Surnames, just-so stories and other muppetry
Christian (Anglican)
Associate vicar, St Luke’s, Holloway
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Script
Welcome to the ST podcast. This episode in in response to what was broadcast in the TftD spot on 3 May 2025 by Rev Martin Wroe, a volunteer vicar at a church in north London.
Wroe here provides a wonderful illustration for why a little background reading is useful. Particularly when combined with a touch of curiosity and a dash of self doubt.
He took up the subject of surnames.
WROE: Many popular UK surnames originate in the trades of long forgotten ancestors – people who were once smiths or butchers.
So far, nothing controversial.
WROE: Your name – Baker or Taylor — advertised your business.
Hmmm. No but, let’s wait, perhaps he’s setting something up
WROE: As we no longer need them to do that, this might explain why we don’t know anyone called Ted Programmer or Sheila Consultant or Mary Deputy-Headteacher-Brackets-Lower-School.
Ah. OK. It wasn’t setup. He really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
No Martin, our last names were never selected or applied to advertise our professions. And, no, Martin, your assertion does not explain why we don’t know anyone called Ted Programmer.
Given that he was planning to broadcast this nonsense to millions of BBC Radio 4 listeners, you might have imagined he’d at least do a little research. What drove him? Was it arrogance? Was it indifference, given the very low TftD quality bar from the BBC? Or was it laziness? In any event, it was staggeringly stupid.
He made a preposterous cosy claim about the origin of surnames, concocted with what I can only imagine to be a an astonishingly incurious priestly mind. Or, perhaps a regular priestly mind having a bad day. It happens.
Here’s what’s revealed by a couple of minutes’ diligent use of free resources on the internet.
For a start, almost none of us ever got to choose our own names, first or last. Our names were given, not chosen. Your name, for reasons that soon become obvious, has its origins in conversations that took place about you, but without you.
Go back 1,500 years in the UK and we all just had first names. Additions to first names were only made when it became necessary to differentiate between two or more people with the same name. In a discussion of Jack, where the participants were all aware of several Jacks, there was a need to tell them apart. They were each labelled and those labels could stick, especially when the need to differentiate persisted.
One might be Jack who lives in Milton. One was Jack son of John. One was Jack the blacksmith. Jack Milton, Jack Jones or Jack Johnson, and Jack Smith
Importantly, the Jack of the discussion is not part of the discussion. If he were, a nod or a look would be ample to convey it was him among the Jacks.
Also, of note, these labels might stick but they’d not be inherited, or considered much more than nicknames.
It took absolutely no effort to uncover this history of the use of names in the UK. I was able to use the second minute of my internet search to verify the information with multiple sources.
Not only did Martin do no research, he was sufficiently certain of his own thinking on the matter that he was prepared to share it with millions. Unfortunately, up with what he came was somewhat obviously incorrect and instantly falsifiable.
Martin demonstrated – in front of a national audience – the same limp thinking that was satirised by Rudyard Kipling in the Just So stories. Kipling wrote “How the Camel Got His Hump” and “How the Leopard Got His Spots”. These stories satirise those who provide ridiculous explanations for why something is the way that it is. Like suggesting that our last names arose from people advertising their professions.
Ask any child who has just read a Just So story, “So do you think that’s how it happened?” and you’ll be firmly, and often comprehensively, told no.
Wroe, though, is not inventing Just So stories for satire or to encourage thoughtfulness in children. He’s inventing them because, apparently, he thinks they are true. Please keep this fool away from the microphones of public broadcasters.
At the time Kipling’s Just So stories were published, the ideas of a man called Jean Baptiste Lamarck had fallen out of favour in scientific circles. Lamarck been usurped by a more comprehensive explanation on the same topic from a Mr Charles Darwin.
Lamarck had suggested evolution. He theorised that species change their form over time by how they behaved:
wanting something badly enough, or repeatedly doing an action, physically reshaped the body — and that the change achieved within a lifetime was then preserved by inheritance.
Today, and at the time of Kipling, this seems naïve. Perhaps even a little silly. Certainly, silly enough for Kipling to satirise.
After Darwin, Lamarck became regarded as something of a clown. This, though, was wildly unfair.
Lamarck advanced a revolutionary idea; the idea that creatures were not at some point created exactly as they are today. He was not he first. Intriguingly, decades earlier, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, had proposed that all mammals and birds shared a common ancestor. Erasmus Darwin suggested that adaptation and competition led to gradual change and that this was the origin of the species. Lamarck was the first to propose the concept of evolution in a scientific context, offering a possible mechanism of adaptation. He was wrong but Lamarck established the intellectual exploration of evolution.
Darwin was able to draw upon his grandfather and Lamark’s thinking to develop natural selection as a scientifically robust explanation of a mechanism by which evolution might actually work.
Martin Wroe was not a Lamarck. He was not advancing a new explanation that, while flawed, might establish a useful way to understand something.
Martin Wroe was not a Kipling, advancing ridiculous explanations to satirise the hard of thinking.
Martin Wroe, apparently, is the clown.
Back to that internet full of information on the history of names. The internet that Martin Wroe felt comfortable not troubling.
It was population density that led to the suffixing of first names with last-name labels but it took land-grabbing kings, bureaucracy and taxation to mandate the use of last names, fixing them and making them heritable, resulting in persistence through the generations of Wheelers, Clarkes, Coopers, Fletchers, Smiths, Millers and Chandlers.
This, Martin, is why there are many Ted Gardeners but no Ted Programmers.
For a trade to be reflected in your last name, you needed an ancestor in that trade about 1,500 years ago.
Programmers, project managers and deputy heads arrived a little late.
Surnames were cemented in English between 1100-1400, the initial push being Hastings, William, 1066 and the administration of the resulting Norman government. A pivotal acceleration took place in the late 1300s when collection of the medieval poll tax was greatly facilitated by fixed and inherited last names. These were imposed by the state. Both the name, and the inheritance.
It was not, as Wroe suggests, a Miller called Bob seeing a marketing opportunity to get one over on Andrew, the next miller over, but deciding to call himself Bob Miller.
With only rare exceptions, we’ve been inheriting our names ever since; reducing the need for labels and all but eliminating the need for new surnames. Those exceptions include double-barrel last name and portmanteau examples, several of which were noted by Wroe in his broadcast.
Wroe’s claim for how surnames came into being is lazy, make-believe. Perhaps even arrogant bullshit. In either case, it’s not really forgivable, unless perhaps he’s playing the long game in a wager with a friend on the topic.
My money is on Wroe being the clown, we can but hope.
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