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"I must admit that for a while my faith in
Brian was slightly shaken, but I needn't have
worried. The thing that went wrong was
that two legs of my bed, which he was using
as a trampoline, had proved unequal to his
artistry, and the weight of about ten other
people, and had gradually folded up,
inclining him further and further off course.
Given a perfectly horizontal launching pad
he could have gone on bouncing on the spot
all night."
Despite broken beds it was probably the
Tynecon that helped lengthen the average
Eastercon by at least another day, since a large
number of fans turned up on the Thursday
before the con - a practice that had started in a
small way two or three years earlier. Certainly by
the following Easter a large Thursday contingent
was ready and waiting for the start of Seacon
75. Originally conceived as the South East Area
Convention with a probable site in Brighton, it
somehow ended up in the De Vere Hotel in
Coventry - and you can't get much further
away from the sea than that. Harry Harrison was
GoH and the rapidly increasing popularity of
conventions was reflected in a new attendance
record of over 400. Though suffering in
comparison with Tynecon, this earlier Seacon
was really quite successful and brought in some
innovations which have more or less settled
down as standard items at modern British cons.
It was here, for example, that the idea of a fan
room and alternative fan programme began, and
it was here too that Graham Charnock and
Group bravely agreed to play for a Sunday night
dance - it was feared that fans wouldn't take to
this (a disco at Tynecon had been one of the convention's few failures), but amazingly they did,
providing strange sights and bruised shins.
There were parties too, like the oddly straggling
one Peter Nicholls encountered on the main
staircase:
"Overwhelmed, I began to walk spiralling
down the stairs. With every successive
landing, it was like entering a yet more
inward circle of Dante's Hell. The circle of
the drunkards was followed by a circle of
limbo, where aimless neofans trudged in
passive circles, seeking a way out to the
great unreachable room party in the sky,
which no one could locate. The next circle
was the circle of the sleepers. Picking my
way through them, I spiralled down through
the circle of the failed gamblers,
commiserating with another about the
difficulty of filling inside straights. Further
down was the circle of the lost. They sat,
unreachable in their desolation, crooning to
themselves "I need a woman". The pain and
anguish of it all was too much to bear. I
feared to descend to the lowest of all the
circles, half-expecting to meet the horned
one himself, haunches sunk in ice, endlessly
chewing on the body of some long-damned
fan. In practice, showing that dramatic
metaphors don't always work out, the only
people at the bottom were Peter Roberts and
Karel Thole, apparently sober, talking
intelligently about Art in apparent ignorance
of the fact that it was 4.00 am and life and
hell."
The De Vere was a large, modern, and
expensive hotel - a fact which may have
caused the reaction which led to Mancon 5. This
programme book is not long enough to detail the
many horrors of that infamous convention.
Apart from the fact that, as with almost all
Mancons, the committee was to a greater or
lesser degree incompetent and bored with the
affair, the con had the peculiar (and so far
unique) misfortune of being held on a university
campus, in this case the squalid barracks of
Manchester University's Owens Park. Though
Robert Silverberg was GoH, the programme was
a shambles - and quite what happened to the
fan side of it never became clear. The only event
of note was a self-organized football game
(Ratfan Dynamo vGannet Flyers - referee, Bob
Shaw) which might have started another new
convention trend if real hotels only had football
pitches.
Chastened by Mancon 5 and Owens Park,
Eastercon 77 returned to the De Vere (an hotel,
incidentally, which has made most of British
fandom paranoid about static electricity) for
what was essentially a re-run of Seacon 75,
though the fan room was larger and better and
the dancing even more dangerous (Eric
Bentcliffe gave an impressive demonstration of
jitterbugging and Gerry Webb an equally
exciting exhibition of falling over). John Bush of
Gollancz was GoH.
Meanwhile a couple of new conventions had
sprung up in 1976, both of them small and with
little or no official programme. The Faancon,
first organized in Blackpool by Graham Boak and
then moving in following years around the
country, was (and apparently still is) held early in
the year; never attracting more than a few dozen
fans, it seems a rather shadowy and little-known
convention. More obviously successful is the
Silicon, staged by the North East Gannetfans
over August Bank Holiday. Though intentionally
small, with an attendance around fifty, it
attracts many of the more active fans from
around the country and seems essentially to be a
continuous weekend party, which can't be bad.
Both these small conventions reflected a
growing feeling that the Eastercon (and even the
Novacon) was becoming too large for comfort,
and as if to prove this the 1978 Skycon moved to
the Heathrow Hotel near London and attracted
some 600 attendees - easily an all-time record
for any British conventions up till now. Despite
this massive turnout, the convention seemed
lost in the hotel which in turn payed little
attention to con attendees who were shunted
off into crowded subterranean rooms (presumably for fear of falling aeroplanes) where
they were nightly harrassed by hired thugs,
posing as security men. It was not a nice place.
The con went on, though, with Robert Sheckley
as GoH and the committee introducing some
considerable sweetness and light by declaring
free drinks at the bar - an action which caused
something close to a stampede and the swift
swallowing of most of the Skycon funds.
And that just about brings us up to date, with a
new regional convention, the Glasgow Faircon,
starting up in 1978 and the latest Eastercon, the
Leeds Yorcon at the Dragonara Hotel, with
Richard Cowper as GoH, managing to be both
smaller and friendlier, and consequently more
enjoyable, than the previous year's extravaganza. Including the new Faircon, we're left
with five annual conventions in Britain, as well
as a fairly new crop of fantasy, Star Trek, and
other fringe and specialist conventions which
are beyond the scope of this article (and its
author though I was kicked out of the first
ever British Star Trek con, if that's any claim to
fame).
So that's it: a biased and probably inaccurate
account of sf conventions in Britain over the last
42 years. I hope it's provided some sort of background to Seacon 79; at the least it may have
shown newcomers that the Brighton worldcon.
is not an isolated event, but is part of a long
tradition of British conventioneering; and it may
also, with any luck, have jogged a few memories
of conventions long past. If anyone's interested
in further information, whether deeply historical
or plain foolish, you can probably find me
wandering around the con. Mine's a Guinness.
Peter Roberts
BRITISH CONVENTION LISTING
1937
Leeds
1938
London
1939
London
1941
London
Bombcon
1943
Leicester
Midvention
*
1944
Manchester
London
Leicester
Leeds
Norcon
Eastercon
Midvention II
Norcon II
1
1948
London
Whitcon
(GoH: Bertram Chandler)
2
1949
London
Loncon
3
1951
London
Festivention
(GoH: Forrest Ackerman. Fan GoH: Lyell Crane)
Bradford
Necon
(GoH: Ken Slater)
4
1952
London
Loncon
Manchester
Mancon
(GoH: John Russell Fearn)
5
1953
London
Chatham
Coroncon
Medcon
6
1954
Manchester
Supermancon
(GoH: John Russell Fearn)
7
1955
Kettering
Cytricon 1
8
1956
Kettering
Cytricon II
1957
London
LONCON1
(GoH: John W. Compbell)
9
1958
Kettering
Cytricon III
10
1958
Birmingham
Brumcon
11
1960
London
(GoH: Ted Cornell. Fan GoH.
Don Ford)
12
1961
Gloucester
LXIcon
(GoH: Kingsley Amis)
13
1962
Horrogote
Ronvention
(GoH: Tom Boardman)
14
1963
Peterborough
Bullcon
(GoH: Edmund Crispin)
15
1964
Peterborough
Repetercon
(GoH: Ted Tubb)
16
1965
Birmingham
Brumcon 2
(GoH: Harry Harrison)
London
LONCON II
(GoH: Brian Aldiss)
17
1966
Yarmouth
Yarcon
(GoH: Ron Whiting)
18
1967
Bristol
Briscon
(GoH: John Brunner)
19
1968
Buxton
Thirdmancon
(GoH: Ken Bulmer)
20
1969
Oxford
Galoctic Fair
(GoH: Judith Merril)
21
1970
London
Scicon 70
(GoH: James Blish)
22
1971
Worcester
Eastercon 22
(GoH: Anne McCaffrey. Fan
GoH: Ethel Lindsay)
Birmingham
Novacon 1
(GoH. James White)
23
1972
Chester
Chessmancon
(GoH: Larry Niven)
Birmingham
Novacon 2
(GoH: Doreen Rogers)
24
1973
Bristol
OMPAcon 73
(GoH: Samuel Delany)
Birmingham
Novocon 3
(GoH: Ken Bulmer)
25
1974
Newcastle
Tynecon 74
(GoH: Bob Shaw. Fan GoH Peter Weston)
Birmingham
Novacon 4
(GoH: Ken Slater)
26
1975
Coventry
Seacon 75
(GoH: Harry Harrison)
Birmingham
Novacon 5
(GoH: Dan Morgan)
1976
Blackpool
Manchester
Faancon 1
27
Mancon 5
(GoH: Bob Silverberg: Fan GoH: Peter Roberts)
Newcastle
Silicon 1
Birmingham
Novacon 6
(GoH: Dave Kyle)
1977
Derby
Faancon 2
28
Coventry
Newcastle
Eastercon 77
Silicon 2
(GoH: John Bush)
Birmingham
Novacon 7
(GoH: John Brunner)
1978
Manchester
Faancon 3
29
Heathrow
Skycon
(GoH: Robert Sheckley. Fan
GoH: Roy Kettle)
Glasgow
Faircon 1
(GoH: James White)
Newcastle
Silicon 3
Birmingham
Novacon 8
(GoH: Anne McCaffrey)
1979
Cheltenham
Faancon 4
30
Leeds
Yorcon
(GoH: Richard Cowper. Fan
Graham & Pat Char
<WmjQ)
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EASTERCON NUMBER.
55
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