When the lead singer of Bob Vylan’s name was revealed, it caused a fair amount of amusement. This anti-establishment musician who hit the headlines after ranting about the Israel at Glastonbury is actually called…Pascal Robinson-Foster.
In football, there has been a crop of stars with double-barrelled names
‘A posh double-barrel name is perhaps not the best handle for a self-styled Rasta radical. So he goes by the name Bobbie Vylan instead,’ wrote veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil. But while it’s vaguely amusing that Vylan’s real name is rather less ‘rock-n’roll’ than his stage act suggests, Neil got one thing wrong: the era of double-barrelled surnames signifying poshness is over.
Once upon a time, hyphenated surnames were a way of aristocrats displaying their social cachet. The upper class is full of Parker-Bowleses and Spencer-Churchills. The list of current earls in the Peerage of England includes a Chetwynd-Talbot, a Hastings-Bass, a Fiennes-Clinton, and an Ashley-Cooper. When, in 1964, the fourteenth Earl of Home faced the fourteenth Mr Wilson, it can’t have been lost on the electorate that the former was a Douglas-Hume. It is no accident that the poshest pupil at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books is named Justin Finch-Fletchley.
But times have changed, and now double-barrelled surnames can be more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Double-barrelled names have more recently reared their head as a political liability. When Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Jacob’s sister and sometime Brexit Party MEP, embarked upon her political career, then-Tory leader David Cameron famously advised her to change her name to Nancy (also, curiously, the name of his own daughter: yes, the one he left at a pub). Less well-known is that Cameron also reportedly told her to drop the Rees; Nancy Mogg might have been the future, once.
Under Cameron’s leadership, there were reports that other Tory candidates were told to go single barrel: thus Simon Radford-Kirby became Simon Kirby, and candidate Scott Seaman-Digby became Scott Digby.
But while politicians were dropping the hyphens from their names, the same wasn’t true in other fields. In football, there has been a crop of stars with double-barrelled names, including Trent Alexander-Arnold, James Ward-Prowse, Emile Smith Rowe, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin.
It is a sign of the times that, whereas the men’s and women’s England football squads contain between them five double-barrelled names, Britain’s Olympic equestrian team – surely the poshest sport – has none. There are proportionately far more double-barrelled surnames in elite football than rowing. All this reflects a wider trend. In 2017, it was reported that 11 per cent of couples now take on a double-barrelled name on marriage.
It is difficult to work out what’s driving this change. Is it that double-barrelled names are more common in mixed-race families (like Bobby Vylan’s own), because both sides wish to preserve their cultural heritage? The shifting politics of double-barrelled names might also reflect an increase in single-parent families, or other deviations from the traditional norms of the nuclear family; single mothers quite understandably want to share a name with their children.
Double-barrelled surnames can also carry some advantages. Aside from appearing to promote equality between the sexes, they also make people more distinctive, lowering the risk of confusion. Hence the full-back Kyle Walker-Peters, who plays for Southampton, is not the right-back Kyle Walker, who recently signed for Burnley.
Names can still be signals of social class, with all that this implies: there is every difference, in the Shire of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, between the humble Bagginses and their snooty Sackville-Baggins cousins. But one should not be deceived by appearances: Ainsley Maitland-Niles could have been an excellent Victorian high court judge. In fact, he used to play for Arsenal.
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