Obituary Peter Hedley Mabey

by Mark Plummer

Peter Hedley Mabey, who died on 19 February 2025, was one of the founder members of the BSFA in 1958 and the Association’s first librarian.

Born on 21 March 1926, he began reading SF pulps at school in 1938. His first contact with fandom seems to have been through fan and bookseller Ken Slater, who put him in touch with fellow Cheltenham fan Eric Jones in the mid-1950s. He joined the West Country Science Fiction Group and later was one of the first to join the new Cheltenham Circle. His first convention was Loncon, the 1957 Worldcon.

He became member number 18 of the BSFA in 1958. In Vector #4 (Spring 1959), he explained that: ‘…it was agreed that the Cheltenham Circle would look after the library, not only because we already had a good collection which would form a nucleus, but because we had a clubroom in which to store it.’ Writing in 2004, Ramsey Campbell said that Peter was arguably responsible for starting his writing career. Noticing that Campbell and Pat Kearney both regularly borrowed copies of Weird Tales from the BSFA library, he put the two in touch with each other; Kearney would later publish Campbell’s first story in his fanzine Goudy. Peter’s work with the library would be acknowledged with the first presentation of the Doc Weir Award at Bullcon, the 1963 Eastercon, although he wasn’t present to receive it.

He moved to Surrey around 1961 and joined the Science Fiction Club of London and the committee of Loncon II, the 1965 Worldcon (for which he was in charge of publications, producing its progress reports and programme book). While he had to discontinue his role with the BSFA library after leaving Cheltenham, he continued to maintain the magazine chain for some years and was part of the select committee formed to investigate incorporating the BSFA. He moved to Harlow in 1971.

In 2008 Peter was made a life member of the Association; he was at the time the longest-established BSFA member still paying his annual sub. In 2014 he attended Loncon 3, making him one of a handful of people who had attended all nine European Worldcons up to that point. He continued to attend conventions regularly well into the 21st century and his nineties.

Professionally, he was an aircraft engineer, working on the development of the Meteor, the first British jet-fighter. He worked on Ferranti’s PEGASUS computer, the biggest in the world at the time, and eventually became department head in 1962 with the title of ‘Chief Stress-man’. He then went on to the Hawker Advanced Projects Group and moved into computing full time in 1966.