Clacton SF Group
The Clacton SF Group was a short-lived local group in Clacton, a seaside town in the east of England. Its prime movers were Barry Hall and Bryan Welham and its clubzine was Perihelion.
Hall and Welham were sixth form students at the Clacton County High School, suggesting they were about 17 or 18 in 1957, and the other group members seem to have been schoolfriends although Hall gave the impression they were at best fringe fans with no wider interaction with fandom:
We enlisted some help from some other members of our fraternity. C. J. Krish (Colin Crisp) who doesn't take any interest in SF but will do anything once just for the hell of it. Then there is (Brian) Bickers, the original neofan himself. He is mostly interested in aircraft but we managed to get him onto SF somehow, (Geoffrey) Stone (Splon), the most cynical lowflying buzzard I ever met, especially when it comes to sex[1].
Another member of the group was Dave Dance.
The first issue of the clubzine Perihelion was produced in a room above a fish shop owned by Welham's father[2]. Their duplicator proved unreliable but they were able to negotiate use of a machine at their school and seemingly about half of the print run was sold to schoolfriends. The group came to the attention of the local press and featured in the East Essex Gazette of December 13, 1957, under the headline 'High School Boys publish Clacton's own science-fiction paper'.
Hall and Welham both attended Cytricon IV, the 1958 Eastercon in Kettering. There were four issues of Perihelion, the last in the Autumn of 1958, and the group seemingly broke up at that point when its members left school to various jobs and further education. Hall and Welham attended Brumcon, the 1959 Eastercon, but weren't otherwise in evidence in fandom.
Links
- 'Above the Fish Shop' by Ian Millsted, Relapse #19 (Spring 2011) at efanzines.com.
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- ↑ Perihelion #1 (October 1957).
- ↑ As of 2024, the building is an escape room.
| Club | 1957—1958 |
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