Ron Buckmaster
(March 30, 1923 – January 1, 2002)
Ronald Leon Buckmaster was a UK fan originally from Kent active from the 1940s to the 1960s. With his wife, Daphne, he was a regular attendee at UK conventions during the period.
In a fanoir in Daphne's Esprit 1 in 1954, Buckmaster told how:
Every Saturday afternoon I walked four miles to Dover and made a beeline for the Americans stall in the market. Here I read frantically until Nemesis in a market apron with significantly jingling leather pouch approached. Three penn'orth of my heart’s blood would then purchase immunity for another hour and an Astounding redolent of ink - fresh ink. One mag was all I could buy but my elasticsided [sic] conscience allowed me stealthily to exchange the last week’s, inside my coat, for another ration to satisfy my ravening hunger.
He was a career soldier, joining the army "as soon as I left school" (that is, during the World War II) and serving in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo, Somaliland, Eritrea, Abyssinia, Sudan and Egypt with "the doubtful honour of being the only fan" in all of these places, at least to his knowledge.
However he didn't discover fandom until a chance encounter on a bus in Welling in what is now south-east London. Buckmaster was visiting his grandmother "one wintry day, on leave" in 1947[1] when:
The bus stopped at the corner of Wendover Way. A moment later a raincoated, ferly[2] figure sat beside me and opened an American ASF. "You like that stuff?" I asked, tentatively displaying a BRE. "Well, as a matter of fact", (would he say 'Well it makes a change from Westerns'?) "I never read anything else - Neither do I – gabble – George O. Smith - gabble – Isaac Asimov – gabble gabble – White Horse Thursday nights – gabble – Welling station got to go now. See you next week." My body left the bus two stops later and plodded its sedate way homewards.
The man was Vin¢ Clarke. Buckmaster started attending meetings at the White Horse and went to the Whitcon in 1948 where he likely met Daphne Bradley, although she "was not to meet him again until a year later", when he "secured a posting to Woolwich as a Christmas present for 1948".[3] They married on September 3, 1949.
In 1954, the Buckmasters were living in married quarters in Woolwich barracks, and co-founded the jocular Woolwich Science Fiction and Vargo Statten Appreciation Society with Bob Shaw who was temporarily working in the neighbourhood.
Buckmaster remained in the army until the early 1960s and his service took him and Daphne to various locations in the UK including Scotland, where they lived around 1960–2. They attended many UK conventions including Loncon in 1949, Festivention in 1951, the first two Cytricons in 1955 and 1956 and Loncon in 1957 through to the 1961 Eastercon.
Ron brought his sister Pam Buckmaster to the White Horse; she married Ken Bulmer in 1953. He also brought his brother, Eric, "once to a con and once to the White Horse", but with no thought for future fanhistorians he didn't say which con; there seems to be no mention of Eric Buckmaster in attendee lists.
In later years he lived in Devon.
- Mobius Strip [one-off 1960] (with Daphne Buckmaster and Chris Miller for OMPA)
| Person | 1923—2002 |
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- ↑ The year is not made clear in his recollection, but is given in Then; there may be Clarke's side of the story somewhere.
- ↑ Sic – this is Scottish or dialect for "strange, wonderful, wondrous, marvellous".
- ↑ On balance, this seems to mean Christmas 1948 and not the year before: Pam's account suggests she started going to the White Horse immediately after the Whitcon; if Ron had been a regular at the time, it is hardly conceivable it would have taken them so long to "meet again".
