Ildiko Hayes
(1936 – 2013)
Ildiko Patricia Hayes was a UK publisher from London active in the 1960s. She worked for the Science Fiction Book Club, editing at least four issues of the Club's newsletter, Science Fiction News, from November 1960 to March 1961. She attended the BSFA Convention, 1960 where Archie Mercer, writing in both Cactus 5 and The Manner Of His Time, described her as:
one of the editorial staff of the British SF book club and a particularly pretty girl. (I wish I knew where she got that first name from.)
Hayes later joined the BSFA and was listed as a member of Discon, the 1963 Worldcon. The 83rd issued of the SFBC's Science Fiction News (March 1964) included a letter about the convention from an unnamed former editor who was almost certainly Hayes:
I came back [to New York City] via Washington, DC, in September, where I went to the SF Convention. Pretty much like an English convention except there are more names present and they mix less with the fans. Most of the fans were actually monster fans. If you haven't heard about the monster cult, let me tell you it's a very serious thing among this section of American youth. It started with Forrest J Ackerman's monster magazine, which is all about film monsters, King Kong and so on. I got friendly with the Ackermans and on the last day we took a picture of him stroking a stegosaurus in the Smithsonian Museum. Throughout the four days he was besieged by scores of boys begging for his autograph. These kids know all the dates of the monster films and all other details, just as jazz fans know the matrix numbers of their favourite records. I was completely amazed and bewildered by this cult, though I suppose one shouldn't be surprised at anything nowadays.
In a Facebook comment, Michael Moorcock said he was met Hayes through Sandra Hall and Hayes in turn introduced him to Hilary Bailey, later Moorcock's wife. 'Ildiko Hayes' is a minor character in Moorcock's novel The Whispering Swarm (2015).
Personal Life[edit]
This is to a degree conjectural, but the name is very unusual and so it seems highly likely that other references to Ildiko Hayes are to the person who attended the 1960 Eastercon unless they're obviously disqualified by time or geography.
Ildiko Hayes was born in 1936 in Manchester, UK. Her mother was Hungarian and Ildikó is a Hungarian name although this information comes too late for Archie Mercer. The registration of her birth uses the more usual accented form but later references, including in issues of Science Fiction News which she edited, do not. In 1939 her father, the musician and educator John Crossley Hayes, moved to Guernsey in the Channel Islands shortly before it was occupied by the Nazis and so much of her earlier life was lived under occupation. The family later travelled to Cyprus and Uganda. Hayes was at Cambridge University in the late 1950s when she knew Sylvia Plath. She may well be the Ildiko Hayes who wrote the liner notes for James Mason's 1959 45rpm vinyl recording of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". She died in Wiltshire in 2013.
| Person | 1936—2013 |
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