BSFA membership 1958

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The British Science Fiction Association was formed in the aftermath of Cytricon IV, the 1958 Eastercon. It continues to this day, the longest lived of the various attempts to create a national sf fan organisation. Many thousands of people have been members during that time with membership numbers exceeding 6,000 by the mid-2000s although the maximum number of members at any time seems to have been about 1,000 and usually below that. It is clearly impractical and may be impossible to produce a list of everybody who was ever a member.

The BSFA received early publicity in the UK prozines. John Carnell mentioned the newly-formed Association in an editorial in New Worlds #72 (June 1958) and a small ad appeared in #75 (September 1958), while Walt Willis wrote about what he termed 'The End of Anarchy' in his 'Fanorama' column for Nebula in July 1958. These all served to bring the BSFA to the attention of people not already in touch with fandom. The first published membership list appeared in Vector #2 (Autumn 1958) with the list more explicitly dated 4 October. These people can be considered to be the founder members.

With the codes preceding the membership numbers, M = full member, A = under-18 associate member, O = overseas member and E = exchange member.

Links in red are being checked in case the person is here already under a variant name.

For ‡, Dave Newman was listed as member M1. However, Vector #3 said he 'was originally listed due to a misunderstanding'. M1 was later reallocated to Brian Aldiss but he was not a founder member of the Association.

A second list was published in Vector #8 (June 1960). This listed 96 members with new recruits including George Locke, Ken Cheslin, Don Ford, Harry Harrison, Michael Moorcock, Arthur Thomson, Dave and Ruth Kyle, and Bruce Montgomery, and members joining from the United States, New Zealand, Germany and South Africa. However, of the original 69 founders only 41 remained members.

Club 1958—
This is a club page. Please extend it by adding information about when and where the club met, when and by whom it was founded, how long it was active, notable accomplishments, well-known members, clubzines, any conventions it ran, external links to the club's website, other club pages, etc.

When there's a floreat (Fl.), this indicates the time or times for which we have found evidence that the club existed. This is probably not going to represent the club's full lifetime, so please update it if you can!

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