Saturday 13 AprilSTEVE STILES:I woke up at ten that Saturday morning. It seemed the thing to do - and besides, my meter heater had shut itself off hours ago and the small room had developed a patina of cold that crept under the covers and wormed me out. Dressing hurriedly, I left my room. The Liverpool suite - a room shared by Eddie Jones and Norman Weedall - had its door open, and as I paused to lock my own door, Eddie called out to me to come on in.
Norman Weedall was stretched out upon his bed, a smile of bliss on his sleeping face. Eddie, however, seemed bright eyed and bushy tailed, despite the fact that he had retired to bed hours after I had. "Say," said Eddie, beaming, "care for a drink?" It seemed like a good idea; I'm not much of a drinker and it was ten in the morning; but what the hell, I had heard that Liverpool fandom, and Norman Weedall in particular, made mighty fine brew. (One of the educational benefits of my first trip to the United Kingdom was the discovery that beer could actually taste good, unlike the canned brews I had unfortunately sampled back home.) Eddie leaned over the sleeping Norman Weedall who was stretched out on the bed in full suit and tie, seemingly in a coma. "Norman," Eddie called out softly, "care for a drink?" Norman Weedall's eyes instantly sprang open. Taking a key from his suit pocket, he went to a large closet and opened it. There, row upon row, stood plastic gallon containers. It seems that these had been carefully smuggled into the hotel through a laboriously clever process to supply this convention, as at many other British cons, with booze when the bars closed down. Another fine old Liverpool custom. We each had a glass of some excellent coffee-flavoured wine. I would love to become a Wine Fancier, building up a varied collection of fine wines to astound and impress my friends, but, as is well known, Pepsi's the thing here in Fanoclast circles.
ETHEL LINDSAY: On the Saturday morning I chaired a panel which discussed "So you want to start a fan group?' With me were Ken Cheslin from Stourbridge, Rob Johnson from Bristol, Gary Klüpfel from Munich, and Tom Jones from Doncaster. We all gave potted versions of our attempts to form groups and then to keep them going; and the audience began to join in with anecdotes of their own. Irene Boothroyd of Bolton gave a vivid description of the trials of being the only femme in a group - "there is more than one tea towel". She also said that "as the members drifted away so did my books." From what I could gather from hers and other comments femme fans could well give a panel on the topic of being in a fan group... a free suggestion to any con committee looking for a programme item. This seemed, a good item as there was a lot of participation from the audience. STEVE STILES: Down in the lobby a few fans drifted about, and I met Ethel and Ella sitting in a cozy niche. We talked about the Presidential elections for a while over tea, and of Robert Kennedy's chances. The consensus was that Eugene McCarthy, good man though he was, didn't have a chance, and that Bobby Kennedy might be the only man able to depose the dismal Nixon-Humphrey choice. If we had only known. Ethel is, of course, a Kennedy fan, and she told me the story that, shortly after President Kennedy's murder, a US fan had achieved a peak in bad taste by sending her a JFK silver dollar with a hole punched in it. Plus a note to the effect that "now it's more authentic." I am not sure whether it's Fan X or Y, so rather than taking a chance of damning an innocent, I'll forego the pleasure of naming the schmuck.
JAMES WHITE: For the first time since the [1965 London] Worldcon I was to have fannish company on the way to a convention. Bob Shaw, gourmet, bonvivant, originator of the slow glass bushel, flogger of three s-f novels inside one year and Ireland's answer to prolific John Brunner, was flying with me to the Thirdmancon. We were using an aeroplane, of course, to avoid being mistaken for Walt Willis, and were travelling light. I had a small handgrip of delicately-tooled, Hong Kong imported plastic, while Bob had his pyjamas and toothbrush folded foolscap-size in a document case. The journey was without incident until we landed at Ringway - we both have a superstitious fear of making bad puns on an aircraft in flight - and were confronted by three large notices in the arrivals' lounge reading "Welcome to Manchester. Please walk carefully." We began to feel bad because our shoe soles and heels were worn down below the two millimetres of tread required by law and were generally not in a pavement-worthy condition. But a few minutes later we felt even worse on finding that the airport coach and rail connection to Buxton would not get us to the con earlier than four-thirty and it was then only ten-fifteen a.m. Buxton was just twenty miles away and the con was going on without us. We decided to take a taxi. Bob and I were strangely silent during that trip. The thought of the awful inroads the taxi fare would make into our beer and tomato juice money was a somewhat depressing one, but eventually we cheered ourselves up with the thought that Ted Tubb was reputed to be bringing along forty gallons of his famous home brew, a foully corrosive liquid with properties in common with paint stripper, aviation spirit and even fermented fruit juice. But our troubles were not over even yet.
St Anne's Hotel had a semi-circular, inward-looking format like a Roman amphitheatre cut in half. A fountain played very carelessly outside, throwing up a thick jet of spa water which blew about the forecourt and eroded the paint and chromework of the visitors' cars drawn up around it. The fountain made it sound as if it was raining all the time and was probably there to make the Manchester visitors feel at home. There was a stone veranda arrangement to protect pedestrians from the health-giving waters and we used this to get to the overflow hotel next door. I had booked a room several weeks earlier but Bob was going on spec. Due to some mischance they did not have a room for either of us, they thought. It appeared that both con hotels had been bought over by now owners earlier that week, the staff and management were brand new to their jobs, they had never been exposed to science fiction people before and they were terribly sorry but their bookings were all mixed up. Eventually Bob was able to share a room with Brian Hill and I got a single. There was some difficulty getting to my room because the manageress, a nice, elderly lady very anxious to please, could not find it. She grew very embarrassed about this but suggested that it might not be ready for me anyway and would I mind awfully leaving my luggage with a friend, and she would probably have found it by teatime if I'd care to call back then.
We went into the con hotel to find Ella Parker ordering tea in the lounge. Ella Parker orders teas in convention lounges practically twenty-four hours a day. She graciously allowed us - well, she allowed us - to leave our stuff in her and Ethel Lindsay's room and we moved to the con hall to find the Guest of Honour, Ken Bulmer, auctioning a bundle of New Worlds containing James White stories. I thought it was very nice timing on Ken's part, and when the auction was over I asked him what he would have done if our taxi had had a blowout. But apparently there would have been no problem because he had been holding that bundle behind his back until I arrived, and did I know how to waken an arm that had gone to sleep? Following the auction there was a two-hour break for lunch. After permeating for an hour or so Don Wollheim, Bill Pettit, a fan whose badge was pinned on at an unreadable angle, Bob and I found a restaurant downtown Buxton and were directed to three different tables for four before they found us one that would seat five and upon closer examination turned out to be a table for eight. Bob and I had had a very early start, we were gripped by a strange and terrible lust for food and we had not yet completed our withdrawal from the real world, so we graciously allowed the others present to scintillate. ETHEL LINDSAY: I met long-time fan Tony Glynn who told me he had orders from Betty Kujawa to take my photograph some time over the weekend. At intervals thereafter he would meet me and tell me this but somehow it never did get done; Tony was one of the first fans I met at my first con - the SuperMancon. A nice guy but you can never get him to become active; I suspect he has too many other interests. Ella and I went out shopping, taking with us young Alan Shorrock. Each year I am amazed all over again at those wonderful Shorrock children - good looking and bright and all as good as gold - and yet not the least stuffy. Alan set off with us as confidently as if he saw us every weekend. Ina Shorrock ought to write a book on how to bring up children - Dr Spock has got nothing on her!
STEVE STILES: "What are YOU doing in Buxton??" asked Don Wollheim in the corridor. He raised his eyebrows. His steely eyes took in my loudly fashionable Nehru shirt with the gold pleats and buttons. Unable to provide an answer, I fled into the programme hall - in time to catch a very dry lecture on astronomy, the aurora australis and like that. It beats astrology, but Mr. Alan Whittaker F.R.A.S. (I don't know what it is either - that's what it says in the programme booklet) was the type of lecturer accustomed to earnest little old ladies clubs and Boy Scouts, and most of the fans, save a few little old ladies and Boy Scouts, were fidgeting in their seats as he droned on and on. To make matters worse, the program hall was illuminated by a sky light - it was very difficult to make out any of the astronomy slides on the screen. JAMES WHITE: We arrived in the con hall for the start of Alan Whittaker FRAS's illustrated lecture on "Life in the Solar System." The Fellow's style was rather pedantic for a fan gathering and most of us had learned all that stuff when we started reading ASF. The fact that his screen was positioned under a large skylight which could not be blacked out made it even more difficult for the spectators to feel agog, even though we could not help but admire the lecturer's persistence. He kept saying things like, "You will notice slight colour variations in - but then you can't see it, can you?" and "In this area the majority of stars fall into the main sequence as you can, er, cannot see...." while Bob, Phil Rogers, and myself kept saying things like, "Is he talking about stars or sequins?", "This is terrible", "Let's leave inconspicuously in small groups", and "Yes, fifty at a time." It was much better fun in the bar helping the Guest of Honour, who was on next, worry about his speech.
Ken made a very good Guest of Honour, and his speech compared very favourably with his GoH predecessors of the last five or six conventions - a nice blend of humour, serious comment and fannish reminiscence, delivered at breakneck speed. He opened by announcing, "Ladies and Gentlemen, according to the Programme I finished this speech an hour ago," and tearing up the first half-dozen sheets of his typescript. One had to listen carefully so as not to miss a word, and concentrate hard to catch the subtle nuances and atrocious puns. The people who tell you that a speaker must talk slowly and appeal to the lowest mental common denominator in the audience do not know what they are talking about. There was absolute silence in the hall while Ken spoke - except when he made puns - and anyone in the outer lounge who raised a voice was promptly shushed, even though one felt that he had recorded his speech at 78 - and was miming to the playback at 15. He ended by tearing off a series of capsule con-reports of every con held since 1951, with particular emphasis on the Supermancon, Operation Armageddon, and the parcel of animal entrails Brian Burgess hid in an SF editor's bedroom until it was time for the sacrifice. The editor, Peter Hamilton of Nebula, found them and threw them out, apparently, and they would have sacrificed Brian only they didn't have the guts.
Transcript of the GoH speech. PETER WESTON: [Ken] went on for over an hour and our attention may have wandered slightly, but fortunately, we were sitting behind a veritable apparition, a young man in pink lounging pyjamas with what looked like a tasselled Turkish fez perched on top of his long, flowing blonde hair. Eileen studied him with fascinated interest, never having seen anything like it before.
It was the first appearance of Bristol fan Peter Roberts, soon to become a fannish icon for his bizarre fashion-sense.
"I travelled up in Archie Mercer's car with the other BaD people," said Peter. "For some in my age-group this was the time of bells, beads and caftans; my vaguely hippy outfit was a Yugoslav pillbox-&-tassel hat (a gift from a holiday), and a sort of red, Chinese-dragon-print cotton top which was indeed a pyjama top (the accompanying bottoms, which I didn't wear, were black, giving a vaguely Mandarin look). I don't recall what trousers I wore, but probably flairs and maybe even 'loons.' To be fair, I was a teenager and it was 1968..." Actually, it must have taken a lot of courage to appear in this get-up in the middle of the afternoon. Most of us just wore our normal working clothes at a convention - that is, sports-jackets, suits, or blazers, complete with collar and tie-what else? Although some youngsters had turned up dressed a bit more casually, some even wearing jeans.
JAMES WHITE: The next item on the programme I really enjoyed: a professional panel discussion entitled, "What's Happening in S-F." This was cancelled! In the lounge we were able to stop Ella and Ethel from ordering more tea, and talked them into eating something instead. They were booked for full board at the Con hotel, and so were Don Wollheim, Bill Pettit and the fan with the twisted badge, so we decided not to go out to eat. Besides, Bob had been talking about feeling the cold and damp, meaningfully. It was a chilly April, he said, and every time the doors opened the damp spa air came in. We nodded sympathetically without speaking to him. Finally he said, "The cold that came in from the spa, ha-ha-ha." We continued not speaking to him for a while. Perhaps we wore unkind to him, but at that time we did not realise that the dread, skeletal figure of Starvation was hovering over all of us and that it would lay its bony finger particularly upon Bob Shaw. That was the first of the two meals at that convention which will remain etched in our memories. Our head-waiter dashed about the dining-room, listening to complaints and making sudden turns and stops so that the tails of his coat swirled dramatically around his knees. He was not able, however, to speed up the arrival of the food, or raise its temperature much above freezing-point, or control the quantities, which were microscopic. At one stage we sat looking at our plates while the cold food got colder waiting for something bulky to arrive like mashed potatoes or chips, only to have the grim realisation dawn that the two tiny, brown, wrinkled potato croquettes wore all the spuds we were to receive. Bob did not even get a croquette - the waitress forgot to come back! When another one asked him what he would like for dessert he asked hopefully for a plate of mashed potatoes with custard. He got a marble-sized portion of ice-cream with nuts in it. He sat there looking brave and forlorn, his slacks growing visible baggy at the waist and his cheeks beginning to curve inwards instead of out. ETHEL LINDSAY: One night we snagged the big table in the dining-room and had dinner with Billy, Dozy, Don Wollheim, Bob Shaw and James White. By this time in the weekend the portions being served were getting smaller and smaller. Ella and I felt really ashamed as we watched what was being served to those visitors; but it was only at the end we discovered that Bob Shaw had not received any potatoes at all. How he kept quiet about this I’ll never know. JAMES WHITE: I reminded him that I had sandwiches in my bag and that usually Brian Burgess brought a supply of meat pies to every convention and would no doubt sell him a couple, although he should try, if possible, to buy two of the current crop. I seem to remember that the Yarmouth meat pies were not a particularly good year. After that frugal meal Bob went looking for Brian Burgess and I returned to my hotel to see if the manageress had found room 22 for me yet. She had. What's more, she was eager to pass on this knowledge in case she should forgot it again, and she apologised again for the fact that she had taken up this job just three days ago and was still finding difficulty in fixing the geography of the hotel in her mind. One could have said some very sarcastic things at that point, and one was tempted, but at the same time one could not help noticing the eagerness to please in this hotel compared to the couldn't-care-less attitude in the one next door. Neither could one forget the plentiful, hot food that they served so promptly and cheerfully or the hot-water bottles they put in the beds. At three or four in the morning they were lukewarm bottles, but it was the thought that counted. During the series of auctions which followed we went in and out of the bar and lounge for tomato juice and tea respectively with Tom Schlück and Ella Parker - Tom was plying me with so much juice that his friends had begun to call him Tomato Schlück. When the auctions ended everyone disappeared into the TV lounge to watch Doctor Who [episode 5 of the Patrick Troughton adventure 'Fury From the Deep', one of the stories completely missing from the BBC archives].
Back in the Con hall the Fancy Dress Party was getting under way, with an average of three photographers for every competitor. Brian Burgess should have won the special prize for his impressive suit of armour - which made him look about twelve feet tall - instead of the imaginative but simple plastic Black Cloud worn by Tony Walsh. Later, Brian's armour proved itself in battle when he and Ted Tubb featured - actually their features were steaming gently inside their helmets - in the Grand Jousting Tourney, during which they broke two shields and three swords trying to prove that the other one's armour could not take it. The welkin rang with the clatter of sword against hardboard and blood ran freely from skinned knuckles, but there was no clear decision, so they raised their visors and called it a knight.
STEVE STILES: Ted Tubb and Brian Burgess engaged in a duel and proceeded to demolish about six wooden swords and three wooden shields. I still have a piece of a wooden shield, which I planned to hang over the mantle with perhaps some crossed broken swords. (The piece of broken shield fascinated the customs inspector on the way back home.) Tubb and Burgess showed much enthusiasm and prowess.
JAMES WHITE: While the dust was still settling we went up to Ella and Ethel's room for a quiet chat. It is possible to have a quiet chat with Ella when her resistance is low between cups of tea, and the service was very slow in that hotel. Don Wollheim, Bill Pettit and Ken Cheslin wandered in, and a little later Bill invited us over to his room. This turned out to be an oasis - well, four crates of beer and assorted hard stuff - of peace and quiet, cultured conversation. Bill forced beer on us and between gulps we talked about his s-f and fanzine collection; while in the corner Ella and Ethel explained American politics to Don. Don is a sort of linguistic chameleon who adopts the accent of the person he is talking to within a few seconds. He says it comes easy when talking to Bob or me because he was born in an Irish colony in Harlem or some place like that, but when Tom Schlück joined us and he started talking to Ella, Tom and Bob at the same time the effect was startling. STEVE STILES: The party for the evening was in the Liverpool Suite, with wine by Weedall and Shorrock being put to very good use. Ted (E.C.) Tubb came over to me and said hello, pausing to admire my shirt. The man seemed both sincere and sensible. I was a bit dumbfounded: I had had my second thoughts about that shirt soon after buying it and finally decided it was garish - a silk Nehru shirt with gold buttons and trimming that I had picked up in a moment of trendy madness in Times Square. I felt self-conscious about wearing it that evening but Ted seemed to like it and, more importantly, so did an attractive young woman who magically materialized on my lap with a "Oh, it's cute." I made a mental note to pick up two dozen more Nehru shirts when I got back to New York. Things were all very pleasant until her rather fierce looking husband wandered in. Beads of sweat popped up on my upper lip as I wondered how to discreetly disengage myself. At that moment the phone rang. Silence descended on the room. Eddie leaped up, bowling over his pretty girl, and headed for the phone. "Hello?" he said. "Yes, yes, I know, but..." His conversation trailed off into apologies and protests, and he hung up. "That was the management," Eddie announced. "They think we're making too much noise, and the house dick is coming up. So we're all going to be the soul of restraint until I can get rid of the twit." Consternation. Groans. Everyone sat about pretending to be respectable. There was a knock on the door. In walked the "house dick." "It was me, folks," said Dave Kyle sitting down amid boos and hisses. What a dick.
Later on in the evening I got to talk with Trevor Hearndon, a likeable Canadian fan. We were joined by Peter Day, a film fan and editor of a film digest, and Brian Marshall, a young fan with a Beatle cut who had been admiring my "Dr. Strange" samples and who was interested in Marvel gossip. The four of us fell to talking about comics, films, and the comparative virtues of the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles. We were standing in a corner and as the evening wore on, and refills were passed around, a gestalt of sorts was established. One of those rosy-glow gestalts. Still later in the evening, we were more or less propping each other up as the floor loomed menacingly up at us. "You know," said Peter Day, "you're a damned good guy." I returned the compliment, adding that Trevor and Brian were damned nice guys, too. Trevor and Brian agreed that everyone present was a damned good guy. We smiled and smiled. God, what a nice bunch of damned good guys, I told myself. JAMES WHITE: Meanwhile, in the corridor, Ted Tubb was worrying loudly about all the free booze lying undrunk in the boot of his car that he would have to take home again. Bob began telling me that he felt like a breath of air and I told him that normally breaths of air did not weigh fourteen stones and come wrapped in Harris tweed sports-coats, but his bottle was making gurgling noises just then so he probably did not hear me. At the hotel entrance we were met by Duncan Lunan who insisted that somebody was firing a machine-gun outside. We scoffed politely - a very hard thing to do when guzzling beer out of a bottle - and went outside to investigate. (We must have been drunk.) But it turned out to be only a fireworks display. On our return to the Con hall we found Ted Tubb, once again his old unworried self, dishing out his home-brew. This was a full-bodied, tightly-corseted, impertinent wine which had been matured in plastic for all of three days. It came in two colours, murky and bright red, had a bouquet that was a mixture of pineapple, turnip and Dolrosa, and attacked the palate like cleaning-fluid. Ted, a persuasive follow, assured me that after all it was only fruit juice. Sometime later I joined Ethel and Ella in the lounge for a chat and a cup of tea. They had just finished their pot and I could not talk, very well because my teeth seemed to have gone all soft, and articulation was hampered by the long green fur growing on my tongue. Ella said that even my glasses were bloodshot and I should go to bed before I went to sleep. The semi-circular plan of the hotel made the corridors curve away in both directions as if the place was the interior of a giant starship, complete with muties, armoured knights, wild-eyed crew members and one drunken Black Cloud. It made things very difficult for someone who was trying to prove something by walking a straight line.
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