made for you by your parents, who can purposefully or unwittingly set you on a path very different from the one down which they travelled. The most important choice, in many ways, is the first one: your name. Before you have even left the womb you have already been allotted a very specific socio-economic class thanks to a (frequently idiotic) decision made by your parents. And the divisions have increased along with the proliferation of names. Last year 6,039 boys’ names were registered by the Office for National Statistics along with 7,395 girls’ names – a bewildering choice.
It used to be the case, in the main, that you named your child after either a monarch or a saint. My parents played it straight – as most people did in the 1970s, be they Rockabillies, the Middleton classes or Asda Mums. I was Harry, my sister was Victoria. Simple. Solid. Classy but classless. Shakespearean Prince Harry or Cockney Harry Palmer: names back then just didn’t carry that much baggage. There were a handful of names such as Sharon, Tracey, Wayne or Kevin that were a little downmarket for children born in the 1970s, and Quentin and Rupert were certainly quite upmarket, but the class issue has become far more stark as more and more people – regardless of which class they come from – attempt to find something a little bit special. It’s another example of how consumers since the 1950s have striven to assert their individuality through the choices they make – it just happens, in this case, to be a decision as long-lasting as a tattoo on your ankle. And even though it costs nothing, it can carry as much metaphorical baggage as a Louis Vuitton suitcase.
Casper or Casey? One is posh, one is not. Jayden is unequivocally low class. Artemis and Arthur are for the type who think slumming it is buying Waitrose Essentials ratatouille. Acorn, the data company that splits the country up into 62 different socio-economic groups on behalf of consumer companies and government agencies, can immediately categorise you by your name. It has 51 million individuals on its database by name, and statistically if you are a Crispian, Greville, Lysbeth or Penelope you are about 200 times more likely to be in the ‘wealthy executive’ top class than in the ‘inner-city adversity’ bottom one. Seaneen, Terriann, Sammy-Jo, Jamielee, Kayliegh and Codie are the six names most disproportionately skewed towards the ‘struggling families’ category, a group of people Acorn works out as most likely to live in social rented accommodation, work in a routine occupation, read the Sun newspaper and play bingo.
If in doubt about how class determines baby names, just spend a minute scanning the Births announcement column in the Daily Telegraph – a group which is immediately self-selecting. Not only are they readers of the most upmarket national paper in Britain, but they are a niche category within that, happy to spend upwards of £150 on an announcement and keen to make public the joy of their child’s birth along with a sense of pride in the wisdom of their choice of names. ‘A son, Zebedee Ebenezer Jay, a brother for Badger, Clementine and Florence’ is a particular favourite of mine. So too: ‘Sybella, a sister for Freddy, Hugo, Oscar and Rex’ and ‘Lysander, a brother for Ottilie and Rafferty’. These all appeared over the last year.
The truly grand have no need to be so showy. When the 15th Duke and Duchess of Bedford had their first child in 2005 – a son and heir, Henry Robin Charles Russell, born already bearing the title Marquess of Tavistock – the following announcement appeared in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Bedford – On June 7th, to Louise and Andrew, a son.’ That was it.
The Telegraph’s top ten names for girls in 2011 were Florence, Isabella, Charlotte, Alice, Isla, Jemima, Daisy, Matilda, Olivia and Emilia. Just two of those names appear in the Office for National Statistics’ top ten list of all baby names registered that year. You will not find many Jemimas or Florences shopping in Brighthouse, visiting a bookmaker’s or claiming housing benefit. Just compare this list of names to those of some who were convicted during the riots that erupted during the summer of 2011: Shonola, Ellese, Aaron, Reece, Kieron and Wayne. The difference between the two is as great as the gulf between Gieves & Hawkes and Primark and, more importantly, it is immediately apparent to anyone hearing those names.
Much of this class divide in names is because of the proliferation of new names appearing in recent decades. The most famous example of these is Kayleigh, which came into existence thanks to the neo-prog rock band Marillion, who had a number two hit with a single of this name in 1985. It was almost unheard of before the song. But since then it has taken hold, especially with parents who grew up with a love of long-haired bouffant power ballads. And it is exclusively a lower-class name, as most newly invented names are. The Jemima class are happy to dredge up an obscure family name, and have no fear of calling their child after an animal (I was at school with both a Beetle and a Frog), but the invention of entirely made-up names is reserved for those lower down the social scale. Some are remarkably imaginative. I know of both a Meta-Angel (her mother ‘met an angel’ early in her pregnancy who told her to keep the child) and a Taome (it stands for ‘the apple of my eye’).
A few years ago Kayleigh made it to the 30th most popular girl’s name in Britain, and it remains popular: 267 children were given it last year. And as I’ve mentioned, the version spelt Kayliegh is one of the five names most heavily skewed towards Acorn Group N, made up of ‘low-income families living on traditional low-rise estates, where unemployment is high’. Kayleigh has spawned a bewildering subset of names, nearly all of which are unrelentingly bizarre. There were 101 Demi-Leighs born last year, seven Chelsea-Leighs, six Tia-Leighs (which could be a liqueur), five Everleighs (a retirement home?), three each of Honey-Leigh and Kaydie-Leigh and even a trio called Lilleigh, which sounds like a sanitary product. In total there were 128 different iterations of ‘Leigh’. These children were born with that name and have no control over what class they have begun life in; but the Hyphen-Leighs represent a group all of their own: children of parents desperate to assert their individuality, regardless of income, housing or education. They do it through a series of public actions, from the naming of their child to their choice of clothes brands. These youngsters were born after Princess Diana stumbled over her wedding vows in St Paul’s Cathedral, but they are as steeped in class as Charles Philip Arthur George. Even the use of a hyphen – a hijacking of what was once the preserve of the upper classes – is a tacit attempt to assert their status, to prove they are not part of the masses. But this has been done on such a scale that those who have done it have become a whole new class.
The Hypen-Leighs are the main supporters of certain fashion chains, and we meet them again in the clothing chapter. As with their appropriation of upper-class punctuation, they are the most agile at spotting high-status brands and making them, or cut-price versions of them, their own, be it Burberry, BlackBerry, Barbour or Ugg. They are as central to this book as the Middleton classes. They both, in their own way, revel in the status they have gained through the choices they have made.
One of the other key class markers when it comes to children’s names is the number of them. It used to be simply that the more you had, the posher you were. It was a way for the Rockabillies who sent their children off to boarding school to help keep Cash’s nametape company in business. I was given two middle names along with my Christian name and was baffled when I met someone at my prep school called just Leo. He had fewer characters in his name than I had initials. The 12th Duke of Manchester, who has spent three years in jail for fraud, called his son, who had the courtesy title Lord Kimbolton, the following jumble of names, all high ranking on the Telegraph list: Alexander Michael Charles David Francis George Edward William Kimble Drogo Montagu. That’s ten pre-names plus the family name Montagu – enough for a cricket team. My father-in-law was embarrassed when he made it to grammar school that he was just ‘John’ and had no middle name – this became apparent when the team sheet for the cricket XI was posted on the school noticeboard. He proceeded to tell the cricket master that his initials were ‘T.G.J.’ – a complete lie, but one that was believed. It was his silent little joke; only he knew that T.G. stood for The Great.
The Hyphen-Leighs have proved that double-barrelling is no longer the preserve of the upper classes, which used the technique as modern companies do with corporate mergers. Families into which they married, and which frequently injected the upper classes with a shot of money or strong genes, were rewarded with
