Identity crisis

By JULIE JACOBSON - The Dominion Post

It's not difficult to imagine the taunting British Schools Minister Ed Balls and fellow MP Alistair Darling have had to face with surnames like theirs. And one can only imagine the ribbing Greymouth mayor Tony Kokshoorn has had to put up with in his 50-plus years.

It's 9.30am and Kokshoorn has to dash. He's got a meeting in a couple of minutes. "With Allan Dick." He's serious.

A Dick. Nudge, nudge. The snigger factor is huge, yet surprisingly, Dick is not among a list surnames being ditched because of their rude or unfortunate connotations.

Early this year, a comparison of Britain's population in 2008 with the first official census in 1881 found the number of people with family names like Balls, Daft, Death and Shufflebottom had shrunk by up to 75 per cent, either because people had changed their names or emigrated. In many cases the changes were made as the names came to be regarded in bad taste.

But back to our Mr Dick. Like others we spoke to who have what would generally be regarded as cringe-worthy names, the Auckland former radio talkback host and magazine editor carries his with pride.

"I almost have to apologise for it at times," he laughs, noting how conversation often dries up if there's mention of "someone making a dick of himself, or these guys are a bunch of dicks, or something.

"People look at you and then they apologise. But you know, it's just one of those things."

He recalls that it wasn't till he started high school that he really thought anything of his name, which has its origins in Scotland. The first stinging rebuke came from a prefect in the late 1950s.

"I went to a co-ed school in Dunedin where the boys and girls were separated. I had to go to one class a week - it was an art class - which was across the girls' quadrangle. I was walking across it one day when a prefect yelled at me across the quadrangle, 'Dick, where do you think you're going?' I said, 'I'm going to my art class'. He yelled back at me: 'Art class? If you make a mistake, have you got a rubber on you Dick?' I was so embarrassed.

"At primary and intermediate school you were called by your first name, at high school all of a sudden you were a man, and you're known by your last name. I never really realised the connotations of the name at all until then."

As an adult, his name has almost certainly been advantageous, and he's had fun with it, he says. "There's no way people are going to forget it."

The current chairman of Hawke's Bay Regional Council, and former Napier mayor, is also an Allan Dick. His daughter, Kate, taught at the Gisborne primary school that Katherine Hanley, nee Boggs, attended.

"She married and became a Smith," says Mrs Hanley, who now lives in Wellington, "so she went from one extreme to the other."

Boggs became Hanley when the new mum married last year - not, she stresses because she hated the name.

She and her siblings were known as "the toilets", though she suspects that's probably fairly mild in the scheme of things.

"I think kids are worse now than they were back then. When we were thinking of names for the baby we really had to think about it because kids are so cruel these days, they make something out of anything."

Tony Kokshoorn, whose Dutch surname literally translates as "cock's horn" but is pronounced "cock shorn", recounts how, when his family moved to the West Coast just over 50 years ago, locals called them the "coke shorns". "Back then you couldn't even say the word [cock]. People just refused to. They pronounced it cokeshorn, as in the drink."

While Kokshoorn was highly unusual "and had all those connotations" in 1950s New Zealand, it's not such a big deal these days, the father of four says, though he then mentions one of his sons thought about changing his name in his early teens but decided against it when dad told him, "that's our name, be proud of it".

"Put it this way, I'd rather have a simple name like Smith, but I haven't so it doesn't worry me."

One person who did have concerns about her potential surname is Pattrick Smellie's wife Ruth. She uses her maiden name, Nichol, as do the couple's children. One of her husband's cousins though, a teacher, did change her name by deed poll: "I think she just got totally sick of it." An uncle became a Smillie, at the insistence of his first wife.

The original Smellies were Glaswegian smelter workers. Thirty-six of them arrived in New Zealand in the late 1880s, settling in the South Island, where they had their own rolling mill.

"No pun intended," says Mr Smellie, "but it's quite a distinctive name to have. And the thing I've realised is that all I am is an easy target. Everybody's name gets made fun of."

One of Mr Smellie's colleagues has the family name Underhill. He still gets called "underpants".

Mr Smellie says his parents prepped him on what to expect before he started school, though holidays, when bored kids spent hours trawling through the phone book for silly names, were a particularly trying time for the family.

"We used to get a lot of phone calls. What's struck me over the years is just how incredibly uninventive people are with the insults they come up with. 'Ooh, smellie' [said in a high voice] was indicative, or 'you need a bath', click."

These days it's Mr Smellie getting the last laugh. He still gets a kick from the silence at the other end of the line when he rings someone he doesn't know and gives his name. "Yeah, I'm loud and proud on the Smellie front," he laughs.

British author Russell Ash's first book on unusual names, Potty, Fartwell and Knob, was confined to British names.

"Despite our reputation for staidness I was astonished to find, for example, a family recorded in the 1891 census headed by a Fanny C***, as well as a Rob F*** living on the Isle of Man," he tells The Dominion Post.

A second compilation due out later this year - Busty Slag & Nob End - expands the parameters to the United States and Australia, where he unearthed a Joseph Anus, a Willy Bollock, a Violet Cock and an Edith Buggery.

"The fact that I found thousands of such names that are rarely, if ever, encountered today suggests that a critical mass is achieved when pride in one's family name is overtaken by constant bullying at school, amazed reactions, concern with inflicting the same fate on your offspring, and so on, so that eventually you throw in the towel and change your surname to something innocuous.

"It's sad but understandable. I mean, would you want to go through life saddled with a name like Pinkey Penis?"

* Just over 7000 people changed their names in New Zealand last year. Among the regulations governing names here, one is that a name or combination of names should not cause offence to a reasonable person.