A while ago I bought ‘official reprints‘ of the three Frieda Harris tracing boards. These prints hang nicely framed in the living room and when I was looking at the third degree tracing board, I saw some details that I want to look into. Before I do that, I want to have a look at the possible history of Harris’ designs.
Masonic tracing boards of course have a history. A history that I will not repeat here. It suffices to mention that in the UK the tracing boards became more graphic. They were no longer flat collections of symbols of the different degrees, but they got depth.
Without wanting to disregard other designers, but for the current story I must mention John Harris (1791- 1873) who designed the tracing boards that would be used in the “Emulation” ritual and became the basic design of practically all English style tracing boards.
In printed form, the colour disappears. In our story The Scottish Workings of Craft Masonry of 1898 are interesting, because this is most likely the ritual that forms the basis of the oldest, co-Masonis ritual.
As you can see, the Scottish Workings stayed quite close to John Harris’ design.
About that oldest co-Masonic ritual, that would be the Dharma Workings of Craft Masonry published in 1904 in the Netherlands. The tracing boards in that publication look like this:
Again, only minor differences.
The Dharma Workings developped. It is said that Frieda Harris designed her tracing boards either (around) 1938 or between 1945 and 1950. Either way, she would probably be most familiar to the 1928 edition of the 1925 version of the rituals. By that time the tracing boards looked like this:
And we we finally arrive at the tracing boards under discussion.
You can see that in spite of her recognisable style, Frieda Harris kept using many of the details of her namesake, but as the degrees progress, the boards become more complex.