, woodland and streets, in fact anything that is the responsibility of the local council, and loves every minute of it.
As a keen driver, Mike completed a driving course with Preston Advanced Drivers and passed his advanced driving test in 1992. He is proud of the fact that he and another student of Preston Advanced Drivers living locally, formed Morecambe Bay Advanced Drivers. Mike stayed with the Morecambe group for 10 years teaching and promoting advanced driving in the area. He was instrumental in forming Morecambe Bay Estuaries Advanced Motorcyclists (MBEAM).
It was while manning a mobile display unit promoting advanced driving at a local show that he met Jim Stewart, who would go on to propose Mike into Warton Lodge in 2008. Mike was initiated on Past Master’s Night in April 2008 and raised on the Past Master’s Night in 2009.
In June 2012, having now also passed his advanced motorcycle test, Mike joined Northwest Blood Bikes. The organisation had only been in existence for one month at the time and it was hard work in those early days often being called out at all hours of the night. Mike recalls his worst experience when he had just collected the liveried bike equipped with ‘blues and twos’ on a Saturday morning. He got the call to collect some medical notes and medication from Lancaster and take then to Barrow. As it was an emergency, he was cleared for use of the blues and twos, so he dashed to Lancaster and did an emergency run to Barrow, only to be told the patient had refused to go to Barrow which then meant an emergency run to Kendal. The heightened level of concentration and adrenalin left him completely exhausted on arrival at Kendal. Northwest Blood Bikes received the Queens Award for Voluntary Service in 2016 and Mike retired from the group in 2019. He continues his life-long love of motorbikes though, having recently toured the Outer Hebrides.
Mike worked his way through the offices at Warton Lodge and while junior warden he left Warton Lodge in 2014 and joined Poulton le Sands Lodge No 1051, quickly rising through the ranks to take the chair of King Solomon in 2017, which was the lodge’s tercentenary year. He is now assistant director of ceremonies at Poulton le Sands Lodge and sits on the Board of Directors for Morecambe Masonic Hall. Mike was exalted into Flowerden Chapter No 7576 in the Province of Cumberland & Westmorland in 2019, but feeling he was being pushed too hard he resigned and is now unattached in Royal Arch.
In November 2021, Mike was persuaded to re-join Warton Lodge after a few casual chats with Dr Keith Lowson where he was invested as junior deacon on the night he re-joined. Mike only really intended to fill in the gaps and had no real intention of working his way to the office of WM. He is incredibly humbled to be the WM of his mother lodge. Last year he took on the role as Secretary of Carnforth Masonic Hall. Mike is very thankful to Jim Stewart for introducing him to Freemasonry. He always wanted a brother and regards Jim as such and Jim’s father, the late Jim Stewart as a second father figure. “Thank you, Jim.”
