A London journalist with Welsh roots reads about a father threatening to disinherit the Labrador over his son’s surname and explains how Britain’s names were always made, changed and borrowed
A Button Maker In Birmingham
The London Prat asks whether a son should take his fiancee’s last name, through the story of a retired insurance manager from Ealing who threatens to boycott the wedding, withdraw funding and disinherit the family Labrador after his son agrees to take his bride’s surname. The father invokes centuries of family heritage. On inspection, it starts with a button maker in Birmingham in 1892.
I come from a Welsh family, and I read it with the particular amusement of someone whose ancestors did not have fixed surnames at all until relatively recently. If the man from Ealing thinks a surname is ancient and unchangeable, he should spend an afternoon with Welsh family history. It will cure him.
Son Of, Son Of, Son Of
For centuries, many Welsh people used a patronymic system. A man was identified as the son of his father, using ap or ab, meaning son of, and sometimes as the son of his father’s father as well. So a man might be Dafydd ap Gwilym, David son of William. His son would not be ap Gwilym. He would be ap Dafydd. Names changed every generation. There was no family surname to inherit, defend or withhold from a Labrador.
Over time, especially from the Tudor period onwards and accelerating in later centuries as English administration, legal records and parish registers demanded fixed names, Welsh families adopted settled surnames. Many were formed from the old patronymics. Ap Hywel became Powell. Ap Rhys became Price or Preece. Ab Owen became Bowen. Ap Huw became Pugh. Others came from fathers’ first names with an English-style s added: Jones from John, Davies from David, Williams from William, Evans from Ifan, Roberts from Robert. That is why Wales has so many people with the same handful of surnames, and why every Welsh school seems to have six children called Jones in the same class.
The Glory Of Borrowed Names
The lesson is that British surnames, in Wales and elsewhere, were not handed down from time immemorial. They were made, usually by ordinary people adapting to new rules, often quite late. English surnames emerged over several centuries after the Norman Conquest, from occupations like Smith, Baker and Taylor, from places like Hill, Ford and London, from nicknames like Brown, Little and Young, and from fathers’ names like Johnson and Dixon. Scottish and Irish names have their own histories of clans, Mac and O prefixes and anglicization. And all over Britain, migrants have brought new names, changed old ones and married into existing families for centuries.
That is not a weakness in British heritage. It is the heritage. Our names are a record of how ordinary people lived, worked, moved and married. A button maker in 1892 is a perfectly respectable ancestor. So is a man called Dafydd who had no surname at all.
Patriotism Without Pedigree
There is a kind of patriotism that depends on pedigree: the belief that Britishness belongs to those whose families have been here longest, with the right names and the right stories. I think that is the wrong kind. The best British patriotism has always been about what we share, not where our great-grandparents happened to be born. The Welsh coal miner, the Irish navvy, the Huguenot weaver, the Jewish tailor, the Caribbean nurse and the Bangladeshi chef all contributed to the country we live in. Their names, adopted, adapted or kept, are as British as any in Debrett’s.
A Word To Fathers
So, to the man from Ealing and any father like him: relax. Your surname is younger than you think, and so is almost everybody else’s. Your son taking his bride’s name will not erase your family. It will add a new branch to a tree that has always grown in unexpected directions. My own Welsh ancestors went from ap this and ap that to a fixed surname in the space of a few generations, and the family survived perfectly well. We kept the stubbornness, the singing and the habit of arguing at funerals. The name was the least important thing we inherited.
The Welsh Way With Nicknames
Wales also solved the problem of too many identical surnames in a characteristically practical way: nicknames. In a village full of Joneses, you needed to know which Jones you meant. So there was Jones the Milk, Jones the Post, Jones the Bread and, in my grandfather’s village, a man known only as Jones the Spy, because he had once been to London. Those nicknames were more personal, more descriptive and more affectionate than any surname. If the Ealing father wants a heritage worth defending, he might start there. Insurance Davies has a nice ring to it.
You can find more of my writing on British identity, history and everyday patriotism on my author page.
A Phone Call To Mam
I rang my mother in Pontypridd to tell her about the Prat story. She listened, laughed and then told me that her grandmother had changed the spelling of her own surname twice, once to make it look more English for a job in service in Cardiff, and once back again when she married a man from the chapel who disapproved. Nobody in the family remembers which spelling was original. My mother said that was the point. The name changed. Gran did not. Then she asked whether I was eating properly, which is the oldest Welsh tradition of all.