Eastercon
Eastercon 1944 was a UK convention held April 8–9, 1944 (Easter weekend) by the Cosmos Club of Teddington, a suburb of London.[1] The GoH was Professor A. M. Low; Walter Gillings was the 'Convention President', while John Aiken the 'Organising Secretary'. Rob Hansen identified 25 attendees including John Millard, serving in the Canadian airforce. Gus Willmorth from Los Angeles, also stationed in the UK, had hoped to attend but his leave was cancelled at last minute, likely because of the 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'.
The Saturday afternoon session was held in central London and 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' (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).
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 its name, date 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
- "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.
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| 1944 |
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- ↑ 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.
