The perception of poshness often increases with anything that whiffs of deposed European royalty, but how posh is your name?
Double-barrelled or triple? Von or du? Hyphen or no hyphen? So many questions. Thankfully, Adam Hay-Nicholls has the answers.
I wasn’t born with a double-barrelled name. It’s something I invented, and I’ll admit as to why. By the age of 13, I wanted to be taken seriously in Aston Martin showrooms. Often in life one has to overcome existential hurdles, and in this case the rather obvious hurdle was that I didn’t look anywhere near old enough to drive. Nor did I have the £80,000 in my Midland Live! Cash account needed to buy an Aston Martin. Yet, to my prodigiously strategic mind, a double-barrelled name suggested I might have a parent who had the readies and therefore, by gifting me a brochure for the new DB7, Stratstone of Mayfair was making a very wise publishing-based investment.
The truth is that my father, whose surname was Hay, had died and been replaced by a man called Nicholls, so that explains the eponym. With Bentley, Bugatti and McLaren all offering such inviting dealerships and particulars I wished to Blu Tack to my bedroom wall, the deed-poll paperwork was filed.
'What do we want? An end to the patriarchy. What do we need? A hyphenated compromise'
Others inherit these things from birth, which can be a mixed blessing. Sophia Patience Money-Coutts, of this parish, describes her nomenclature as ‘laughable… like the sort of soppy, button-nosed simpleton who keeps fainting in a Georgette Heyer novel.’ What makes it funny, of course, is it suggests she can’t get enough of the green stuff and, thanks to family connections, she — unlike the single-barrelled Nigel Farage — will never be de-banked. Sophia’s parents took an even greater liberty with her magician brother, Drummond, who shares his name with the Royal Bank of Scotland’s private arm. I mean, how many financial institutions can you squeeze onto one birth certificate?
The British tradition of double surnames comes from aristocratic estates that sought to preserve names that would have become extinct due to the absence of male heirs. This is how we wound up with the Spencer-Churchills and the Stopford-Sackvilles. Also, even the term ‘double-barrelled’ hints at an affinity for tweedy outdoor pursuits.
Sophia Money-Coutts admits her name sounds like 'the sort of soppy, button-nosed simpleton who keeps fainting in a Georgette Heyer novel.'
Having a double-barrelled name doesn’t mean that you come from money, of course, or, indeed, that you’re even posh; although when Sophia insists that you pronounce her name ‘So-Fire’ it feels like she might have been going for that after all.
More and more families are combining the mother and father’s surnames — something that feels very modern. What do we want? An end to the patriarchy. What do we need? A hyphenated compromise. But one does need to be careful that the two names work together. I know a Danish girl whose parents decided to combine their surnames, and as a result she goes by the eyebrow-raising name of Lise Munch-Busch. And just now, on the internet, I was reading about a couple who applied for an insurance quote: a Mr and Mrs Child-Harmer. I’m going to assume that the Child-Harmer clan doesn’t date back to the Norman conquest and was simply the result of too much prosecco at the registry office.
Monty Python was a font of excellent double-barrelled names. The Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch did as much to instil the compound name as aristocratic in the public consciousness as it did satirise it. Who can forget Nigel Incubator-Jones and Oliver St.John-Mollusc. Another Python character, Raymond Luxury-Yacht, insisted that his surname was pronounced very differently from how it was spelt. ‘It’s pronounced Throatwarbler-Mangrove.’
The Frontis page of Country Life has long been a safe haven for a nom d'élégance, such as that of equine artist Madeleine de St Pierre Bunbury. Other notable examples include, but are certainly not limited to, Lady Margaret Vane-Tempest-Stewart, The Hon. Anne Douglas-Scott-Montagu and Lady Priscilla Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby.
To hyphen or not to hyphen? It’s a personal choice; one doesn’t indicate it’s posher than the other. Tom Parker Bowles, also of this parish, is sans-hyphen, as is Iain Duncan Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas and Helena Bonham Carter (although some of her relatives disagree). I doubt The Queen’s son has this problem, but the danger is people will assume it’s a middle name. And people who go by their full names have a tendency to try and assassinate the American president. Shout out to John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald there. I can only assume it was this confusion that led Prime Minister David Lloyd George to add a hyphen upon his elevation to the peerage.
Of course, if you want to be really silly, why stop at two-barrels? Why not have an entire Gatling gun of surnames. The Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes and Van-Tempest-Stewarts are fundamentally outflanked by quadruple-barrellers such as the 9th Baron Thurlow, Roualeyn Robert Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce (b.1952) and the champion quintuple-shooter Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (ret.), from which one could claim four houses at Stowe!
'I’d suggest the surnames Rothschild and Astor can get you past any velvet rope. But they’re not much fun, are they?'
Size matters in this game. The longest name on record in England was that of a British Army captain who died at the Somme in 1917. His name was Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. His father wasn’t a landowner. The only slightly silly sounding Ralph William Lyonel Tollemache-Tollemache was, in fact, a bankrupt priest. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tollemache-Tollemache senior took eccentric pleasure in giving his 15 children absurd names.
The perception of poshness often increases with anything that whiffs of deposed European royalty. A ‘von’ or a ‘de’ or a ‘du’ confers an automatic sense of entitlement. If you’re a de Beaufort or a von Bismarck, you’ll get party invitations based on the ‘of’ alone. Sometimes you don’t need an ‘of’ or a double-barrel. I’d suggest the surnames Rothschild and Astor can get you past any velvet rope. But they’re not much fun, are they? So let us tip our hats to the man who created the world’s longest and most unhinged name of them all. A name so long it’d take up half the phone book and is about to put me well over my character-count.
Ralph Fiennes might not seem like a posh man with a posh name, but his full name of Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes might change your mind.
He was a German-American typesetter born Hubert Blaine Wolfstern in 1914. That wasn’t interesting enough for Wolfstern, so when he left Germany to settle in Philadelphia on the eve of WWII he changed it. He decided to take 26 christian names for each letter of the alphabet, and to give his surname a limousine-like extension. Please be upstanding for Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus...
(Deep breath)...
Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffwelchevoralternwarengewissen-haftschaferswessenschafewarenwohlgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeit-beschutzenvonangreifendurchihrraubgierigfeindewelchevoraltern-zwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenvanderersteerdemenschderraum-schiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraftgestartseinlangefahrthin-zwischensternartigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelchegehabt-bewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurasse-vonverstandigmenschlichkeitkonntefortpflanzenundsicher-freuenanlebenslanglichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurcht-orangreifenvonandererintelligentgeschopfsvonhinz wischensternartigraum.
[Ed note: we have had to insert hyphens into the name, otherwise it wouldn't fit on the page. The name does not in fact have any hyphens.]
That is a 604-letter surname. This typesetter really loved type, didn’t he? It wasn’t always practical when filling out forms though, making introductions and suchlike, so he would often go by the more modest Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff. In an interview in 1965, he explained the benefits of having an unusual name. ‘When somebody calls my name, I don’t have any trouble finding out who they mean… I don’t like being part of the common herd.
