Difference between revisions of "Eastercon 1944"
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Revision as of 10:25, 22 May 2024
Eastercon 1944 was a UK convention held April 8–9, 1944 (Easter weekend) by the Cosmos Club of Teddington, a suburb of London.[1] Walter Gillings was the 'Convention President' and John Aiken the 'Organising Secretary'; the originally announced GoH (or dinner Guest Speaker) Professor A. M. Low was 'unable to be present under military exigiencies'.
Rob Hansen identified 24 or 25 attendees:
- John Aiken
- Sydney Bounds
- Tommy Bullett
- Hal Chibbett
- W. A. Deveraux
- George Ellis
- Bruce Gaffron
- A. Gascoigne
- K. W. Gatland
- Walter Gillings
- H. Gomberg
- Fred Goodier
- Peter Hawkins
- Arthur F. Hillman
- Gordon Holbrow
- Donald Houston
- Ron Lane
- Michael Lord
- John Millard
- S. G. J. Ouseley (+1? see below)
- E. Frank Parker
- Laurence Sandfield
- Dennis Tucker
- Arthur Williams
Con reports refer to 'the Ouseleys of the Stoke-on-Trent group' so the assumption is that Mrs Ouseley was also present but there is no indication that she was a fan per se. Michiganian John Millard was in the UK serving in the Canadian airforce. Gus Willmorth from Los Angeles, also stationed in Norwich, had hoped to attend but his leave was cancelled at last minute, reportedly due to armywide preparations for D-Day.
This may have been the first British convention to charge a membership fee: 15/-[2] for both days, including 'all meals and entertainment', or half for one day.
The Saturday afternoon session in central London involved a visit to the bookshops of Charing Cross Road, a screening of some Disney shorts at the Cameo News Theatre, and a trip to the Pillars of Hercules pub followed by dinner in the Shanghai Restaurant.
The Sunday session with a proper con programming started at noon at Shirley's, a cafe in Teddington where the Cosmos Club was located: there was a comedy quiz panel, "Presidential Address" by Gillings on future of fandom, auction, film show and a pub evening for those who didn't have to leave.
The advance publicity said some informal events were planned for the Monday but these did not happen based on reports.
A souvenir book Eastercon 1944 edited by Bruce Gaffron was published in November, 'badly delayed by the interference of doodle-bugs'.<ref I. e. the German V-1 flying bombs, launched mid-June; not only these disrupted life in London and around per se, but Cosmos Club was originally based around a fire watch unit.</ref>
Rob Hansen summed up his detailed history:
… from 2010, the thing that most impresses about it is that it happened at all. The other wartime cons were small affairs, but the 1944 Eastercon was as full and complete a convention as any that had been seen in Britain to that point. Organising and running it under wartime conditions was a magnificent achievement. Both it and those responsible for it, the Cosmos Club, deserve to be better remembered and more celebrated than they have been.
Eastercon was the sixth UK convention ever (if the 1941 informal fan gathering Bombcon is discounted, as fanhistorians tend to), and as noted above, largest and most representative since the Third British Convention in May 1939. In spite of the con's name, it being de facto UK natcon, and second at Easter after 1943 Midvention, it was not included in the list of Eastercons (i. e. UK natcons) when their series was retroactively codified in 1971; the numbering started from the 1948 Whitcon notwithstanding their names, dates and the incredible 4 years separating them without any similar con despite the end of the war. Then again, perhaps the point is that it was Whitcon that started a new regular tradition in new conditions without such gaps.
- Eastercon 1944 detailed history at Rob Hansen's website. Includes the Programme Book but not the souvenir one
- "Eastercon Diary" by Aiken in Futurian War Digest 35 (Vol. 4, Number 5), June 1944 (summarised/quoted above)
- Summary/quotes of the above in Column 40 of Harry Warner, Jr.'s All Our Yesterdays dealing with the FWD in general
See also Early Conventions.
| Norcon | early conventions | Midventionette |
| 1944 |
| This is a convention page. Please extend it by adding information about the convention, including dates, GoHs, convention chairman, locale, sponsoring organization, external links to convention pages, awards given, the program, notable events, anecdotes, pictures, scans of publications, pictures of T-shirts, con reports, etc. |
- ↑ 28 minutes southwest from Waterloo by the (already electrified!) Kingston Loop Line; Teddington was amalgamated into Greater London in 1965.
- ↑ 15 shillings, i. e. three quarters of a pound. Per https://measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/ this is about £39 of purchasing power in 2022, though thrice more considering average income. To give another comparison, the Futurian War Digest cost 3 pence (1/80 of a pound), while the first post-war prozine, the 1946 Fantasy was a shilling. So this seems quite a sum; even the 1949 Loncon cost only 7/6d including the buffet, half as much.
There is a caveat on the Eastercon's primacy to charge, as the Midvention a year earlier also announced a fee of 5 shillings; however this was a much smaller and informal event, a kind of relaxacon avant le mot, and it is not clear whether in the end the money was collected, in the addition to expenses incurred by lodging and food.
