the middle names project

fanny ella-jane goodwin

I’m not sure if this counts, but I always wonder if I would be a different person had my parents thought more carefully.

They named me Fanny Ella-Jane Goodwin. My dad claims to this day it was to be Fannyella.

In the UK Fanny was not a good name to have though school years. Endless bullying followed mostly verbal apart from one episode of being tied to a fence. Nothing could lift the feeling of being ‘dirty’ and ones confidence was left in tatters.

I went through court with my mum’s permission at 12 years old to take Fanny off and from then onwards be Ella Jane Goodwin only. So strictly speaking I go by my middle name. My father was most upset as he had given me the name Fanny, and thought I should’ve kept it regardless.

The relief at high school to become invisible was huge but it always felt a little late to be the kind of gregarious, popular and confident person I wanted to be. I’m getting there now but it’s taken until my 30s! I wonder who’d I’d be if I’d been Ella from the start, possibly the same person but just a little sooner.

When naming my son we were really careful to name him a sturdy simple name. He’s called Bradley. We tinkered with Boba Fett but thought better of it in the end!

benjamin charles alfred gonshaw

An email conversation between my friend Ben and his mum. Shared memories, layered stories. Lovely.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

From: Ben 
To:  Lillian 
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2012 10:19 AM
Subject: Can you check this?

Hi Mum,

A friend is looking for stories about people’s middle names so I wrote one.

Before it gets put up on the internet, can you check it for accuracy.  I made the dates up - and some other parts of it might be wrong too.

A quick check would be great.

xxx

Benjamin Charles Alfred Gonshaw

My grandfather, Alfred Steiner, was a Czech national born 190x? and died 1955.

He came to England during WWII and was interned as an enemy alien.

One afternoon while he was clearing trees the New Forest he met my grandmother Irene, who had escaped from Hungary in ‘39 to come to work as a maid in a manor house in Dorset.

After the war they travelled through Europe together looking for any family that may have escaped the Nazis.

Sadly my grandfather returned alone, but my grandmother found that her mother had been hidden on a farm and they brought her back to England.

Alfred taught maths in a college. He was very passionate about it and published several papers of proofs and theories.

He started a summer camp, bringing teachers from all over Europe, housing them for two weeks and training them to teach maths. With his command of languages he lectured them himself across all 7 of his mastered tongues.

He died of a heart attack in 1955, leaving my grandmother, mother (aged 7) and my uncle (aged 3).

The summer camp dwindled after his passing and stopped a few years later.

My grandmother would often say that I had a lot of Alfred in me - perhaps more than just that mere quarter of my name.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

From: Lillian 
To: Ben
Date: Tue, Mar 13, 2012 09:36
Subject: Can you check this? 

Darling Ben

This is amazing.

Fred as everyone called him was born in 1901.

He was Dr Steiner as he had a doctorate fom the university of Vienna.

He died in 1958 when I was 9 and Michael was 8.

He had cancer of the oesophagos.

He taught maths at Bournemouth Grammar School for Boys.His pupils loved him and called him ‘Doc’.

He and Irene called it the summer school. It was for teachers of English in their own countries. The purpose was to unite people across Europe, including Germans, in friendship, in the aftermath of WW2.

He was a witty, charming man, who was fiercely intelligent and visionary, but very humble in person. He used to say (in the 1950s) that the optimists are learning Russian, and the pessimists are learning Chinese.  After his British naturalisation ceremony he turned to his witness and declared in his heavily accented English, ‘The trouble with this country is there are too many bloody foreigners.’ He was the epitome of the ‘absent-minded professor’. Mamma was the practical one, and played a big part as administrator of the summer school, arranging host families for the attendees.

His Hebrew name was Yitzhak, so you are named after him twice.

Made me so happy to recall, and to think it means something to you.

All my love

Mum

joanne kathleen rowling

Image courtesy of Beacon Radio.

Joanne Kathleen Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, was born in 1965.

Her multiple award-winning series has sold more than 400 million copies, taking her from a life on social security to multi-millionaire status in just five years. As well as providing pretty much the ultimate affirmation of her career as an author, it opened up secondary pursuits as a philanthropist and film producer.

But before Harry Potter, there was no K in JK Rowling. Her publishers were afraid the target audience of young boys would not want to read a book written by a woman.

So they insisted that she use her first two initials. Having no middle name, Rowling opted for Kathleen, from her favourite grandmother, Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling.

The nom de plume only held cover for a short while, as the meteoric success of Harry Potter meant Rowling attracted more than her fair share of interest from tabloid newspapers.

Her middle name has definitely become a lasting part of her identity though: during the UK Leveson Inquiry, she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling.

In recent years, Rowling has received an honorary doctorate from Harvard, France’s Legion D’Honneur award, and a Bafta for Outstanding Contribution to Cinema. In 2010, the Harry Potter theme park opened at Universal Florida. In 2011, she announced the Pottermore social network.

In February 2012, Rowling announced she would publish her first novel for adults.

tom graham newman

My Mum liked the name ‘Graham’ because she thought it was ‘Scottish’.

But it isn’t.

The name refers to the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, not far from where I grew up. It’s famous for being the birthplace of Isaac Newton, Margaret Thatcher and Rambo, the cockerel my parents kept when I was kid.

jeff zveitel kwiatek

“Your middle name really starts with a Z?”
“Yup.”
“How do you say it?”
“Swei-tel.”
“How do you spell it?”
“Z-v-e-i-t-e-l.”
“That’s stupid.”

You can’t imagine how many times I’ve have that conversation. By receiving my mother’s maiden name I received a blessing and a curse. On one hand it’s really cool. I mean how many people have a middle name that starts with a Z? It always felt special to have something so unique as my middle name.

But the questions, the laughter—that I could do without. As someone with two hard-to-spell, hard-to-pronounce names my paitience often wears thin. When people think I’m playing a joke on them I find myself thrusting my ID in their face, rather than spend 5 minutes convincing them.

I love my middle name, someday I would like to see it on the side of the building, but the next time someone asks I’ll just refer them to this post.

helen lucy wright

My middle name is Lucy, which means “light”.

My first name, Helen, also means “light…

My surname is Wright.

So I guess that makes me Light Light Wright?

toby david warren ingram

My middle name is Warren too.

Gouverneur Warren was a US Civil War general. He has a statue in New York.  My grandfather’s mother was, I think, his granddaughter. 

I like my American heritage, so I like the name Warren. 

noriyuki “pat” morita

alan mathison turing

vincent warren franklin

My middle name is Warren. There, I’ve said it. I haven’t uttered the word for at least six months. And it will be another six before I do so again. I hope.

It’s a name that never really goes anywhere. It doesn’t have a single strong sound in it. It’s a dribble. It’s what someone with a speech impediment says when they’re trying to say something else.

My first name is Vincent. It means victor, or invincible, depending on who you ask. My surname is Franklin. It means free man: someone who isn’t a serf, but isn’t landed gentry either.

Chaucer wrote a tale about a  Franklin.

Warren means place where rabbits live.

david rhys williams

I’m Rhys Williams.

Not David Williams, you understand, but Rhys Williams.

I’ve always been Rhys Williams. It’s not an affectation. I had no ‘lost weekend’ where hallucinogenic drugs forced me to ditch the perfectly pleasant and sensible David. It’s what my mum and dad called me, and what everyone calls me.

The only reason Rhys is my middle name is because my mum thought ‘David Rhys’ sounded better than ‘Rhys David’. She’s right. It does. But that doesn’t stop it from being a mighty pain in the backside in doctors’ surgeries, for example. Or on the phone to over-intimate customer service representatives. Or at the building society where they wouldn’t let me pay in a cheque to Rhys Williams, because my name was David, not Rhys. Or at the registry office where I got married, where they insisted on marrying me as ‘David Williams, known as Rhys’, almost prompting me to call my wedding off in a massive huff.

But no, those things are much, much less important than the sound of the name David Rhys. David Rhys. Like three musical notes, the peal of a church bell, dancing on your tongue like a joyful salmon leaping from a brook.

jackie “mr tv” pallo

angharad teresa brown

I’m the youngest of six so I’ve always been pretty pleased that I got an unusual (outside Wales at least) first name, especially as my surname is, well, fairly common.  I would have thought my parents might have run out of names by the time I was born. So my middle name has always been less important to me.

My siblings got quite standard and fairly conventional first names and being Catholic, my parents named them after saints.  When I came along, I think my parents knew I would probably be the last, so decided to buck the trend - they gave me an unreligious Welsh name that they had always loved, but which was the name of my Mum’s sponsor when she became a Catholic. 

I didn’t escape a saint’s name completely though, as my middle name is after Teresa of Avila - a Carmelite nun who was canonised in 1622. I like the fact that it’s a fairly unusual spelling as you would normally see Teresa with an ‘h’.  However, I don’t feel a great connection with my middle namesake, and find it slightly odd to have been named after a devout nun who inflicted tortures upon herself because of her devout faith! 

susan gertrude crossman

I never thought to despise my middle name until the school yard coolios got hold of it and made it clear I was destined to social misery.  My family is ofgood Scottish stock and even a “Morag” would have at least conjured visions of craggy mountains or comely lochs; in the cultural landscape of the Canadian education system, “Gertrude” fell quite flat and made no sense at all.

I bear the cross of my mother’s first name and I never asked if she herself thought “Gertrude MacKinnon” an oxymoron: she was proud to bear her mother’s name and she fully expected me to feel a strong sense of name-pride as well.  There was a disturbing pattern of generational compliance developing here, however, and all I felt was doomed. 

For years, the other children taunted me about my ugly middle name and I was too righteous a kid to create a new one for myself, although I always thought I would have it legally changed when I got older.  It became a character development tool that eventually helped me become as stoic and stalwart as a Highland piper.    

The school yard is far behind me now and I’ve come to terms with the Gertrude in me.  I even like how unique the name is and how special it makes me feel.  It’s taken decades, but that pride my mother hoped for years ago has finally put down a few roots and though I’d never pass the name onto any of my own children, I’ve finally decided that the name can stay — in fact, I can’t imagine life without it!

lewis j dryburgh

I wasn’t given a middle name and I always felt like I was missing out.

When I was 13 I started referring to myself as Lewis Jesus Dryburgh, probably a touch grandiose for a geeky teenager but I loved it.  After a telling off from my mother (who noticed the ‘Jesus’ on some of my maths homework) I began calling myself Lewis J. Dryburgh - I like to imagine sharing the same middle name as Homer J. Simpson (it stands for Jay.) 

Years later and I’m still using ‘J.’ as my middle name, whether I’m introducing myself to someone or filling out important documents. Recently, this proved extremely useful when dealing with an accidental council tax billing.

As a born no-middle-namer I find it reassuring to read this:

“There is no legal procedure to follow in order to change a name. You simply start using the new name.”
-Citizens Advice Bureau

So there you go.