Mr Rookes
(???? –)
Mr Rookes, for whom our history does not record even an initial, was a UK fan from Axminster briefly active in the 1930s. He attended the Third British Convention in London. That, sadly, is the sum total of our knowledge of the man, derived from a line in Ted Carnell's report published in The Satellite v2 #6 in June 1939:
Back at the joint, G. W. Axworthy of Portsmouth, Mr Rookes of Axminster, Charnock L.V. Walsby Heald, the Jekyll and Hyde of Liverpool, and most of the London crowd had arrived.
Unlike the almost equally mysterious Axworthy, there is no record of him leaving so perhaps he was left behind in the Ancient Order of Druids' Memorial Hall on Lamb's Conduit Street, although let's hope not as it was destroyed by incendiaries on May 10, 1941. But no, presumably at the end of the convention he returned to Axminster and disappeared out of fannish ken. Perhaps, having noticed that his presence had attracted such scant attention, he resolved to make a bigger impact at the 1940 convention, a plan rather kyboshed by the outbreak of the Second World War, but to take this further would be to descend into the realm of the counterfactual.
Oddly, there is no record of anybody named 'Rookes' living in Axminster in the 1921 or 1939 census.
There is an argument for saying that Mr Rookes does not really need a page here in Fancyclopedia 3 given we know so little about him but the simple truth is that somebody has decided that every known attendee at a pre-War British convention should have a page and so here we are. Who knows, maybe more information will emerge...
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