GENEALOGICAL HUMOUR
DOUBLE BARRELLED
DOUBLE BARRELLED SURNAMES
From the Evening Post 29 June 1895 p2.
Double-barrelled surnames have long ceased to be a novelty. Anybody who is anybody has insisted for the last 30 years on giving his friends the unnecessary trouble of directing their letters with a pair of surnames, when one would seem to answer every reasonable purpose. It was the peers and landed proprietors who began this little game of spelling your patronymic with a decorative hyphen. They chose to marry heiresses or inherit property from distant branches of their families, and to advertise the fact by assuming both names, their own and their wives�, or their own and their benefactors�, as if by dint of acquiring a couple of estates they duplicated their personality, and went about henceforth as living Januses, like the Siamese Twins or the Two-headed Nightingale. They were all of them Pelham-Clintons, and Curzon-Howes, and Ashley-Coopers; they rejoiced in their duability as Agar-Ellises and Bootle-Wilbrahams; they blossomed forth with delight into tandem pairs of Leveson-Gowers and Knatchbull-Hugessens. Some of them, indeed, even went a step further, and appeared like Mrs Malaprop�s Cerberus, as "three Gentlemen rolled into one," dazzling our eyes with such superb designations as Cochrane-Wishart-Bailie or Buller-Fuller-Elphinstone. After this, was it any wonder that mere ordinary commoners should feel they would stand no chance in the struggle for existence unless they aspired incontinently to be Robinson-Smiths and Higgins-Bakers? You may see nowadays Gwendoline Montgomery-Mullins keeping a suburban sweetshop, and Adolphus Cecil-Jones at the receipt of custom in a Metropolitan Railway. When things have reached this length, what can our old nobility do but "go them one better� by assuming a quadruplet? Surnames are now threatening to be no longer double-barrelled, but positively to develop into perfect six shooters. Montagu-Douglas-Scott and Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes won�t satisfy the ambition of our newest creations. I believe I am right in saying that at one time the member for Westminster was correctly described as Mr Ashmead-Bartlett-Burdett-Coutts-Bartlett-Burdett-Coutts though he has since sloughed of some portion of this superfluity; and everybody must remember the stirring line "Long may Long-Wellesley-Long-Pole-Wellesley live" which dates back as far towards the beginning of the "movement" as the days when Horace Smith wrote "Rejected Addresses" — From "Norman Blood or Otherwise" in the Cornhill Magazine.
FAMILIES I AM RESEARCHING | MISCELLANEOUS GENEALOGICAL STUFF | NEW ZEALAND — ON LINE GENEALOGICAL AND FAMILY HISTORY RESOURCES | NEW ZEALAND — YOUNG BOY IMMIGRANT SCHEME 1911 — 1914 | NEW ZEALAND DISASTERS AND TRAGEDIES | NEW ZEALAND MISCELLANEOUS GENEALOGICAL INDEXES | NEW ZEALAND LAND WARS — MISCELLANEOUS GENEALOGICAL INDEXES | NEW ZEALAND AND WORLD WAR ONE | NEW ZEALAND AND WORLD WAR TWO | NEW ZEALAND ROLLS OF HONOUR AND WAR MEMORIALS — BY LOCATION | NEW ZEALAND ROLLS OF HONOUR AND WAR MEMORIALS — BY CONFLICT | NEW ZEALAND ROLLS OF HONOUR — MILITARY NURSES | PAKEHA/MAORI TRANSLITERATIONS | PASSENGER LISTS TO NEW ZEALAND | SHAND — FAMILY HISTORY | SOUTH TARANAKI, NEW ZEALAND — GENEALOGICAL RESOURCES | SPONDON, DERBYSHIRE, ENGLAND — GENEALOGICAL RESOURCES | WANGANUI COLLEGIATE SCHOOL 1865 — 1947 | WESTERN BAY OF PLENTY, NEW ZEALAND — GENEALOGICAL RESOURCES