Naming Practices and Class Differences in Twentieth-Century Britain

This article is concerned with an often-overlooked aspect of social life, the practices deployed in naming people. Names, by linking people with a family, endow people with a past history. Names frequently identify a person’s gender, and help to identify other aspects of their present social identity. Where identities are subject to discrimination a name can lead to harm or advantage which renders the topic of importance. This article focuses on the role of names in identifying and projecting social class in twentieth-century Britain, and is thus concerned with the social history of the ‘symbolic power’ discussed by Pierre Bourdieu. While social class has often been linked to specific names in Britain, this article discusses a more basic feature of personal names: their number. The article reviews the hypothesis that the average number of personal names borne by a group of people is positively related to their social class, a suggestion first put forward by Ron Hall in 1960. Examining name samples of the British peerage, British financiers, industrialists and trade unionists as they were in mid-twentieth-century Britain, it finds the hypothesis validated and concludes that these personal names were not only denotative but also connotative.