The Name Game

As you may or may not know, Bert Weedon shuffled off his mortal coil the other week at the grand old age of 91. Bert was a top man who can hold claim to being the first British guitar hero, being as he was a major influence Hank Marvin and then anybody who was anybody who emerged in the British music boom of the 60s, despite wearing specs and being forced to stand behind that talentless git Cliff Richard half the time.

Rockin' Bert also staked his claim at legend status by writing the "Play In a Day" guitar tutoring books, which are still snapped up by aspiring fret-Gods to this day. He even managed a UK #1 album in 1976, so he gets the all-round "Top Man" status for me and I hope he felt he'd lived the good, productive life that he had.

But this post is not about him per se. It's about his name and others like it. Bert. You don't hear it much anymore, do you? Unless you watch Sesame Street, of course. My great-grandfather was also a Bert. But he didn't play guitar - I gather (given he died in 1977) that he was a big guy who drank lakes of whiskey despite having a congenital heart defect. In any case - you don't hear of kids called that name anymore do you? Same as two of my grandparents - Frank and Esther. I've not heard annoyed mothers screaming those names on the bus.

Bert - grumpy git and Eric Cantona lookalike.

Names, like anything, can fall in and out of fashion. Some are like Levi 501s - never at the cutting edge, but always there. Peter, Paul, Elizabeth or Sarah. You always have them names in any school over the last 100 years.

It's like my own family. My other grandpop was called Joseph, his name taken from an uncle. He named his three sons Joseph, James and Thomas. The last two were named after his Uncles, and so it goes as far back as we know, like they had a pool of five or six names for each gender they had to use every generation. It stopped when it came to us, thankfully. Equally so, a close friend of mine has the name surname and middle name as his dad and grandfather. In the name of sanity, when his good lady wife give birth to a son, he changed the pattern.

It's weird how new names suddenly become in vogue, though. When I was a lad, I never knew a single Chantelle. Nowadays, there seem to be loads of them. How? The same way I hear mothers down Didsbury way calling their little daughters "India". How did anyone think that was a good name? Perhaps they called their other kid Pakistan and they're always rowing.

Mind you, it reminds me of one of my pet hates: people who name their children on the basis that they "look like an "". All babies look the sodding same, skin tone excepted. Horrible little screaming things. 

In this matter, as with so many others, we can turn to the man who should be Poet Laureate, Mr Nigel Blackwell.

"A woman who described herself as “A little bit Bridget, a little bit Ally, a little bit Sex And The City” and chose to call her baby boy Fred as a childishly rebellious attempt at a clever reaction to those who might have expected her to call him Julian or Rupert. Bit of advice: call him Rupert, it fits, and besides it’s a good name. Don’t be calling him Fred or Archie, with all its cheeky but lovable working class scamp connotations, unless you really do have plans for him to spend his life in William Hill’s waiting for them to weigh in at Newton Abbot."