Former Test umpire Dickie Bird.
Photograph: PA
The naming of kids is a difficult matter, as TS Eliot didn't quite say, and the births columns of the Times and Telegraph still throw up the odd entertaining aberration: Aeryn Violet Holness and Rufus Alick StGeorge Taylor are both a few weeks old and still unaware of the burden they bear. I blame Lemony Snicket.
But as a remarkable list compiled by the Cornwall Record Office shows, peculiar names are nothing new. A former archive assistant, Renee Jackaman, happened upon a few strange names in the course of her work and decided to maintain a list. It records some quite extraordinary names. Filly Pirkin, born in 1673, would surely have been trademarked by a theme pub had she been born 300 years later. Angelina Snook (born 1871) is pure Roald Dahl. Philidelphia Poope was born in 1693 and presumably inspired by reports from the first English colonists in north America.
Suffiah Tink (1806) could just be a bad spelling of Sophia, but whoever named Melchisedec Bospidneck (1791) and Talent Ferret must surely have known what they were doing. As for Fanny Forward, Fanny Job and Albion Trebilcock - well, just blame your filthy 21st century imagination. Rather sweetly, Hugh Hunny married Susanna Bear in 1701.
