In which The Author muses on changing
fashions in children’s names
When was the last time you met someone called Vernon? Or Edna, or Idwal, or Doreen? If you did, the chances are they were quite elderly. Maybe somewhere down towards the roots of your family tree you’ll find an Archibald or a Henrietta. They’re not names you hear any more. I can’t think of anybody I’ve spoken to recently with any of those names. There are names which seem to place a person very specifically in their time: Albert, Maud, Cyril, Eileen, Royston, Violet – you can almost smell the carbolic soap and the overcooked cabbage, can’t you?
At the opposite extreme, anyone named Kayleigh will almost certainly have been born in or after the summer of 1985.
I can fix the date in my mind with deadly accuracy. Marillion’s single of that name was a big hit in the summer of 1985, and seemed to be played constantly on Radio 1 when I was working in Prince Charles Hospital. In fact, there was one newborn whose blood samples came to the lab with the label ‘Baby Griffiths’ (I’ve picked a surname at random!) for the first few days of her life, until the parents – presumably by virtue of Fish’s relentless neo-Prog revivalism – decided to name her Kayleigh.
Names, like so other many aspects of life, seem to go in and out of fashion. When I was in school my contemporaries had names like Christopher, Mark, Michael, John, Richard, David, Helen, Claire, Joanne, Janet, and Caroline. They were names that had a history. They were the names of saints and monarchs and historical figures. They weren’t unusual, or exotic, or plain bizarre. No teacher of mine ever stopped in his tracks when calling the register, stumbling over the name Christopher.
My own name – Stephen – has a venerable heritage, being the name of nine Popes, a saint, and a badly drawn King of England, amongst other things.
Apart from exchanging the ‘ph’ for a ‘v’ (which as Stephen Fry recently pointed out, would have made me an American), there was little that could go wrong. My surname, of course, being an Irish patronymic, gave my teachers all manner of nightmares. Even now it confuses canvassers from call centres all over the ‘English-speaking World’ – to the extent that, when they say ‘May I speak to Mr —?’ and mispronounce my name, I simply reply, ‘Sorry, he doesn’t exist!’ and put the phone down.
By and large when we were in school there was a divide between the ‘traditional’ names like the ones I’ve mentioned, and more ‘modern’ names, which seem to have been taken from film stars and the like: Gary, Wayne, Lee. We also had a smattering of unusual ones – Keith, Marcus, Adrian, Glyndwr, Rhydian. Thinking back, Welsh first names seemed to be very much a dying breed when we were kids. I suppose this went hand-in-hand with the general decline of the Welsh language and culture in the industrial valleys of the south. The only Dafydd we knew of was our family dentist – and, for all I know, he may well have changed his name when he espoused the Plaid Cymru cause as a local councillor. Was he the only Dafydd in the village, I wonder?
Our grammar school first year was full of Ians and Davids, Michaels and Simons, Roberts and Garys, Andrews and Christophers, Darrens and Pauls, Richards and Martins. We had a few Timothys and Stuarts, a couple of Philips, a Gareth or two, a Rhodri, a Jeremy, and a Neil. We had Matthews, Marks, Johns – but no Luke. There was no James, no Thomas, no Nathan, no Evan, and definitely no Dafydd. The Old Testament names were even further out of fashion than the Welsh names – we didn’t have a single Adam or Jacob or Daniel or Saul in our year.
We did, however, share a classroom with the unfortunately-named Wayne Kerr. The poor bastard! A few years below us, my brother was in school with the even more unfortunately named Duane Pype, and a lad named Leighton Lovatt – whom their English teacher once remarked ‘sounded like a village in Oxfordshire’.
Outside school, the girls we knew were called Sharon, Yvonne, Diane, Tracy, Ellen, Andrea, Elizabeth, Karen – a similar mixture of the traditional and the modish. Our older cousins were called Christine, Denise, Diana. You don’t come across those names amongst younger girls. They’re called Ceri and Kayleigh and Gemma and Kelsey.
As I grow older, it’s interesting to see the names of younger friends reflecting a wider trend. About twenty-five years ago, the fashion seemed to swing back towards Biblical names: Benjamin, Adam, Thomas, Samuel, Hannah, Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca. This trend continues into the present school-age generation, with Nathans, Jareds, Lukes, Leahs, and Jacobs now making up the register instead of Pauls and Matthews. I’ve lost count of the number of Thomases who have been born to friends of mine over the past decade.
Meanwhile, the celebrity effect seems to continue to grip the public. I don’t know how many Jordans (both male and female) are in nursery schools throughout the valley. Nationally, the most popular names for children for a few years recently were Jack and Chloe – purely because these are the names of the offspring of TV presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan.
There are parents who give their children names from films and books, in the hope that they will be ‘unusual’ – and are usually disappointed to find that the name isn’t unique after all. My ex-girlfriend Sam has a friend with a daughter named Shannara – taken from the fantasy novels of Terry Brooks, I assume. Sam was very shocked when I mentioned casually that I’ve got a friend named Shanara (with one ‘n’) – she’s twenty-six, and her parents are Bangladeshi, so I guess the Asians beat Terry Brooks to that one.
Similarly, the teenage daughter of another friend is called Keira. According to her mother, she was named after a character in a fantasy film. I wonder how they both felt when Keira Knightley shot to fame a few years ago …
Nowadays, parents claim to be giving their children ‘traditional’ Celtic names; to this end, I know of three little boys called Kian. Now, I spent a lot of time a few years ago recording the details of headstones in my local cemetery, and I don’t think I came across a single interment of a Kian. Maybe it’s not as ‘traditional’ as they think. If Stuart Cable had called his son Idwal, then I’d have gone along with that. Then again, his mother’s name is Mabel. I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere.
The local paper runs an annual Bonny Baby contest; some friends and I once joked that it should be renamed the Marvellous Monicker contest, as some of the handles these kids will carry through life are truly wonderful. Last year, the winner in one category was the amazingly-named Christopher Junior Buddy Davies. He had stiff competition, though, from a girl whose parents (presumably Jeremy Clarkson groupies) had named their daughter Diesel Porcha. But the Wayne Kerr Award must go to the infant daughter of the Bunce family – the fabulously tasty Chelsi Bunce.
Mind you, just when I thought I’d met all the great names going, last week I met a woman called Florence. Surprisingly, she’s not a neighbour of my cousin in the care home. She’s not even out of her twenties yet. But she’s originally from Uganda; maybe it’s as common a name in Kampala as Jordan is in Aberdare. I guess it’s not quite as eccentric as Diesel Porcha.
An Autobiography in Random Chapters 