The first use of the name 'BOMBCON' to describe the September 1941 gathering I'm aware of occurred fifteen years after the event when it gets elevated to a convention in the pages of the programme book for NyCon II (aka NEWYORCON), the 1956 Worldcon, in an ad for the 1957 London Worldcon. The ad would have been the work of Ken Bulmer, who was in charge of 'Overseas Publicity' for the 1957 convention, and is an altogether peculiar piece of work. It calls our second convention NECRONOMICON (a name it had never had either before or since), 1948's WHITCON is listed as LONCON, and the 1949 convention is suddenly RAGCON. The 1953 one is listed as 1st INTERNATIONAL CON - which at least bears some resemblance to the name it appears under on the day membership tickets - but it had almost immediately been dubbed FESTIVENTION and has been known by that name ever since.

Then there's BOMBCON.

As seen in the reports on the previous page, at no point did anyone involved name the event a convention. So either Ken was misremembering, or he decided to consider it one to support his claim for London as "The City with the WORLD record for conventions". That such a list was able to be presented as an accurate one also highlights a problem that existed at the time and for many years afterwards: namely that there was *no* official list of British conventions. This state of affairs would not be rectified until 1971 when Peter Weston, wanting to print such a list in the programme book for that year's Eastercon, got together with Ken and compiled one. Unfortunately they made a mess of the pre-war cons, omitting the 1939 convention, including BOMBCON, and attributing the 1944 national convention in London to Manchester. They also reduced FESTIVENTION to just another national convention and omitted the 1957 Eastercon entirely. This was the list that would appear Eastercon programme books for the next two decades.

As a result of the research I did in the late 1980s for for my history of UK fandom, I came up with a corrected listing that included the cons Ken and Peter had omitted, restored FESTIVENTION to its rightful place as an international convention, and dropped BOMBCON. This list was subsequently accepted as being more accurate and is essentially the one that has been used ever since. As for why I dropped BOMBCON....

It became obvious to me very early on in the writing of THEN that I needed to be clear on what is and is not a convention or conference. In the spring of 1978 I attended a weekend party at the London home of Greg Pickersgill and Simone Walsh (report by Dave Langford in TWLL DDU #12). Many of the most active fans in the UK travelled from different parts of the country to get there (I myself came up from Wales) and, because they were active fans a fair bit of fannish business got discussed and sorted out over the course of that weekend. At one point I remember saying: "Y'know, this is virtually a convention. We should declare it one." Someone, possibly Greg, replied: "Don't be daft!"

And they were right.

At the absolute least, a convention should have been announced and planned as such beforehand. It's not a status you confer in the middle of an event or retroactively declare afterwards. So that was my bare minimum for inclusion. Inevitably, there were things that met this minimum requirement yet still missed the mark in other ways, and those outliers I decided on an individual basis. In the case of BOMBCON the decision was an easy one. It didn't meet the minimum requirement, so it was out.