Laurence Sandfield

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Bertram Laurence 'Sandy' Sandfield was a UK fan from London active from the 1940s until the 1960s. An early UK filker, he wrote the filk songbook Songs from Space. He was a member of the British Fantasy Society (BFS) and the BSFA.

Sandfield is mentioned in Futurian War Digest #28 (May 1943) seeking back issues of Astounding. He joined the the BFS soon after and was described by John Aiken as one of the newcomers at the Eastercon in 1944, 'wearing a tie of a totally new primary colour'.

He was thereafter a regular attendee at UK conventions including the Whitcon in 1948 and Loncon I in 1957. He is often described as playing guitar to mixed reactions. In A Fake Fan in London, Bob Madle wrote of the 1957 Loncon with:

Lawrence Sandfield ... strumming away mightily on his git-iiddle to the utter delight of all attendees

However it seems likely that Bobbie Wild was talking of Sandfield when she said, as reported by James White in Hyphen #19:

... she had insured herself so that she could wrap a certain person's blank guitar round his blank-blank neck with impunity

Archie Mercer, writing in Excelsior #3 described Sandfield's performance at Cytricon III in 1957:

Sandy ... is a London Circleite who digs trad jazz and plays guitar in espresso bars and places. Sings, too. Eric Jones recorded an hourlong concert of his playing one of the three nights – I forget which – and when it was played back later I stood glued to the tape-recorder until it was finished – although I'd heard the original. Sandy specialises in blues and folk-songs generally, usually with a Transatlantic bias – a style of playing that is very popular in this country these days, and for which we have borrowed the term 'skiffle' to describe it. Sandy, being an sf fan, has attempted to adapt the medium to sf-based themes, such as spacemen's songs of home and the like, with varying success depending on how starry the listener's eyes can get. Personally, I prefer his 'London Circle Woman' with a bright twelve-bar chorus for virtually every one of the Globe Tavern's regular female denizens of a Thursday evening – and I can think of a dozen or so more off hand, so he's plenty of material to choose from.

While Sandfield didn't publish fanzines he occasionally wrote for others, including one of the three known accounts of Cytricon III written as by 'Sandy Lawrence'. An article in Northlight #7 (ed. Alan Burns, November 1959) written in the aftermath of the London Symposium one month earlier provoked such a 'a furious and disproportionate response' according to Peter Weston in Prolapse #12, that it led to Sandfield 'gafiating completely'. This may be slightly premature as Sandfield appeared in costume at the London Eastercon in 1960 as Rhysling, the bard from Robert A. Heinlein's 'The Green Hills of Earth'. He is listed in Ron Bennett's Directory of Science Fiction Fandom for 1960 but not for 1961. In Skyrack #83 Bennett numbered him among the 'Names from Fandoms Past' present at Loncon II in 1965.

He published a handful of short stories in the early 1950s, some under pseudonyms.

Not to be confused with Sandy Sanderson.

• Laurence Sandfield in Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Photo.

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