In a few months the World Science Fiction Convention will return to the British Isles; and, Lord willing, so will I, 48 years after my first visit to that green and pleasant land.

I think I know what I can expect from the 2005 Worldcon that is to be held soon in Glasgow -- an experience much like the one I had at the first Glasgow Worldcon ten years before, only rather more so. My recollections of Glasgow in 1995 include a pleasant stay on the nineteenth floor of the lofty Hilton Hotel, a bit of whisky in my breakfast oatmeal and haggis for lunch, a daily jaunt across town to the shimmering, glassy convention center, and having, amid the great throngs of convention-goers, old friends and new, a whirlwind series of encounters not only with British fans and writers but with delegates from former Soviet-bloc countries like Latvia and Poland and the Czech Republic and Ukraine, and visitors from Russia itself, all of them still rarities in the early post-Communist years. At the end of the day there was dinner in one of Glasgow's superb restaurants, and a party at one of the hotels, and perhaps a drop or two of the single malt before bedtime. This time, I suppose, everything will be bigger, shinier, throngier, whirlwindier. I do hope to stay at the Hilton again and to find that the single-malt product is still available, and I will gladly sit down to dine on haggis when the opportunity is presented.

One thing is sure, though: whatever the 2005 Glasgow convention will be like, it won't be remotely similar to the first British Worldcon of all, the one that was held in London in September of 1957. That convention now seems to have taken place in some alternate universe. Those of you whose Worldcon experience is confined to the last ten or fifteen such events would be flabbergasted by the differences between a modern con and that primordial one.

We can start with the attendance figures. I have attended all five of the previous British Worldcons, and I must be one of just ten or twenty people who can make that claim, because there were merely 268 people present at that first one in 1957. (268 attendees, yes: not a typographical error. There will be individual panels at the upcoming Glasgow affair, or autographing lines for the more popular pros, that will have more people than that in attendance.) Attrition of one kind or another must have claimed most of those 268 along the way, and those of us who remember the quaint event out in Leinster Gardens are growing very sparse by now.

*Quaint* is the right word for it. The venue was the Kings Court Hotel, a very modest affair of Victorian or Edwardian vintage a mile west of Marble Arch. It was my first trip overseas, and London's architecture, primarily of 19th-century origin, looked downright medieval to someone like me who had grown up in the high- rise glamor of 20th-century New York. The Kings Court in particular seemed like something out of the middle ages to me. Everyone who attended the convention stayed in that tiny squalid hostelry except for those who commuted from their London homes. All the convention events, such as they were, took place there too, in one small ballroom. (Certain other convention events, the unscheduled kind, took place in the nearby lounge, where beverages of all kinds flowed freely and uninhibited British fans put on displays of public affection that the staid, puritanical American attendees beheld in bemused astonishment.)

Joy Clarke, Sandy Sanderson, Ron Buckmaster, Vince Clarke, Bob & Barbara Silverberg, unknown with back to camera (possibly Fred Brown).

The cost of a room at the Kings Court was one pound a night, including breakfast. Let me repeat that, too: *one pound a night,* which then was the equivalent of $1.40. You must make allowances, of course, for the carnage that half a century of inflation has wreaked on good old sterling: in those days a reasonable salary for a shopgirl or a young clerk was six or seven hundred pounds a year, a local ride on the Underground was sixpence -- 2.5p in modern British money -- and newspapers cost a penny except for posh ones like the *Times*, which might have been tuppence then. Even so, a pound a night for a hotel room was on the low side for the era, so low that when my wife and I hopped over to Paris for a few days during our trip, we simply kept our London room rather than go to the bother of putting our things in storage during our absence.

Of course, the Kings Court was somewhat less than lavish. That pound-a-night fee didn't include heat in one's room, for example. If you wanted that, you fed one-shilling pieces (think 10p. coins) into a meter on the wall. The Americans at the con, perhaps a third of the total attendance, were utterly unfamiliar with that kind of arrangement, but we quickly learned to keep a stockpile of shillings on hand to get us through the night. Another little hotel amenity to which we Americans were accustomed was a private bath and toilet in each room; but no, no, austerity was still the watchword in an England not yet fully recovered from the hardships of the war, and the Kings Court provided just one or two such chambers on each floor, giving us a nice little lesson in old-world privation.

Then there was the matter of breakfast: toast, cornflakes, sausages, eggs. No problem there, except that the toast was prepared the night before and set out on each table in little metal racks, along with bowls of corn flakes. The layout of the hotel was such that the most convenient route from our rooms to the meeting-hall in the evening was through the dining room, but the first time we tried it we were met with anguished cries from the hotel staff: "Please don't walk through here! You'll get dust in the cornflakes!" That became a watchword for the attendees all weekend.

Barbara Siverberg, H. Beam Piper

As for the attendees, those brave 268 of the Worldcon Pleistocene who tiptoed past the cornflakes, they included a good many whose names are still familiar today. Among the writers present were Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, Arthur C. Clarke, James White, H. Ken Bulmer, E.C. Tubb, John Wyndham, Michael Moorcock, Eric Frank Russell, William F. Temple, H. Beam Piper, and Sam Youd ("John Christopher"). John Brunner -- whose death at the 1995 Glasgow convention cast such a tragic pall over that con -- was there too, a slender lad of 23. The formidable John W. Campbell, greatest of s-f magazine editors, was the Loncon guest of honor. His British counterpart, E.J. ("Ted") Carnell of *New Worlds,* was the convention chairman. Everyone who was anyone in British fandom was on hand, of course, and a good many American fans, too, most of them passengers aboard a chartered flight organized by David A. Kyle of New York.

You would think that the program would have been a busy one, with that many of the era's best-known professionals there. You would be wrong. The day of the round-the-clock multi-track convention program was still far in the future. The one and only event of Loncon's first day, Friday, September 6, was a brief opening ceremony in the evening, followed by a party. Saturday morning nothing was scheduled except a concert of recorded jazz. In the afternoon came the official convention luncheon, featuring brief speeches by many of the con's celebrities -- an event made notorious when the famous American fan Forrest J Ackerman, who had arrived wearing a string necktie of a type commonly worn in the Western United States but unknown in England, was turned away at the door. "The ceremony is to begin with a toast to Her Majesty," Forrie was told. "Gentlemen must wear neckties." His protests that he *was* wearing a necktie were unavailing. (I suppose it's still possible to imagine a ceremony at a modern British convention that includes a toast to the Queen, but one for which neckties of any sort are mandatory is unthinkable today.)

Bob & Barbara Silverberg in front, Dave & Ruth Kyle in next row, Eric Frank Russell between them in back row.

The Hugos were handed out on Saturday night -- a brief ceremony, because only three were given, one for best American magazine (Campbell's *Astounding Science Fiction*), one for best British magazine (Carnell's *New Worlds*), and one to *Science-Fiction Times,*, the *Locus* of its day. With that rite out of the way, an official of Madame Tussaud's waxworks spoke for half an hour about Britain's first planetarium, and an auction of old s-f magazines and magazine illustrations filled in the time until 10:45, when a costume ball got going in the minuscule main hall, followed by the traditional masquerade and judging of the costumes. Sunday's program was equally light -- more jazz in the morning and the showing of amateur films in the afternoon and a hypnotism demonstration (in which I failed utterly to go into a trance, though some British fans proved hilariously more susceptible.) Then, at night, came a film showing ("Mr. Wonderbird") and another auction for collectors. Monday, the last day, provided the one and only panel of the entire convention -- a question-and-answer session featuring half a dozen of the attending pros. After that, John Campbell delivered his guest of honor speech (on psionics, of course, the latest of his many pseudo-scientific obsessions), and the rest of the day was devoted to the sort of mild noodling around (more amateur films, another auction) that had filled most of the weekend. Not much of a program, no. I can't remember much about my own role in it, aside from sitting in on the hypnotism session. I think I was part of that Monday panel, but maybe not. It was all a long time ago and the fifty Worldcons I've attended have begun to blur together beyond repair. My keenest memories of Loncon I have to do with alcohol. Not that I'm a hard-drinking man -- which is, in fact, the point. The first episode occurred at a pub called the Globe in Hatton Garden, where on Thursday nights the London s-f crowd was wont to gather. Ted Carnell took me to the meeting the night before the con opened, and, when in an injudicious moment I expressed curiosity about British beer, everybody there insisted on buying the young American writer his special favorite. Politely, I tried them all, going way beyond my capacity, and then, at the end of the evening, John Brunner said, grinning diabolically, "But you haven't had barley wine yet, have you?" And coolly foisted a bottle of that high-proof ale on me, a lethal topper that sent me reeling off into the night. At the convention itself I was inducted into the Order of St. Fantony, a mysterious cult operated by Cheltenham fandom. At the climax of the ceremony the new inductees -- I was one of about five -- were handed a tall glass of a clear fluid that was described as "water from the sacred well of St. Fantony" and instructed to drain it at a gulp. Which we did; but what the glass contained, I learned a few stunned moments later, was something called Polish white spirits -- 140-proof vodka. Ah, yes, a quaint little convention. Quaint, too, were the bizarre sodium lights that cast an eerie orange-yellow glow over the nearby streets of the Bayswater Road and over the prostitutes who thronged there. Prostitution is not unknown in America, of course, but the streetwalking kind was uncommon back in that distant age, and I had never seen any right out in the open before. The poor girls were not exactly looking their best under those yellow-orange lights, to put it mildly, and for me the sight of them was, well, a nicely alien experience. Long, long ago, that London Worldcon. I do expect that things will be quite different in Glasgow, where the convention will be ten times as big and the streetlamps won't glow orange. Hold the Polish white spirits and pass the haggis, please.

.... Robert Silverberg (c) 2005 - (used with permission)